Something wicked this way comes... (2020 speaker teaser content)

Duke LeJeune

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AudioKinesis has never really done a “statement” speaker system before, but with a little luck 2020 will be the year, and What's Best Forum will be the front-row seat.

We won't be shooting for "absolute best speaker for a big room", nothing against big rooms, but where we have the most to offer is in small to medium rooms.

Nor will we be shooting for "absolute best" anything, as that sort of claim would call for a much higher-paid marketing department than ours. Instead, we will be shooting for something like "a unique and enjoyable combination of attributes, without any disqualifying colorations." Some of what we'll be doing will be refinements of things we've done before, and some of it will be new territory for us.

By way of overview, we aspire to combine the liveliness, palpable sense of presence, and tube-amp-friendliness of a first-rate horn system; the immersion and utter lack of listening fatigue of a first-rate dipole system; and the disappearing act and low-end solidity of a first-rate conventional system. We expect to do so in a way that is unusually adaptable to less-than-ideal rooms. We will be making some trade-offs along the way, so we'll mention those too.

First up in the "new territory" category is a proprietary horn which combines the directivity control and freedom from coloration of Earl Geddes' Oblate Spheroid geometry with a large-format compression driver. Heretofore, to the best of our knowledge, Oblate Spheroids (and their derivatives) have been confined to small-format compression drivers. For what we are trying to accomplish, we think this particular horn will outperform anything else we are aware of.

But there will be a tradeoff relative to some high-end horns: Because the Oblate Spheroid profile is constant-directivity, the highs are spread over a wider area than would be the case with a tractrix, exponential, spherical, or hyperbolic horn. Our on-axis efficiency in the high treble is a little under 100 dB, which becomes the limiting factor. This isn't bad efficiency, but it does fall short of many high-end horn systems. (Just to be clear, our horn puts out as much high frequency energy as these other types, but it is not concentrated into a narrow on-axis angle).

Why not add a high efficiency supertweeter? Because we have found that time-domain coherence of the upper harmonics is worth preserving, and that cannot be done in the analog domain with a supertweeter. So we will be using large-format compression drivers which have sufficient top-end extension.

New territory for us will include (estimated) 100 dB efficient, 16-ohm main speakers. This translates to a 97 dB/2.83 volt sensitivity, and compatibility with a wide range of specialty tube amps, including the Atma-Sphere M-60 OTL amp. We are designing with the M-60 specifically in mind, and it may well prove to be the ideal amplifier for these speakers despite its relative affordability. Solid state amps can of course also be used, and most will deliver half their 8-ohm rated power into these speakers (hence the 97 dB/2.83 volt sensitivity), but typically with lower distortion. In practice a solid state amp's reduced wattage output into the 16-ohm nominal load is unlikely to be a limiting factor because of their high efficiency.

Familiar territory will include an upwards-and-backwards firing "Space Generator" section, whose purpose is to add some spectrally-correct, relatively late-onset reverberant energy. This results in a more effective presentation of the spatial cues on the recording. So on a good recording we can achieve that "you are there" sense of envelopment which relies on the recording's spatial cues dominating over the playback room's acoustic signature, and which is normally out of reach without a very good large room (and a suitably capable system). The Space Generator section we will be using is more advanced than what we have heretofore displayed at audio shows. The Space Generator is our secret weapon; it is what will distinguish what we do from other high-efficiency systems.

We will also be returning to familiar territory by using the Swarm subwoofer system for the bottom couple of octaves, as we think it combines the pitch definition of good dipoles with the bottom end extension and impact of a monopoles. Can it "keep up with" horns? We have customers using the Swarm with 107 dB efficient fully-horn-loaded systems (well, "fully horn loaded" except for the Swarm), including one who replaced his horn subwoofer with a Swarm. For those intimidated by the thought of having to find places for four subwoofers in a small to medium room, their footprint is only one square foot, and their placement is very flexible. In situations where extension well below 20 Hz is required, options will include a 10-Hz Swarm (which will have a larger footprint).

The combination of very good radiation pattern control, independently adjustable reverberant sound (via the Space Generator sections), adjustable top-end "tilt" and midbass tuning, plus the highly adaptable bottom end of the Swarm, combine to make our approach exceptionally real-world room-friendly. Not that there wouldn't be further improvement in a well-treated dedicated listening room, but in general we offer less sonic compromise in ordinary or problematic rooms than most other approaches. And if the services of an acoustician are engaged he or she will not need to "fix" the speaker's off-axis response, but rather can concentrate on improving the room's acoustics.

