Wes Phillips

Are you watching Alon Wolf?

Thanks for the tour Wes- I love getting to see the inner workings and construction of the big-boy speakers, esp. the more exotic ones like these. Great meeting you at d.b.a. by the way. I hope to get down to the City more often and do it again.

Yeah, and it's only two feet away from the wall!!! What a joke!!!!! If anyone can afford to build an anechoic chamber, it's these guys. A forklift is really such a great way to stabilize your measurement technique. Bwaaaah!

Dear Vito,Please allow me to correct some details here, which you may have deduced from the photo: actually, the speaker is located nine feet away from the back wall. The thing that may have confused you is the foam block on the back of the forklift, which is itself located five feet away form the back wall. As for the stability of the forklift - you are right that most forklifts are not suitable for mesaurements. This specific model uses dual vacuum-enclosed ball bearings in its pathways, which makes it highly stable. Some other companies, besides our personal favorite Stoecklin of Switzerland, also use this technology. Our accelerometer tests have shown it to not have any measureable contribution to the speaker's lab tests, so we consider it suitable for measurements.By the way, we are happy to have you or any other interested reader as a guest at our factory, to see firsthand the processes which Wes Phillips has so ably described.

Dear Rene,Thank you for the question!Just as you have pointed out, I indeed believe that frequency response is very important, as are the relative phase, the mechanical losses and many other criteria, most of which you are probably already familiar with from your work.As for distortion - it is actually quite important, but one needs to look more closely at the particular type of distortion. The NRC's measurements just show the THD, which doesn't tell the full story. I urge you to read Stereo Sound (Japan) issue 156, where they have actually shown what the distortion consists of. Our Anat Reference Main Module was the winner of the distortion comparisons made there between 14 ultra-high-end speakers, mainly due to the fact that our distortion was entirely K2 (which is basically inaudible below 5%), and when it came to the more critical K3 distortion, our figures were the lowest ever measured by that magazine. So, it is mainly a question of "how deep you dig" when you measure.