Famous Canadian loudspeaker manufacturer has developed some extraordinary technologies over the years, and its Paradigm Premier 800F is a perfect example. The company has really thrown all its recent technological break-throughs into this four-driver, three-way floor-standing design.
EQUIPMENT
The most obvious of those technologies sits in front of the Premier 800F’s 165mm-diameter midrange driver, which has a carbon-infused polypropylene cone with a Thiele/Small diameter of 130mm. In front of it is what Paradigm calls a patented ‘Perforated Phase-Aligning’ (PPA) lens, which it says “increases and smooths its output without colouring the sound”.
The idea of putting a dispersion/phase-alignment device in front of a driver is not a new idea — loudspeaker manufacturers have been putting them in front of tweeters for more than half-a-century, and indeed Paradigm has fitted one to the tweeter on the Premier 800F. But putting one in front of a midrange driver is, while not without precedent, relatively rare.
How might such a ‘lens’ “increase and smooth” the output of a midrange driver? One reason is fairly obvious. In any