To the best of our knowledge, nobody else is doing a 100 dB ballpark system that can convey the sense of envelopment of a good dipole system in a modest room. Unless someone beats us to it, we'll be the first.

So at this point (about 11PM on January 1st, 2020) the custom tooling we need is being fabricated by a machine shop. We have some custom parts on order, and will be ordering other custom parts in the near future. We are working with a master woodworker who is a longtime industry veteran on the cabinet design. And as you can probably tell, we are highly optimistic. Which shouldn't be surprising - I think the only ones left in this industry are the optimists!
 
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Ron Resnick

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Very intriguing, Duke!

Best of luck with making this speaker a reality!
 
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Duke LeJeune

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Jul 22, 2013
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Very intriguing, Duke!

Best of luck with making this speaker a reality!

Thank you very much, Ron!

What we'll be doing is obviously related to the Gina system you heard a T.H.E. Show last summer but with improvements and refinements, some of them pretty substantial (like a ballpark 9 dB increase in efficiency, along with better room interaction). And we're pretty excited about what the new horn will bring to the table. We think the Gina is still quit competitive in its size and price range, but it's not a "statement speaker".

One tradeoff I forgot to mention: The relatively narrow radiation pattern of our mains, combined with our recommended aggressive toe-in, results in minimal early same-side-wall reflections, which is arguably a two-edged sword: The advantage is greater soundstage depth (because "small room signature" is reduced), but the disadvantage is reduced soundstage width on most recordings (because strong early sidewall reflections increase the apparent source width). That being said, our team of engineers have emerged from the lah-BORE-ah-TOR-ee with an ultra-high-tech solution to restore soundstage width: Move the speakers further apart.

The reason we recommend aggressive toe-in, such that the speaker axes criss-cross in front of the listening area, is for the sake of sweet spot width. Our set-up geometry results in a decent spread to the instruments even from well off the centerline. This puts the off-centerline listener well off-axis of the near speaker, and on-axis (or nearly so) of the far speaker. The secret to this unorthodox geometry working well is, the output of that near speaker must fall off smoothly and rapidly as we move off-axis, at least in the mids and highs were we get most our image localization cues. Fortunately this sort of radiation pattern is something a good constant-directivity horn inherently does well.
 
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the sound of Tao

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Jul 18, 2014
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AudioKinesis has never really done a “statement” speaker system before, but with a little luck 2020 will be the year, and What's Best Forum will be the front-row seat.

We won't be shooting for "absolute best speaker for a big room", nothing against big rooms, but where we have the most to offer is in small to medium rooms.

Nor will we be shooting for "absolute best" anything, as that sort of claim would call for a much higher-paid marketing department than ours. Instead, we will be shooting for something like "a unique and enjoyable combination of attributes, without any disqualifying colorations." Some of what we'll be doing will be refinements of things we've done before, and some of it will be new territory for us.

By way of overview, we aspire to combine the liveliness, palpable sense of presence, and tube-amp-friendliness of a first-rate horn system; the immersion and utter lack of listening fatigue of a first-rate dipole system; and the disappearing act and low-end solidity of a first-rate conventional system. We expect to do so in a way that is unusually adaptable to less-than-ideal rooms. We will be making some trade-offs along the way, so we'll mention those too.

First up in the "new territory" category is a proprietary horn which combines the directivity control and freedom from coloration of Earl Geddes' Oblate Spheroid geometry with a large-format compression driver. Heretofore, to the best of our knowledge, Oblate Spheroids (and their derivatives) have been confined to small-format compression drivers. For what we are trying to accomplish, we think this particular horn will outperform anything else we are aware of.

But there will be a tradeoff relative to some high-end horns: Because the Oblate Spheroid profile is constant-directivity, the highs are spread over a wider area than would be the case with a tractrix, exponential, spherical, or hyperbolic horn. Our on-axis efficiency in the high treble is a little under 100 dB, which becomes the limiting factor. This isn't bad efficiency, but it does fall short of many high-end horn systems. (Just to be clear, our horn puts out as much high frequency energy as these other types, but it is not concentrated into a narrow on-axis angle).

Why not add a high efficiency supertweeter? Because we have found that time-domain coherence of the upper harmonics is worth preserving, and that cannot be done in the analog domain with a supertweeter. So we will be using large-format compression drivers which have sufficient top-end extension.

