Gadgetory

Chicago 2016 launching yet some more speakers I'm keeping myself busy and this time I've got to model look to models I'm showing that I'm playing one of them is the first of a new range that we're calling well it's a step up from the debut and it's called unify and it's unified because I've gone back to my love which is concentric drivers I've been doing concentric drives ever since I was a calf over 20 years ago and it holds something special for me in the way it handles the music but I've not been able to do it in the debut series because they're at a lower price point then I could really do justice with designing a concentric driver so now these bookshelves start at $500 a pair and we have three speakers in the range $500 for the bookshelf $1000 for the equivalent Tower and then a center channel at 349 so these are true 3-way systems even with the $500 bookshelf five inch aluminum cone woofer four inch aluminum cone mid-range driver and a one inch soft dome that's a development from what I did with the debut but it's more refined goes out higher in frequency it goes out close to 30 K and the key is not that it can do 30 K it's that it hasn't started rolling off by 20 which a lot of soft donors already do the little dirty secret of high res audio yeah we got the recordings that's supposed to go out to 1,500 K but the tweeters don't but it's all part of what I've been trying to do recently which started when I was a pioneer with those best 22 loudspeakers I've done speakers at all price points all the way up to $80,000 a pair when I was with T ad which went into systems with electronics that brought up the system price to two hundred and forty thousand dollars that's a lot of money I realize it is and it's fun designing stuff at that level but you often get the comments well yeah but anyone if you got that much money to spend on design can do or should do a good speaker and yes that's true but you're still trying to outdo all the other guys who are cooking $80,000 speakers so you still got a challenge there and it's a very different challenge and it's satisfying its own right because you're really pushing the boundaries of what's possible but it's a very limited market clearly for that price and yeah I won't go into value for money because it's this law of Domitian Returns that we understand but I've had success with doing all price point and there's a satisfaction of doing entry level systems because we all you look around shows and everyone's heads getting gray we're getting old where's the either the young people coming in or the people with limited disposable income you know people with families I want people to be listening to music I think we all do that's why we're here but there's a limited opportunity of good equipment at affordable prices so that's become my mission right now to try and give people that and give surprising value we all get asked as audiophiles by friends I'm thinking of buying a stereo system what would you recommend and we'll give her answers and then we'll go I wasn't meaning that much you know that's the that's rock bottom for us we don't know how to recommend often something below that because either we haven't thought it through or we haven't been exposed to it or we realized that was there was nothing available lower price that we could honestly recommend so it's okay just go and listen for yourself you get on life get out my way so what I try to do is give that choice give that value in a way that what I want is when you get the product home knowing that it's been recommended I don't want you to start listening and go oh I see what Bob or whoever why he recommended it to me it is good yeah I want you to go well I know Bob recommended this I didn't think he meant it was that good that's if I don't achieve that I think I'm I'm failing and so I'm trying to work that into all the speakers I do and certainly it seems from the reaction to the debut series I'm on to something people are talking about exactly that how surprising it is so I'm trying to maintain that and obviously I'm going to go up in price points because having tackled entry level I want to do a step up but not a ridiculous step up so if you think of the debut it started to 29 and to $79 a pair for the b5 and the b6 this new one is $500 but he's a true three-way with illumine cones and the concentric driver so it's still tremendous value and it is I feel and again from the reaction here at the show the first public showing it is a significant step up in sound so it's about double the price and it's at least let's say double the performance and that's not a normal reaction to audio law of diminishing returns as you step up in price yes the performance goes up but not as much as the price did and I think right now I'm the other way around I can get a step-up in sound that goes beyond the step up in price now I know at some point that's going to flatten out and then flip back to the other way as we get higher on hiring price but right now that's what I'm trying to do so we've got the three speakers in that range and I'm trying to show its capability and also play music that maybe is not the kind of music I listen to I'm listening to the people who are listening to what I'm demonstrating and comments about kinds of music and obviously I think attracting new listeners into it we can play something other than just jazz hit and octa-core self still female vogue I love female vocal but there can be other genres of female vocal that can be used to show the capability but what it does highlight and we all know this a lot of music these days relies on really good extended bottom-end for the drive to the music and generally entry-level speakers just can't do it so that's my other goal in the design to give an extended range from the speaker when you design small speakers obviously this small because we're trying to still keep good performance but also a speaker that's practical for most people to accommodate in the listening rooms