A sibling of Danley's SH-50, the company says its new SH-25 delivers 10dB more output with a perfect, 25° x 25° beamwidth. Users can hard pack multiple SH-25s in any direction to effectively create the world's only perfect multi-cell horn, the company says. The SH-25 will be demonstrated during NSCA in demo room W307A. Composed of a single 1" tweeter, four 4" mids, and eight 6.5" woofers, a single SH-25 covers the frequency spectrum evenly from 80Hz to 18kHz and sounds transparent and true even with no equalization, Danley claim. When four of the 28" x 28" x 42" units are packed together, the low-end drops smoothly to 50Hz. Sensitivity is rated at 104dB, and maximum output reaches 140dB, the company says.
"We are absolutely, unapologetically aiming the SH-25 squarely at the forehead of the line array world," said Mike Hedden, president of Danley Sound Labs. "The industry went to line arrays primarily for two reasons. First was the complete lack of time coherency. After all, thestandard loudspeaker setup was however many boxes you could stack a side, but bear in mind these boxes didn't behave well by themselves, much less with 20 stacked together. So the industry took this cacophony of sound and actually went very old school by vertically stacking everything. This resulted in fewer boxes covering a given area of a horizontal seating plane and it did sound better, not great, just better, than the previous mess. Second, you only need couple of pick points allowing quick and easy hanging. So fine, now you can generate mediocre sound quickly. But the folks buying $100 tickets don't care that you can reproduce mediocre sound fast, they came to hear accurate fidelity!"
"A well behaved point source will always sound better than a line source," continues Hedden. "However, in my opinion, the majority of loudspeakers marketed as line array products have little in common with true line source phenomena. For the few speakers that actually have any line source behaviour it is for a very limited bandwidth contained to the high frequencies. Inreality they are simply variations of mediocre point sources simply vertically stacked."
Hedden concludes: "We spent the time designing the Danley Sound Labs SH-25 right so you don't have to waste your time trying to make it work."
(Lee Baldock)
