An Introduction from Songer Audio

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We're so happy to have joined the What's Best Forum community!

Below you'll find a little information about myself, Songer Audio, and of course the 100% handcrafted field coil loudspeakers that we make in Portland, Oregon.

About Songer Audio

Songer Audio is the product of my lifelong passion. It is the sum of thousands of hours of design and redesign, of refinement and production, and of an obsessive drive to perfect the joyful experience of music. My background is in software engineering, where I had a successful 20-plus year long career. While I owe much to the software industry, programming was rarely more than a means to a paycheck for me, rather than something I've loved to do. I've always been an artist at heart, and whether I've been drawing, sculpting, painting - or, most recently, designing and building drivers and loudspeakers - creating art has been my true calling.


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I have been occasionally designing and building speaker cabinets with factory drivers since my college days. At a point however, I began to wonder if I could produce the drivers for my speakers as well. That curiosity led to a nearly decade-long, obsessive exploration into field coil driver design, and the result of that work is what I believe to be one of the finest full-range drivers in the world. It is a work of art, and everything from its brass and aluminum frame, to the cones and voice coils, the suspension, the surrounds, the motors - is all constructed and assembled in my small shop in Portland, Oregon.

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This year has been an exciting debut for us. We exhibited both the S1 and S2 at the Pacific Audio Fest in July, and most recently at the Capital Audiofest in DC, to overwhelmingly positive responses from press and attendees at both events. At the Pacific Audio Fest, we were honored with a coveted Oasis Award by Dr. David Robinson of Positive Feedback, for the S2. The S1 captivated press members with another major publication at the Capital Audiofest just last month, and in a few weeks we will be shipping a pair to them for a full review. More details on that will be coming soon.

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A Modern Field Coil Driver

Field coils have been around for over 150 years, and were all but replaced entirely with plentiful and inexpensive permanent magnets in the 1950s. However in spite of being expensive and labor intensive to make, field coils are the superior magnet for sound reproduction. They provide a constant highly uniform gap density, and a magnetic stiffness that is hundreds if not thousands of times higher than a permanent magnet.

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That uniformity and stiffness translates into very high accuracy and low distortion, better in both respects than permanent magnets are capable of. They are also adjustable. Varying the power supplied to the field coil changes the Thiele Small parameters of the driver, and as a result tunes the character of its sound.

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The patented spider design holds the voice coil in tension with a flexible, acoustically transparent lattice and a carbon fiber composite collar, ensuring accurate, linear cone motion and no unnecessary resistances to the music signal whatsoever. The Type D dipole version of our driver takes advantage of the acoustically transparent spider to include a rear-firing whizzer, the only one of its kind in the world. This provides phase coherent presentation across the full frequency range in both the front and rear of the driver.

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The S1 and S2 Loudspeakers

The S1 loudspeaker minimally compensates for natural cabinet diffraction, and nothing else. The signal isn't needlessly degraded, as no filters or crossover circuitry are necessary. It simply holds the driver at ear level, where it plays with perfect phase and timing, free of coloration, and port tuned for deep, accurate bass.


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The S2 is a product of years of intensive development. It suspends the Type D field coil driver almost wholly in free space, attached at a single point to a layer-constrained, high mass, hardwood and glass-filled nylon mount for excellent imaging and clarity. Its Acoustic Elegance LO15 dipole woofer is "port constrained" on the front side to lower resonant frequency and raise efficiency. The baffle is folded into a discrete, open chamber in the back, which greatly reduces sound wave cancellations common in dipole applications, and delivers full and yet unmistakably dipole bass response.

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Thanks to everyone at WBF, for making us feel so welcome! I'm looking forward to sharing much more over the coming year. Cheers, everyone.
 
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We're delighted to have two wonderful new partners and some of the finest brands in the world with us this week at the 2023 Capital Audiofest.

Courtesy of Hear This and Destination Sound Group, we'll host the US show debut of the LampizatOr Poseidon DAC, a new offering from one of the most exciting brands in the audio world. A state-of-the-art Taiko Audio Extreme Server will spin the tunes for us, while a gorgeous Rhapsody, the exquisite 20wpc 300B single-ended integrated amplifier from Trafomatic Audio, drives our S1 and S2 handcrafted field coil loudspeakers. This is unquestionably the most refined system we've ever paired our work with. Our thanks to @gleeds and @LampiNA for making it all possible.

Come, see us this weekend in room 740 at the Twinbrook Hilton in Rockville, MD on November 10th - 12th. We look forward to sharing this very special experience with you.

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Well everyone, that's another wonderfully successful show in the books at Songer Audio! Thank you to those who attended the event and made time to listen with us, as well as to the press and our friends in the industry who have enjoyed our work, and been so good to us since our debut in Seattle 15 months ago. The time certainly has flown by.

I love this video (link below) from Audiophile Junkie - our sound signature is quite apparent, even in footage captured by a phone. Pay special attention to it at about 4:25, when he transitions to the back of the speaker. It does a perfect job of illustrating the magic of the rear-firing whizzer, and how seamless the dipole version of our field coil really is, in both directions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6WpqnZ6VyI

Please do overlook all of the fingerprints on the field coil housing.


It's hard to overstate what a synergy was achieved in our loudspeakers with a Trafomatic Rhapsody 300B integrated, the LampizatOr Poseidon DAC, and a @Taiko Audio Extreme server. It really was, even for myself, like hearing our loudspeakers as they were truly meant to be experienced for the very first time. What a beautiful, complete, graceful, moving and fully realized sound it was... I just cannot stop thinking about it. Special thanks to @gleeds of Hear This, and Fred Ainsley of Destination Sound Group and @LampiNA.

A theme we heard from attendees at the event can be distilled down to the following: "These speakers sound incredible! Do you have any future plans to pair them with vinyl?" Well, I'd hate to disappoint our fans... so look for us to do just that, very likely at the next event in the spring.

We'd also like to thank Gary Gill and Lou Hinckley for running such a perfectly executed event each year. I loved attending Capital AudioFest before I entered into the industry, and we love it even more now that we come to exhibit each year. Bravo, Gary and Lou, if you happen upon this post.

Next up, the inaugural Southwest Audio Fest in Dallas in March. We can't wait to see you there, and to share this truly extraordinary listening experience with you.

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Forum Members, Ken is one of those rare people that not only gets his art but understands the science. His hand built field coils full-range drivers can reproduce sound as few others can. This was our first time showing the Rhapsody 300B integrated in the US and while I had heard Ken's creations before this time around I was gobsmacked by their sound, especially the S1 model. Imagine a full-range driver that besides their characteristic coherence has real bass and dynamics. I'll take it one step further on a number of recordings they also had an electrostatic like see through quality with exceptional detail and realism through the mids and highs!

Digital when provided by Lampi is as good as it gets but a top flight vinyl rig will add another dimension to what makes Songer speakers so special.

Ken is a special person making a special product and deserves support from the audiophile community.
 
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Just sharing a little more good news, today - Songer Audio is proud to have been honored for the S1 this month by Materialist, a lifestyle magazine in Germany, as one of the Top 100 Masterpieces of 2024. Of course I couldn't be more grateful to Materialist, for recognizing the passion and craftsmanship that goes into all of our work.

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