small speakers don't normally I have base or have base dynamics they often give that up in order to get some kind of efficiency make it easy to drive but then you're missing half of the music and so I'm going the other way around I'm sacrificing some efficiency because on the whole pair is a lot cheaper these days than it used to be and we fixate on efficiency and how many watts can it handle how many watts as Miami Fire got but most of the time we don't push our amplifiers that hard yes party time okay we do but most of the time we don't and yet we always gonna miss the bass if we haven't engineered that in so that's what I'm trying to give people and I'm using for example deadmau5 track to illustrate not just that the performance extends down low enough to do justice to that genre of music but also it can do it at a surprisingly powerful rhythmic level even from a 5-inch driver and I've even been going so far the this show is the public introduction of these new unifying speakers but I've also got a new ad let's say even more entry-level speaker in the debut range we started with the b5 and like I said that was 2 min $29 the last speaker had before I joined elac was with pioneer the BS 22 and that was a four inch driver and it proved to be enormously successful $129 a pair really unheard of performance at the price point but starting with ELAC I made yeah enough of a significant jump to that price point because I needed to differentiate and of course the pioneers still out in the marketplace so why compete with myself but now we've come back down to fill in halfway with that gap and this is the first ever showing of the debut before so it's a four inch driver same kind of style while exactly the same style is the b5 just small the box and same how my mid will first same tweeter but in a four inch size now four four inch small box you wouldn't expect any bass and yet what I'm demonstrating to people in directly after I show the new unify which is already surprising people with the amount of bass and getting I'm getting great performance out of the b4 and okay it's not as good we'd expect that but it's surprisingly good it's that wow factor again and what I'm trying to do as I engineer these speakers is of course no fines driver can do everything the five inch or six-inch or whatever can do but it's got to do enough to surprise people to give them most of the music spectrum that they want to hear and if it starts to fail let's say it should do in a easy graceful manner so that you're not immediately drawn out of the music you can keep listening kneel notice I have the basis maybe not as clean or dynamic when I really push it hard but it's still there and I can still listen to the music the worst thing is if it clicks and farts and pops and ah what was that and he's rushing to turn it down so if it's the failing gracefully I think I'm gonna be a master at failing great say I did act so on did point out after I'd said that he said that sums up my life failing graceless oh can you imagine that on your tombstone so you know I am on a mission because it's been a long time since we've had enough people pay attention to this market segment and I'm gonna do this both for the speakers and for electronics that are introducing and the subwoofers both in terms of surprising value and solving practical problems that people have we have a tagline expect innovation and that means we're going to examine the market and it's not just about can we make the same thing but better value but let's look at what are people not doing that needs to be done and we've addressed that with the new amplifier beyond the technology that we've got in terms of it so what we call the Bosch amplifier it's not a Class D amplifier what it does is solve a difficulty that people have in how to connect a subwoofer into a stereo system most regular stereo systems are not configured to easily add a subwoofer and if you try and cobble something together you can't play any louder than you did before because most implementations mean that you're still running the main speakers full range so you add better bass extension you don't add loudness capability now we receivers are obviously in a home theater system they're configured always to really use a subwoofer you can put a filter into the main speaker so you cut off the base from that and feed it into the silver but not so much for a stereo system so we're introducing an amplifier which in a very compact chassis because of the amplifier technology we use not quite as efficient as Class D but still pretty let's say efficient enough to be able to package 100 watts per channel into a compact chassis but we've added DSP capability so that we can find a way to easily add a surfer into the stereo system and of course that's easier when it's your own amplifier our own amplifier so it's got two dedicated subwoofer output so just one simple connection to the server but he also allows you'd for a high-pass filter than two main channel and so restrict the bass that's going into there and put it into a subwoofer but then the combination of app control from a smart phone over Bluetooth we've got an algorithm that allows us to measure what the subwoofers doing and measure what your main speakers doing and then perform an automatic blending of the two you know the problem when you're trying to add a su before you got face controls you got fingers it controls your amplitude controls and basically we leave it up to the customer to sort out how to add that subwoofer into the main speakers and that's because we don't have control of that and we don't know what the customers using but if you think about it as a speaker designer my job normally is to blend the woofer to the mid wilfer to the mid-range to the tweeter and I ought to know what I'm doing but it's still not easy to do often to get that seamless sound character how's the customer an inexperienced person supposed to stand that chance especially when all the controls are buried around the