New territory for us will include (estimated) 100 dB efficient, 16-ohm main speakers. This translates to a 97 dB/2.83 volt sensitivity, and compatibility with a wide range of specialty tube amps, including the Atma-Sphere M-60 OTL amp. We are designing with the M-60 specifically in mind, and it may well prove to be the ideal amplifier for these speakers despite its relative affordability. Solid state amps can of course also be used, and most will deliver half their 8-ohm rated power into these speakers (hence the 97 dB/2.83 volt sensitivity), but typically with lower distortion. In practice a solid state amp's reduced wattage output into the 16-ohm nominal load is unlikely to be a limiting factor because of their high efficiency.

Familiar territory will include an upwards-and-backwards firing "Space Generator" section, whose purpose is to add some spectrally-correct, relatively late-onset reverberant energy. This results in a more effective presentation of the spatial cues on the recording. So on a good recording we can achieve that "you are there" sense of envelopment which relies on the recording's spatial cues dominating over the playback room's acoustic signature, and which is normally out of reach without a very good large room (and a suitably capable system). The Space Generator section we will be using is more advanced than what we have heretofore displayed at audio shows. The Space Generator is our secret weapon; it is what will distinguish what we do from other high-efficiency systems.

We will also be returning to familiar territory by using the Swarm subwoofer system for the bottom couple of octaves, as we think it combines the pitch definition of good dipoles with the bottom end extension of a good dipole. Can it "keep up with" horns? We have customers using the Swarm with 107 dB efficient fully-horn-loaded systems (well, "fully horn loaded" except for the Swarm), including one who replaced his horn subwoofer with a Swarm. For those intimidated by the thought of having to find places for four subwoofers in a small to medium room, their footprint is only one square foot, and their placement is very flexible. In situations where extension well below 20 Hz is required, options will include a 10-Hz Swarm (which will have a larger footprint).

The combination of very good radiation pattern control, independently adjustable reverberant sound (via the Space Generator sections), adjustable top-end "tilt" and midbass tuning, plus the highly adaptable bottom end of the Swarm, combine to make our approach exceptionally real-world room-friendly. Not that there wouldn't be further improvement in a well-treated dedicated listening room, but in general we offer less sonic compromise in ordinary or problematic rooms than other approaches. If the services of an acoustician are engaged he or she will not need to "fix" the speaker's off-axis response, but rather can concentrate on improving the room's acoustics.

To the best of our knowledge, nobody else is doing a 100 dB ballpark system that can convey the sense of envelopment of a good dipole system in a modest room. Unless someone beats us to it, we'll be the first.

So at this point (about 11PM on January 1st, 2020) the custom tooling we need is being fabricated by a machine shop. We have some custom parts on order, and will be ordering other custom parts in the near future. We are working with a master woodworker who is a longtime industry veteran on the cabinet design. And as you can probably tell, we are highly optimistic. Which shouldn't be surprising - I think the only ones left in this industry are the optimists!
Duke, a bit wicked can be good... it’s easy to read in your post all the excitement this new speaker is bringing you.

It’s great to be generating an exciting new design project and sounds like it’s culminating many years of experience and bringing something new to light out of it all.

Looking forward to hearing much more and of course the first pics.
 
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DaveC

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Nov 16, 2014
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Thank you very much, Ron!

What we'll be doing is obviously related to the Gina system you heard a T.H.E. Show last summer but with improvements and refinements, some of them pretty substantial (like a ballpark 9 dB increase in efficiency, along with better room interaction). And we're pretty excited about what the new horn will bring to the table. We think the Gina is still quit competitive in its size and price range, but it's not a "statement speaker".

One tradeoff I forgot to mention: The relatively narrow radiation pattern of our mains, combined with our recommended aggressive toe-in, results in minimal early same-side-wall reflections, which is arguably a two-edged sword: The advantage is greater soundstage depth (because "small room signature" is reduced), but the disadvantage is reduced soundstage width on most recordings (because strong early sidewall reflections increase the apparent source width). That being said, our team of engineers have emerged from the lah-BORE-ah-TOR-ee with an ultra-high-tech solution to restore soundstage width: Move the speakers further apart.

