Post by: Al Smith on March 02, 2010, 09:21:46 PM
http://www.pksound.ca
Here is an article about them:
http://beatroute.ca/view_article.php?sectionID=17&articl eID=2902
Post by: Al Smith on March 02, 2010, 09:25:24 PM
Post by: Mac Kerr on March 02, 2010, 10:52:32 PM
Mac
Post by: Al Smith on March 03, 2010, 12:42:40 AM
Post by: Mac Kerr on March 03, 2010, 12:51:06 AM
| Al Smith wrote on Wed, 03 March 2010 00:42 |
Me thinks something fishy with PK claim. |
What do you mean by that.
Mac
Post by: Elliot Thompson on March 03, 2010, 06:38:16 AM
| Mac Kerr wrote on Wed, 03 March 2010 03:52 |
Your accusation implies that the PK sub predates the LAB Sub. The article you linked to mentions 2003 as the beginning of the PK sub. The archives of the Live Audio Board don't go back all the way, but I did find a thread from October of 2002 that talks about a previously completed set of LAB Subs. That would put that set in at least early 2002. Perhaps Tom Danley will chime in with some of the details about how he came to design the sub as a DIY project for the Live Audio Board. Mac |
From my eyes, the Lab Sub (internally) is exactly like the Servodrive Basstech 7 which stems from the 80's designed by Tom Danley. The photo below is the Servodrive Basstech 7
Here is the Lab Sub
http://www.paulstech.com/img/lab12/P1020403.JPG
It is amazing someone would insinuate they are the original designer of the Lab Sub.
Best Regards,
Post by: Doug Fowler on March 03, 2010, 09:44:42 AM
What is your exact complaint? Are a competitor of PK?
We have seen many posts like this over the years, and your calling this 'fishy' is like Mr. Pot calling Mr. Kettle "black".
So what's your story, first time poster? The LAB sub design is copyrighted. The terms of the copyright allow personal/business use except sale for profit.
-doug, PSW moderator
Post by: Michael Hedden Jr. on March 03, 2010, 10:54:19 AM
| Doug Fowler wrote on Wed, 03 March 2010 14:44 |
What PK claim? There are hundreds of Tom's design working around the world. The LAB sub is a labor of love, designed by Tom to give back to the community. What is your exact complaint? Are a competitor of PK? We have seen many posts like this over the years, and your calling this 'fishy' is like Mr. Pot calling Mr. Kettle "black". So what's your story, first time poster? The LAB sub design is copyrighted. The terms of the copyright allow personal/business use except sale for profit. -doug, PSW moderator |
Not sure if this is okay to post but,if you look at the side of that sub you'll see what appears to be a cooling plug!!! (cue the Hitchcock violins)
Is this some twisted trip into Wayne's world?Mike Hedden
Danley Sound Labs, Inc.
Post by: kevinnemrava on March 03, 2010, 11:28:36 AM
I have never met or conversed with Al Smith.
PK does, as far as I know, produce ths lab 12 (PK-CS212s) for sale and profit. We have come across a number of installs in the calgary area, were these subs were sold to bar owners, as new stock, and were claimed to have been custom designed and built by PK.
Post by: Winston Gamble on March 03, 2010, 12:20:15 PM
| Elliot Thompson wrote on Wed, 03 March 2010 11:38 | ||
From my eyes, the Lab Sub (internally) is exactly like the Servodrive Basstech 7 which stems from the 80's designed by Tom Danley. The photo below is the Servodrive Basstech 7 Here is the Lab Sub http://www.paulstech.com/img/lab12/P1020403.JPG It is amazing someone would insinuate they are the original designer of the Lab Sub. Best Regards, |
Either you have a different definition of "exactly", or you need to have your eyes checked.
Winston
Post by: Chris Van Duker on March 03, 2010, 03:12:15 PM
I've seen plenty of LabSubs at Burning Man, including my own, as well as many of the other major and minor loudspeaker manufacturers, but I don't remember seeing anything with PK on it.
I'll get in touch with those artists and see if their "endorsements" ever really happened.
(Edited to clarify 2nd paragraph)
Post by: Tom Danley on March 03, 2010, 03:21:15 PM
To be clear, the lab sub is similar to a BT-7 except for the driver arrangement, one finds there is only so much of a given horn can be put in a given box ha-ha.
I had settled on that generic “snail” shape on an earlier box, the TPL-3 as it required the least bending.
