Introducing the Ultimate Active Speaker System

[Tranquility Bass]

Years in the making, this is part of a cost-no-object Active Speaker System we are designing for a client which replaces half a million dollar worth of stereo separate components including exotic cables, expensive power conditioners/re-generators and power distribution boards which offer little or no benefit or value to our system. It has a total name-plate power-rating of ten times that of the stereo amp it replaces with superior distortion and noise and an aggregate instantaneous current rating of 180 amps per channel with all channels driven !!

The heart of each speaker is the Active Speaker Integrated Controller (ASIC) used to integrate all speaker drivers, amplifiers and supervisory circuits. Each speaker has one ASIC and is connected to the source units through a central hub which is also custom designed for this application and which interfaces to each satellite plate via our 2nd generation Perfect-Link II interface which has been fully updated for this application. Both speakers and Preamp/Hub are fully electrically and galvanically isolated from each other so there are no ground loops to cause interference. Because of this the speakers and Preamp/Hub can be plugged into different circuits of the house without any detrimental effects on performance and which offers full transparency compared to any analog type of interconnections which are difficult to isolate without compromising fidelity.

Designed from the ground up the ASIC contains its own DSP with its own custom DSP firmware and provides levels of integration that is unmatched by any separate stereo components irrespective of their cost, size or weight ! We've gone through over fifty design iterations on the drawing board and gilded the lily on this design and left no stone unturned, so it should come as no surprise that to achieve the same level of integration using separate components is a practical impossibility ! However, all of this hardware would be of little use if there wasn't a way to tie all of the pieces together in a unified way.

For this reason, a brand new software application called the System-Builder was developed from the ground up specifically for the hardware which for the first time allows a complete N-way speaker system to be accurately specced, modelled, configured and measured from start to finish whilst maintaining strict tolerances on quality and performance. With our own proprietary driver stitching technology the system is essentially driver agnostic but we recommend using quality components throughout along with the higher dynamic output capability of using multiple amplifiers in an active system will guarantee clean full fidelity output up to concert levels without fatigue due to the absence of dynamic limits imposed by a single amplifier driving a passive speaker system. A thermal management system is provided for harsh environments with extreme ambient temperature variations.

One of the benefits of such a system is that every part is made to seamlessly work together with the others and there are no issues with mismatches between components nor is there the added expense of buying amplifiers, cables, preamps, DAC's, crossover and hoping they all work together because all of this is already provided with the system. Because of the systems approach to designing the speaker we can't use an off-the-shelf DSP system with it's canned user interface simply because it is not suitable for this application and totally inadequate for the job. Also the oversimplified DSP capability just cannot do what we need which is why we had to build our own hardware and write our own custom DSP code and operating system kernel from the ground up. This gives us a competitive advantage over other vendors who don't build their own electronics in-house. which means we can do things that other speaker vendors can only dream about so they are ill equipped to design and build their own electronics and are solely dependent on the vendor of the electronics that supply them.

The only thing we don't supply is the source units so please add your own "sauce". However, with the advent of some outstanding low cost SOTA streaming solutions that partner really well with our electronics we prefer to focus our attention on the development of a SOTA speaker system and leave the source units to the source unit aficionados ! Our new 60 page whitepaper goes into great detail to explain many of the ground breaking concepts used in this exciting new speaker system. For those who could not previously afford the best now you can without the limitations of a passive system !



PS. Have a nice day Marc

[Tranquility Bass]

Some people spend a fortune on speaker cables thinking it is the most purist form of signal delivery from amplifier to their loudspeakers !!

But unbeknownst to them the signal has to pass through a complex passive crossover full of an array of lossy and imperfect passive components before it reaches their loudspeaker drivers which is kind of defeating the purpose of having this ultra-pure interconnect cable in the first place !! Passing large amounts of current through capacitors, inductors and resistors was never a good idea. If a passive component was ever going to show its flaws was in a hostile environment like this and yet people continue to seek out the law of diminishing returns by throwing good money after bad on interconnect cables whilst ignoring the elephant in the room ! Hell, there are some speaker vendors who even go to great lengths to hide their passive crossovers by potting the components so people can't scrutinize their design choices !

With our active speaker, each driver is connected directly to its own amplifier channel with the shortest possible cable length, and even like speaker drivers do not share an amplifier. Every speaker driver has its own associated amplifier channel with its own active crossover network implemented in the most purest form inside a DSP in the form of a mathematical algorithm that more accurately mimics a passive crossover without any of its disadvantages. The advantage of doing it inside a DSP is that there are no issues with power dissipation, component tolerances and drift in values over time, component non-linearities, capacitor dielectric absorption, inductor iron losses and of course cost !! Not only that we can accurately match levels between drivers without using padding resistors that dissipate a lot of power and can drift in value over time. You might think this is overkill but when you consider that the cost of this whole speaker is less than the cost of these speaker cables alone you'd have to agree that the Ultimate Active Speaker has a hell of a lot more to offer than a traditional passive speaker system !

[Tranquility Bass]

Why a single amplifier driving a passive speaker is such a bad idea but nobody is talking about the elephant in the room !! Maybe if your amplifier is carved out of a solid block of aluminium billet, or you buy some uber expensive speaker cables, or use some cable lifters or even use a grounding box it may solve these fundamental issues but wishful thinking never solved any technical problems

[Tranquility Bass]

Semi-populated DSPXO pcb's arrivethed to be populated and tested. These ones are earmarked for the upcoming Active Speaker system where each system requires no less than three DSPXO boards - one for each speaker and one for the central hub ! Whilst waiting for these boards to arrive we have been busy writing the new firmware that runs on these boards. The Ultimate Preamp proved that these boards are reliable, versatile and extremely high performance with more than enough DSP capability and onboard memory along with the onboard high performance DAC's and ADC's becomes the glue that binds all of the subsystems together ! Because we write the code ourselves that runs on the DSP so we get to choose how it operates and thus have infinitely more control compared to many of the off the shelf DSP systems which are basically limited to designing filters only.

[Tranquility Bass]

We must have redesigned this Active Speaker Integrated Controller (ASIC) sub-system at least a hundred times with many major and minor changes along the way. Whilst doing so, we have come up with numerous breakthroughs designed at perfecting loudspeaker reproduction. Some are even worth patenting ! These are not useless things like using bits of expensive speaker wire, expensive mains cables, milling out expensive bits of metal or changing out DAC's etc. These are things that make real-world differences in addressing the flaws in current loudspeaker technology ! This is only possible when you have total control over all facets of the design process.

[Tranquility Bass]

Rather than use some obscure general-purpose mass-produced single board computer (SBC) designed for set-top box and HTPC apps (like this $79 USD VIM3L Chinese-made SBC from Khadas used in someone else's prospective DSP product**), our custom-built DSP hardware was built from the ground up specifically for hi-end audio applications, and the measurements speak for themselves. The payoff is that we fully integrate all peripherals, such as DACs, ADCs, and custom hardware, onto the same board as the DSP and using the same low-jitter clock, thereby ensuring they are tightly coupled together. Not only that, we don't rely on a third-party operating system along with all of the bloatware that comes with it, which just slows everything down; instead, we wrote all of the code from the ground up to be highly lean and efficient.

** as well as going to great lengths to hide the actual DSP/CPU used for fear of identifying this board, which kind of makes it a diyaudio project disguised in an expensive case using a similarly specced Raspberry-Pi board and thus very hard to justify the 14k USD price tag ! Tsk,tsk,tsk...not a good look for the price charged