The reason we recommend aggressive toe-in, such that the speaker axes criss-cross in front of the listening area, is for the sake of sweet spot width. Our set-up geometry results in a decent spread to the instruments even from well off the centerline. This puts the off-centerline listener well off-axis of the near speaker, and on-axis (or nearly so) of the far speaker. The secret to this unorthodox geometry working well is, the output of that near speaker must fall off smoothly and rapidly as we move off-axis, at least in the mids and highs were we get most our image localization cues. Fortunately this sort of radiation pattern is something a good constant-directivity horn inherently does well.


I hope I can hear them at at RMAF 2020! :) If you haven't seen the new hotel, the Gaylord, it's a massive improvement and hopefully you'll be able to find a room size that matches your new speakers. It's more expensive for those showing, but I think it's worth it and RMAF will probably regain a lot of it's popularity it lost after the unfortunate remodel of the previous hotel.

I also setup my horn speakers with a wider than usual placement using a lot of toe-in, this certainly works well for me! :)
 
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Steve Williams

Site Founder, Site Owner, Administrator
I'm just seeing this thread. Duke, what wonderful news. Having heard your Gina this past year you know how impressed I was.I look forward to reading about this coming to fruition and to be able to hear it at one of the upcoming shows

Best of luck to you and James. and of course a Happy New Year to you and yours
 
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Duke LeJeune

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Jul 22, 2013
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Thank you very much Steve and Dave and Tao for your encouragement.

I can leak a few more details: The midbass section will consist of two 15" midwoofers, with a separate round Oblate Spheroid horn perched atop the midwoofer bin. The midwoofers we'll be using only have a single 1 dB bump within their passband, so they are exceptionally smooth, and the motor is one that we have found to have excellent impact. It's not the absolute highest efficiency woofer, but imo what we gain from trading off that last dB or so of efficiency is worth it.

Visually the general configuration will be reminiscent of the Avantgarde Duo XD, but without the little tweeter horn. We are opting to keep the footprint as small as we reasonably can (18 inches wide not counting the horn, by 22 inches deep), to keep this speaker viable for more modest-sized rooms.

Our horn will incorporate as many coloration-minimizing features as possible, including the theoretically optimum Oblate Spheroid profile and the largest round-over I have yet seen on an Oblate Spheroid waveguide. This latter feature will facilitate the "disappearing act".

It now looks like the midbass bin + horn will have a nominal impedance of 12 ohms, with a 2.83 volt sensitivity of 98 dB @ 1 meter, and a 1-watt efficiency of 100 dB @ 1 meter. It looks like we'll be able to hit uncompressed peaks of about 118 dB @ 1 meter with the Atma-Sphere M-60 or Novacron, without the need for a protective highpass filter. Max SPL (based on AES rather than "music program" or "peak" power handling) will be about 10 dB higher, given sufficient power and a protective highpass filter. Not that super-high SPL is one of the goals, but total effortlessness at normal SPLs is.

We think the freedom from needing a protective highpass filter is arguably a big deal. Just about everyone I know of who uses a protective highpass filter to protect their main speakers from over-excursion has either upgraded to a better filter at least once, or would if they could at a reasonable cost. Having the option of doing without removes one possible source of degradation from the signal path.

Enclosure material for the midbass bin will be the highest grade 3/4" plywood available, double-thicked in some places, well braced and with liberal use of constrained-layer damping. I conducted an extensive round of experiments into the specifics of the best way to do constrained-layer damping, and those experiments inform the details of what we'll be doing. So the enclosure won't be milled aluminum or carbon fiber or an advanced polymer, but it will be highly competitive when it comes to freedom from resonances.

This speaker will be compatible with just about anything from solid state to the relatively high-output-impedance Atma-Sphere S-30 OTL amplifier, with most SET amps falling somewhere in between. Only the very lowest-power SET amps will be off the menu. Multiple pluggable ports will allow shaping the low end for the amplifer's output impedance and/or the room acoustic situation, with "all ports plugged" being a viable option.

Incidentally the subwoofer system which will handle the bottom couple of octaves or so, the Swarm, has received one Product of the Year award, three Golden Ear awards, and three Editor's Choice awards from The Absolute Sound. So apparently the concept has pretty good "legs". The Swarm frees us from having to make tradeoffs in favor of deep bass extension on our midbass bin.
 
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Duke LeJeune

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Chris Rock's less-funny brother, The. Sweeeet!!

The experience of listening to Magico M3's in CV's dedicated room last summer is what convinced me to use a vertical stack of midwoofers. I was hearing a welcome and natural-sounding midbass warmth from the Magicos, in an area where most speakers are lacking. I think this was in part due to the vertical stack of three 8" woofers, which interact with the floor much more smoothly than a single woofer would. In particular, each one's floor bounce-notch would be at a different frequency, so they'd fill in one another's notches. That's one of the main ideas behind our stacking two 15's vertically, instead of doing something else.
 
