More things to do with Acouplex…
By Roy Gregory
The audio industry is a bizarrely segmented and divisive arena. Given that the goal is a single, integrated (and, hopefully, musically coherent) system, the degree of collaboration or even common thinking across that system’s various components is minimal to say the least. Even within a single product category, such as amplifiers, we don’t just have schisms between Classes A, AB and D, solid-state and tube, the DHT NOS evangelists won’t talk to the push-pull pentode brigade, while hybrid amps are simply beyond the pale, upstart opportunists trying to exploit the vacuum tube’s inherent superiority for nefarious (and probably self-serving) ends. Don’t even get me started on competing speaker technologies… If, when the day of reckoning arrives, the only people who make it into heaven are the ones that own flea-powered triode amps and vintage (preferably single driver) horn speakers, the rest of us are probably well out of it!
But on a more serious note, these divisive tendencies, technological myopia and a reluctance to learn from each other’s experience creates a number of serious blind-spots when it comes to product design. When it comes to building hi-fi products, accepted wisdom often falls into the category of ‘never questioned’. The result is the ubiquitous application of components or materials that consistently limit performance, because they’re fashionable or because it’s always been that way.
When ‘good practice’ turns bad…
You want an example? Try the nasty, raw steel spikes that you find on the bottom of almost every speaker that costs less than €20k. Companies know that customers expect their speakers to have spikes, so they provide them. But because the designer is wrapped up in his ‘big thing’, be that the driver technology he’s using, the cabinet design or materials, the crossover technology or components (or some lopsided combination of all three) the spikes are an afterthought, bought off the shelf, often for the lowest price possible. Yet those spikes have a direct and demonstrable impact on the speaker’s performance – something the manufacturer often remains blissfully ignorant of, because during development they don’t listen with the spikes in place and they certainly don’t compare different spikes. Which is a problem, because those raw steel spikes they supply not only sound bad, the crude threads they have make precise adjustment of the speaker’s attitude needlessly difficult or impossible. So, they undermine potential performance in two ways, sonically and positionally.
Replace those nasty, raw steel items with a set of Track Audio or Andante-Largo, precision machined, stainless-steel spikes and you’ll get an instant and obvious improvement, both in the inherent sound of the speaker but also the ease and accuracy with which it can be set-up and, very often its stability, if it’s placed on carpet. Given just how demonstrable those improvements are and the fierce competition between sub-€20k speakers, you’d think that fitting decent spikes would be a no-brainer… Designers will generally cite cost as a prohibitive factor, but bought in bulk, the impact on BOM would be tiny. What they really mean is that they don’t want to give up any budget that might be applied to their particular components or area of interest – even if using crappy spikes undermines any benefits from their chosen Golden Path. Which brings us right back to square one.