On the picture of the bt-7, the white pipes were for a forced air cooling system which all but eliminated power compression. That fan ran off of some amount of amplifiers power so it’s speed went up and down with the signal.
I went back and looked in an old file and found a “possible group project” post on 1-1-2002. At that point it was just getting started, no drivers yet. If McJerry is monitoring, he might be able to find out when he made the samples
The project came about when some one here on PSW suggested a group build of some W bins and a following discussion of drivers.
At that time, there was some major folk lore surrounding the driver parameters needed for a given horn.
I guess you could say the lead up went this way.
I have built electronic things and loudspeakers my whole life so I relate to the diy’r, I have made a lot of cabinets and sawdust.
After giving up hopes of being in a band and then the speaker business and then doing electronic repairs for years etc I got a good job in 1978 at Intersonics inc.
I worked for 18 years at Intersonics inc, a NASA experimental hardware contractor and they needed a lot of hats filled when I started.
My bosses were an old English acoustician and a Physicist from Fermi labs and former physics teacher.
It was a great opportunity for me, I waved my hands and drew pictures and they would tell me what I was talking about. I see things working physically my mind, not in math.
Anyway, I was able to make some large improvements in the acoustic levitation transducers and systems they used so the owner gave me some latitude.
I had the idea for the Servodrive speaker on an airplane ride back from Huntsville.
After number #3 sounded good enough to bring in, Roy the president (being a hifi buff) said I could pursue a speaker business on the side as long as it only cost heat and lights.
Maybe 10 years later, the company had grown, we had flown hardware on a couple sounding rocket and two shuttle flights. I had one foot in the Speaker division and one foot on the NASA side. I had a really good mathematician named Dan Riordan assigned to help me on the NASA side and I posed that I needed a way to model sound traveling though a passage which will be defined and through a temperature gradient.
In these systems the sound source won’t last long if exposed to the 1500 degree C heat so it has to travel down a passageway to get into the furnace.
I should explain, the whole point of acoustic levitation is that there is no container, at very high temperatures, one runs out of materials that you can use as a “cup” that doesn’t cause nucleation or impurities.
Having secondary purposes in mind, I asked that it could also be driven by a set of T&S parameters “like a loudspeaker”.
Thus after considerable work on his part and by dumping the temperature gradient and doodling dimensions, I had a tool which could model a given horn’s response, ah….even a motor driven bass horn.
I used that and a couple others of Dan’s mathcad programs to design the BT-7 and others and when the lab sub project came to be, I thought hey, I’ll use these programs to make something powerful with normal drivers.
So, when somebody talks about indirect benefit from the space program, well the Lab sub alignment is an unexpected example.
At one point I had to decide if I was going to go into payload specialist training or stay and focus on the speaker business. Between being sure I would be plagued by nausea in zero G and the speaker biz growing, I passed on the Astronaut training.
Anyway, it wouldn’t have worked out as the first shuttle disaster ended our flight hardware contracts, no one got to go past the vomit comet training and it had that name for a real reason..
Man, I’m feeling old now.
Best,
Tom Danley
Post by: Elliot Thompson on March 03, 2010, 04:15:35 PM
| Winston Gamble wrote on Wed, 03 March 2010 17:20 | ||
Either you have a different definition of "exactly", or you need to have your eyes checked. Winston |
Really?
| Tom Danley wrote on Wed, 03 March 2010 20:21 |
Hi Guys To be clear, the lab sub is similar to a BT-7 except for the driver arrangement, one finds there is only so much of a given horn can be put in a given box ha-ha. |
I rest my case.
Best Regards,
Post by: Mac Kerr on March 03, 2010, 04:27:49 PM
| Elliot Thompson wrote on Wed, 03 March 2010 16:15 | ||||||
Really?
I rest my case. Best Regards, |
Maybe it is your eyes you should rest. Yeah, they both have "snail" horns. Wow.
Mac
Post by: Al Smith on March 03, 2010, 06:26:11 PM
So it appears that PK took Mr. Danly's idea?
[that is a good story btw]
And the claim of the Bassnectar band only playing on pk subs is bogus?
Post by: Art Welter on March 03, 2010, 07:28:58 PM
| Al Smith wrote on Wed, 03 March 2010 16:26 |
Geez, that was a lot of posts to go through. So it appears that PK took Mr. Danly's idea? [that is a good story btw] And the claim of the Bassnectar band only playing on pk subs is bogus? |
I couldn’t care less if Bassnectar only wanted to play on one type of sub, whether true or not.
