His solution?
Multiple spheres. He also came up with a nifty "stand" mechanism that allows the consumer to adjust the position of the three drivers relative to their listening position and the room in which the speakers sit…
search
Proclaim Audioworks' Dan Herrington had a revelation one day while sitting in the smallest room of his house. "I was reading old JAES papers," he said, "when I read a measured analysis of speaker radiation patterns based on cabinet construction. A sphere was extraordinarily close to the perfect form, but then you had to deal with using multiple drivers."
Art Dudley and I didn't so much enter Hyperion Sound Design's room as get dragged in by our ears. Standing in the Hyatt's hallway, we heard some close harmony quartet singing that sounded mighty darn real.
We went in sat down and were given a demonstration of how to run a demo right. The room was modestly treated with RealTraps, the speakers were artfully placed to minimize boundary issues, and the music was playing at sane levels and was absolutely mesmerizing.
The best part? "You can buy the whole system, including four channels of single-ended tube amplificatiion,for…
The HT845 single-ended monoblock amplifiers ($2500/ea) were so new, Hyperion had no literature on them. They looked and sounded good, though.
Hyperion Sound Design's Albert Wu holds up his SVF midrange driver. It's quite a piece of work. It has no spider, incorporates what Wu calls "rear pressure reduction," and the flat-carbon fiber plate that I took for a dust cap is really the transducer.
Obviously, the driver is proprietary to Hyperion—and it seemed like a lot of innovation for such a modestly priced speaker. "We like keeping prices sane," Wu smiled. "We think of ourselves as providing balance to an industry that needs some."
Bob Silverman wowed a select but enthusiastic audience Friday with a concert that consisted of two Mozart sonatas (K303 and K300) and three Brahms piano sketches. He was playing a Steinway parlor grand that sounded wonderfully Mozartian.
Afterwards, the gentleman standing behind me put into words the thought that was only beginning to form in my mind: "Just one of those Brahms sketches was worth the price of my three-day ticket."
And Saturday at 11:30, we get to hear Silverman play a program devoted to Chopin.
Jeff Joseph was demoing his RM7si compact monitors ($2300/pr) with Bel Canto's 150Wpc 3001 integrated amp ($2200) to spectacular effect. Why was that surprising? Because his source was an iBook laptop feeding a usb output into the 300i.
"The sound is great," Josephs enthused. "But the best part is that now you have permission to buy a new, high-performance system for your office."
Obviously, Jeff's chancellor of the exchequer has a different set of authorizations than mine.
"Your mileage may vary," he allowed, "the the limitation is no longer that you can't get the…
We got to talking to Bel Canto's John Stronczer and he pulled us into an empty conference room to talk. "I did something interesting," Stronczer said.
"I wondered if you always need to reclock digital signals when you distribute them, so I ran upsampled data into two S/PDIF outputs into two separate converter/amplifiers and measured the group delay over several days and got no drift. It sounded noticeably better for reasons I don't completely understand, but here's the part that startled me, if I used one channel only from one amp's output and then the other channel on the other…
I could hardly keep my hands off of Chord Electronics' CD Transport and DAC. I'm not kidding. In the new Jet Black finish seen here in Larry Greenhill's photo, the pair is absolutely exquisite, and begs to be touched. Chord's founder and chief designer, John Franks, explained the cosmetic design was inspired by the hard black stone found between the cliffs of Whitby and Staithes. Like many things of beauty and wonder, its origins are fabled and obscured; Whitby Jet is believed to be either a form of carbon or the remains of hardened sap dating back to the dinosaurs. I'm putting…
"So," I began innocently, "how do you determine the shape of your loudspeakers?"
Loiminchay designer, Patrick Chu, gave me a look. "Seriously?" he asked.
I nodded. Seriously.
"I love women!" he exclaimed.
I gave him a look. He laughed and laughed and laughed. The Loiminchay Mandarin Supreme (starting at $80,000/pair) uses a 19" horn with a 1" driver, and employs 10" and 12" bass woofers.