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the sound of Tao

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Twin 15 inch midbass with horn on top is a great approach Duke. 98db sensitivity is for me perfect, opens up for a fantastic array of amps but then doesn’t pose the expensive challenge of amps for much higher efficiency horns where amp noise becomes a difficult beast to tame.

Very much looking forward to hearing more... and even better some early tease woofer and horn pics.
 

Duke LeJeune

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Twin 15 inch midbass with horn on top is a great approach Duke. 98db sensitivity is for me perfect, opens up for a fantastic array of amps but then doesn’t pose the expensive challenge of amps for much higher efficiency horns where amp noise becomes a difficult beast to tame.

Thank you sir!!

I was hoping to end up in a "sweet spot" where amplifier choices were abundant without noise floor being a major issue. It sounds like you think we're on the right track, as far as that goes.

Very much looking forward to hearing more... and even better some early tease woofer and horn pics.

Tooling is still being fabricated for the horns. One of our suppliers made a significant change which in turn necessitated us making a change, and that reset the clock, unfortunately... at least on the horn itself.
 
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Duke LeJeune

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Update: The Coronavirus de-railed the project for a while, but it now looks like things are slowly getting back on track.

In the meantime we refined our horn design a bit, and are hoping to have not one but TWO sets of horn tooling fabricated in the next week or two, such that we can make and thoroughly test (and possibly offer) two different compression driver options.

Why not just use the same horn for both compression drivers? Because matching up the exit angle of the compression driver with the entry angle of the horn MATTERS. This won't quite be Magico M9-level uber-engineering, but on the other hand we're trying to squeeeeeeze in just below M9-level pricing (<- yes, that was tongue-in-cheek).

Four months ago the compression driver choice was obvious, but then a very exciting new compression driver appeared on the market. We snagged a pair just before the factory corona-shut down, and preliminary tests on a (mis-matched) off-the-shelf horn were sufficiently encouraging.

So we are spending some bucks on R&D to make sure that when we talk the talk about the sweetness of our compression driver/horn combination, we will have walked the walk.

One other thing: We intend to make this speaker reasonably shippable (for a high-efficiency horn system) and set-up-able by a single determined audiophile armed with a dolly, and we plan to have at least one demo pair in rotation, such that IF the audio shows don't make the comeback we're all hoping for, we will still be able to arrange auditions.
 

the sound of Tao

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Update: The Coronavirus de-railed the project for a while, but it now looks like things are slowly getting back on track.

In the meantime we refined our horn design a bit, and are hoping to have not one but TWO sets of horn tooling fabricated in the next week or two, such that we can make and thoroughly test (and possibly offer) two different compression driver options.

Why not just use the same horn for both compression drivers? Because matching up the exit angle of the compression driver with the entry angle of the horn MATTERS. This won't quite be Magico M9-level uber-engineering, but on the other hand we're trying to squeeeeeeze in just below M9-level pricing (<- yes, that was tongue-in-cheek).

Four months ago the compression driver choice was obvious, but then a very exciting new compression driver appeared on the market. We snagged a pair just before the factory corona-shut down, and preliminary tests on a (mis-matched) off-the-shelf horn were sufficiently encouraging.

So we are spending some bucks on R&D to make sure that when we talk the talk about the sweetness of our compression driver/horn combination, we will have walked the walk.

One other thing: We intend to make this speaker reasonably shippable (for a high-efficiency horn system) and set-up-able by a single determined audiophile armed with a dolly, and we plan to have at least one demo pair in rotation, such that IF the audio shows don't make the comeback we're all hoping for, we will still be able to arrange auditions.
Duke that sounds great... but the proper way to do this is to post a sexy photo-shopped tease shot on Facebook and tell everyone you’re just about to release a $751,000 pair of speakers.
 

ddk

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Update: The Coronavirus de-railed the project for a while, but it now looks like things are slowly getting back on track.

In the meantime we refined our horn design a bit, and are hoping to have not one but TWO sets of horn tooling fabricated in the next week or two, such that we can make and thoroughly test (and possibly offer) two different compression driver options.