The concept of a spiral horn is not new, Western Electric had spiral horns starting in the 1920’s. People have been blowing through conch horns and tubas long before that.
The box size of 45 x45 x 22.5 is very common, integers of a standard truck box of 90 x 90.
Clair Brothers S4 cabinets were built to this size in the 1970s.
I built horn cabinets that size in 1981, with the grill on they would have been hard to tell from a BT7.
There are lots of designs now using that size with spiral horns, but Tom Danley was the the first to combine that size with a spiral horn as far as I know.
Art Welter
Post by: Ivan Beaver on March 03, 2010, 08:13:46 PM
And just wanting to point out somebody who was apparently doing a commerical build of the Lab Sub. Ya know- "heads up" kinda thing.It is hard to tell if PK's cabinets are the same stolen design-or something different that just looks kinda the same.
A quick tell would be what drivers they are using and an internal shot or two. Or better yet some plans.
It would also be interesting to hear him explain his design concepts and horn theory. Does he have any other designs?
The funny thing is that Danley got a note about this a day or two before you posted.
Don't know if there is a relation or not there.If they are selling the design-then that is a copyright infringment.
Post by: Dave Rickard on March 03, 2010, 08:56:41 PM
http://srforums.prosoundweb.com/index.php/m/310775/503/#msg_ 310775
Post by: Duane Massey on March 03, 2010, 10:18:38 PM
Post by: Elliot Thompson on March 04, 2010, 12:35:22 AM
| Mac Kerr wrote on Wed, 03 March 2010 21:27 |
Maybe it is your eyes you should rest. Yeah, they both have "snail" horns. Wow. Mac |
The driver arrangement changing is expected since the Basstech 7 used two 15-inch drivers whereas, the Lab Sub utilise two twelve’s. It is like changing the port length in a reflex cabinet when using a different driver than the cabinet was designed for. If one would replace the stock drivers in a JBL SRX 728 with B&C 18 TBX 100s the port tuning would need the be adjusted to correct the electrical and mechanical differences of the TBX 100 being inserted in SRX 728.
Dimension wise the Basstech 7 & the Lab Sub are alike. The frequency response of the cabinets based on Serodrive Basstech 7’s spec sheet, and the measured Lab Sub results using praxis which stem from the Subwoofer Shootout dating from 2003 are a like.
Horns are very finicky creatures. It is very hard for two cabinets to deliver the same frequency response while offering the same cabinet dimensions unless they are one in the same.
The Lab 12 was designed around the Lab Horn’s characteristics. If it weren’t for Eminence, there would have never been a Lab Sub. The interest of the Lab Sub became so great there was a sub forum made solely for that purpose. A lot of valuable information was lost on the Live Audio forum. It seems the Lab Sub section on the old board never made it to the Lab archives.
Best Regards,
Post by: Mike Smith on March 04, 2010, 08:01:57 AM
Yes, it is a good story. I didn't mind hearing it again.
Post by: Todd Michael on March 04, 2010, 10:55:15 AM
I do believe I was actually the first person to build and test the very first LAB Sub. It may have been with the first version woofers from Eminence, I can't remember exactly as it's been a while
Anyway I still have a copy of the email I sent you on April 5 2002 with measurement results and assembly pictures.
Take care,
Todd Michael
Yorkville/VTC
PS- Call when you get a minute to talk about a new project.
Post by: kevinnemrava on March 04, 2010, 11:33:54 AM
| Ivan Beaver wrote on Thu, 04 March 2010 01:13 |
It is hard to tell if PK's cabinets are the same stolen design-or something different that just looks kinda the same. |
Yes, They are the same, I help him build the original set.
Post by: Mac Kerr on March 04, 2010, 12:40:22 PM
| Elliot Thompson wrote on Thu, 04 March 2010 00:35 | ||
The driver arrangement changing is expected since the Basstech 7 used two 15-inch drivers whereas, the Lab Sub utilise two twelve’s. |
Elliot, after resting your eyes, check a dictionary for a definition of "Exact". I think you will find that speakers with different driver placement, and different driver size cannot be exactly the same. They can be similar, they can be based on the same design principles, but not exactly the same.
Using words like exactly, and unique, rule out any differences at all.
Mac
Post by: Al Smith on March 04, 2010, 04:47:43 PM
Post by: Mike Smith on March 04, 2010, 05:29:27 PM
I would have said sub-bass.
Post by: Al Smith on March 04, 2010, 05:48:27 PM
Post by: Doug Fowler on March 04, 2010, 06:00:17 PM