Sunday, January 25, 2009

Design Acoustics D-6

I picked these up on Saturday. The legs in the pictures aren't original and will be removed.

These are very odd, with 5 Peerless tweeters ( 4 are similar to the ones used by Rectilinear Research in the Mini IIIs the fifth like the ones in the IVs) and one midrange driver on the front, and a 10 inch woofer (needing refoaming) and it's port on the back.

I remember the brand from my obsessive stereo magazine reading in the seventies, when the company made a big splash with it's dodecahedron shaped D-12.

I will let an anonomous writer fill in more:

"Most of you are probably familiar with the dodecahedral D-12 (D for Design) that was Design Acoustics first product and that made the name for the company. That speaker was reviewed by Stereo Review and came out as one of the highest rated speakers ever reviewed by Julian Hirsch. The problem was that the design was just too unconventional even for the Eames era, so a 'conventionalized polyhedron" was marketed that was listed as the D-6. The price was quite a bit lower than the big brother and it became a relative market success for the quite small company. High-Fidelity Magazine immediately reviewed this model in June 1973 and found it to be one of the flatter measuring designs they had encountered. Following his glowing review of the D-12, Hirsch picked up the model for review in September and essentially said that it was his favorite. It was the only speaker to rank a perfect 100% score overall up to that time and for sometime afterwards and in other reviews years later, it was still mentioned favorably. Interestingly, Hirsch liked the D-6 better than the AR LST, though today the D-6 is forgotten and the ARs go for the price of a decent used car.

Hirsch aside, I will say that these are very good speakers for their size and what was available at the time. Thanks to the Peerless drivers, which are unusually smooth for cone tweets, the highs are pretty good and the odd arrangement counters the tendency of cone tweeters to beam terribly. The rear firing woofer, crossing over at 800 Hz, doesn't do what it should do, imo, without very careful positioning near a wall. So, the sound can end up being lean with good mids and highs, but with a major lack of lower midrange and midbass. Overall, they're an interesting design that sound better than one would expect, but will tend to perform less than optimally in most rooms. At the prices they can be found for (eBay pairs have sold for ~$300 in the past, but sometimes others can sneak by for ~$50-100), they are a steal for vintage speakers despite the unconventional (omnidirectional) sound."

I will get them working and look forward to hearing them! I fear that placement close to walls will be difficult in my space, so full of stuff, but am sure they will reward my efforts.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hope you got these working. I had a pair of D12s that were my main speakers for several years. They really needed a lot of space to sound great, but even in a small room they could create infrequent sonic miracles. Several times I found my self getting up to answer the door or looking for the cat in the room when listening to intimate live recordings. There was one small club Flamenco recoding of Carlos Montoya that fooled me EVERY TIME. In the recording someone yells in another room and the D12 made me think I had a home invasion every time. Their sound stage and high end detail fooled me as no other speaker AT ANY PRICE ever has. They are impractical, imperfect miracles. mitchalee@comcast.net

Louis T said...

Hi Lloyd, I had recently purchased a pair of D-6 speakers from a seller here in Toronto. As I was looking closely at the pictures of the ones you had here, I realized they are the same set with marks at the same spots and all!

I am not sure why that is the case, but I noticed that both speakers had different serial numbers --- is this correct?

Also, I noticed that my left and right speakers are not symmetrical... I wondering if I could be holding onto 2 lefts or 2 rights.

If you have more details about the set you had, I would certainly like to know - email me at Louis.Teoh@hotmail.com

Here are pictures of them in my room --- http://www.louisteoh.com/blog/?p=1209

Film fanatic said...

Those d6 speakers are excellent. I remember Julian Hirsch tested those speakers and said the sound was perfect from any point in the listening room. I have a pair of d8 speakers which is a much larger version of the d6 standing 44" tall and weighing 70 pounds each. They have two 10" rear firing woofers, 1" dome tweeter, 5" midrange, and I think six piezoelectric tweeters spread out along all sides on the angled portion of its front baffle. Frequency response was 30-17,000 hZ +- 3db. Retailed for 695 dollars each in the mid 1970s which I'm guessing is 3,000 in todays dollars. They're in very good condition and still sound great to this day.

Film fanatic said...

Incidentally if anybody remembers Peaches records, they had a pair of d6 speakers set up about 10 feet high blasting away and they sounded excellent. This was before I knew what kind of speakers they were, but they were playing them with the grills off and I couldn't understand where all the bass was coming from because there was no visible woofer.