Why not just use the same horn for both compression drivers? Because matching up the exit angle of the compression driver with the entry angle of the horn MATTERS. This won't quite be Magico M9-level uber-engineering, but on the other hand we're trying to squeeeeeeze in just below M9-level pricing (<- yes, that was tongue-in-cheek).

Four months ago the compression driver choice was obvious, but then a very exciting new compression driver appeared on the market. We snagged a pair just before the factory corona-shut down, and preliminary tests on a (mis-matched) off-the-shelf horn were sufficiently encouraging.

So we are spending some bucks on R&D to make sure that when we talk the talk about the sweetness of our compression driver/horn combination, we will have walked the walk.

One other thing: We intend to make this speaker reasonably shippable (for a high-efficiency horn system) and set-up-able by a single determined audiophile armed with a dolly, and we plan to have at least one demo pair in rotation, such that IF the audio shows don't make the comeback we're all hoping for, we will still be able to arrange auditions.

When the going gets tough the tough go building! At least some do, the rest go shopping :p!

Sounds like a great project Duke, there are even many here with low powered SETs who're looking for quality speakers to match and they're rare in the US, unless you go vintage of course.

david
 

Duke LeJeune

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Duke that sounds great... but the proper way to do this is to post a sexy photo-shopped tease shot on Facebook and tell everyone you’re just about to release a $751,000 pair of speakers.

Ha! I just might do that!!

That oughtta set the hook... then I can reel 'em in with a "limited time introductory offer... $700,000 off..."


When the going gets tough the tough go building! At least some do, the rest go shopping :p!

Sounds like a great project Duke, there are even many here with low powered SETs who're looking for quality speakers to match and they're rare in the US, unless you go vintage of course.

Thank you very much, David!!

I don't see ANY opportunity for me to get involved in the magnificent world of high-end vintage horns... for one thing somebody else already had the guts and foresight and chops to do that, is are doing it very well!!

;^)

I recall reading in a thread on this site where people were lamenting the lack of locations in the US to actually audition high efficiency speakers, aside from audio shows. That made me think, let's make these babies "ship-able", relatively speaking.
 

sbo6

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Chris Rock's less-funny brother, The. Sweeeet!!

I think this was in part due to the vertical stack of three 8" woofers, which interact with the floor much more smoothly than a single woofer would.
Just an FYI - The Magico M3 has 3 7" woofers, not 8". Either way it's an excellent speaker. Also, good luck with your design, I'm curious to see your new creation!
 

LL21

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Dec 26, 2010
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Fascinating! Really looking forward to seeing it here first! BTW, regarding 4 subs...i suppose the choices are either: passive and the owners has to prepare for cables running the entire perimeter of the room (incl potentially past a doorway) or crossing over the floor mid-room...or self-powered subs and a wireless signal which means the subs are limited to proximity to outlets?
 
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Duke LeJeune

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Fascinating! Really looking forward to seeing it here first! BTW, regarding 4 subs...i suppose the choices are either: passive and the owners has to prepare for cables running the entire perimeter of the room (incl potentially past a doorway) or crossing over the floor mid-room...or self-powered subs and a wireless signal which means the subs are limited to proximity to outlets?

Thank you very much!

If someone else offers a more suitable subwoofer solution than we do, by all means go with that instead!

But yes our four subs would be passive, and driven by a pair of amplifiers. What our mains will bring to the subwoofage end of the spectrum is this: Their inherent rolloff will allow the subs to do what they do best (the bottom couple of octaves) without needing a highpass filter in the signal path, unless you plan on hitting very high peak sound pressure levels (north of about 120 dB/1 meter).
 

marty

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What our mains will bring to the subwoofage end of the spectrum is this: Their inherent rolloff will allow the subs to do what they do best (the bottom couple of octaves) without needing a highpass filter in the signal path, unless you plan on hitting very high peak sound pressure levels (north of about 120 dB/1 meter).

Very compelling! As far as I can tell, there is a paucity of manufacturers taking this approach, but it makes a lot of sense to me since after years of suffering every other possible way to hook up subs to mains, I think this approach has the most potential to hit all the right notes (no pun intended). Avoiding a high pass crossover network promises to be a huge inherent advantage. I've always thought that if it could be done by a manufacturer who makes both the high pass speakers and the subs, many of the obvious pitfalls (i.e phase and timing errors) can hopefully be addressed in a highly satisfactory way. Good luck! I will look forward to hearing them at a future demo somewhere.
 
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Site Co-Owner | Administrator
Julian (The Fixer)
Website Build | Marketing Managersing