back of the subwoofer so you constantly jumping up and down for me listening see going over leaning over the back of the subwoofer adjusting controls putting all of that as an algorithm into the DSP containing the amplifier fixes all of that and makes it very straightforward and at the same time with the trick we've got of measuring near and near to the woofer and then back in the listening position we can use the microphone in the phone instead of requiring a calibrated microphone will kind of cancel out the effects of the microphone but at the same time we've now got the ability to do room correction but it's not on any silver for that you choose but it's not just room correction that's limited to the subwoofer because if you just do room correction on a silver and you're crossing that let's say 50 or 60 Hertz it means you've got no room correction above that and yet you need it if you think you need room correction you certainly need it going on above 50 Hertz and possibly all the way up to about hundred and fifty hundred and eighty Hertz we wouldn't take it beyond that this amplifier gives you that capability it automatically blends and they've does room correction both on the sulfur and the named speakers and a hundred watts Channel and it's six hundred dollars and therefore another of these great value propositions but one that solves a difficulty that everybody has that they haven't been able to get around up till now without a lot of effort so that's where we're going with the company same with the music server that we're doing dedicated music server that isn't a computer that you've tried to plumb into your hi-fi system now I know as old folks we can use computers but we don't want to have to use computers in a hi-fi that's the hi-fi this is my computer and I don't want to deal with crashes and updates and all that kind of stuff now obviously the new younger market is totally comfortable with computers but still we wanted a solution where it's like a hi-fi it's just a component we put into the hi-fi and that way we're able to have a music server that's dedicated and easy to use but as the interface between the music server and the user we use room labs software and for those who are not familiar with room you need to be when we look at iTunes and any of the other programs on computers intended to organize your music collection and make it available easily to use room just is so far beyond pretty much anything else as a way of aggregating your music and understanding what you've got and what would interest you the ability actually listening to interrogate the metadata that's all stored locally on our device and it goes out catalogues your whole collection but it's doing it in a way that you've got so much information available to you and just a simple thing like I listen to a piece of music that take a button oh there's the drummer I don't know what else he does click a button it scans your it both tells you everything he's ever done but it also scans your entire music library that you have resident say on the hard drives or available through tidal and tells you every album that you've got access to that drummer is on and then shows you a new screen of just those albums and can listen to those and you could just go on and on and on and on spend hours just exploring very powerful so that's the the other product that well it's gonna be available next month shipping next month so it's this expect innovation you'll see more we're going to address the idea of it once again that the new market of well do I really want to bother with Dax and preamps and power Emerson and speakers because what I normally do is plug a set of computer speakers into my laptop and I'm done or I Bluetooth wirelessly to my speakers what's all this other stuff that I'm having to get to understand so given we've got music server we're going to you're doing powered speakers that wired and wireless take why I've already designed and morph it into wireless versions for that market to make it easy yeah I remember when I first showed the debut speakers with he like it was a Newport Beach show last year and compared to what I normally have to do to set up a a demo or even to bring the equipment to a show when I was doing ta D speakers at feelin's Andy pounds and live as a 200 pounds and all this peripheral stuff I decided I'm gonna do a simple system and I used an all-in-one Bel Canto DAC pre power box one box power cables to the speakers and I plugged my computer in that was it I actually arrived at the show with two suitcases if half an hour later I kind of almost set up I want that feeling I want the feeling that you can get a system that is open up and it works but it gives that sound quality as well so that's that's where we're headed and it doesn't mean I've abandoned the high end I still love the idea of how good can you get and you know it's not just about the speaker's themselves just in the way I set up a system where I get the music from everything about getting good qualities sound I still enjoy that and I will be doing that but there's time for that what I want to do now is concentrate on this more entry level to get people excited about listening to music in a better way it's not that people are not listening to music it's just we feel what those of us who are involved in high-end audio or not even hiring just audio files interesting how to get the best out of music we want to we see what people are missing in how they to music and we know just what the musicians the recording engineers are putting into making those recording us and yet it's not coming out the other end it's like a dirty painting you're looking through a dirty window you don't get the full benefit of all the efforts of that paint and put your painting we passionate about music as well as the equipment or at least we should be and we want people to hear that and go oh wow now I understand that into play between this and that because I can navigate it that's where I want to go