Sophia Rocks!

Sophia Rocks!

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IMPORTANT NOTICE

We have stopped distributing the Jordan line. 

That said, we are now developing Sophia 2 but using some other diver. Stay tuned!

Hey, hey mama said the way you move, Gon’ make you sweat, gon’ make you groove.Led Zeppelin – “Black Dog”

Intro

So can your loudspeakers make you groove to Black Dog?

OK, whenever I write about the awesome fun we have here with the Hedlund Horn, Spiral horns, (and more horns to come) I always get emails from folks all over the world, asking for more details.

“How does it sound?”

“Really so good?”

“What do you mean by effortless, organic, natural bass?”

The fact is, if possible, I’ll pool together the resources to build a Hedlund Horn for everyone of you. But logistics is a nightmare here. To ship a pair of 60+kg behemoths isn’t most folks idea of fun… If your idea of marital bliss is that of your wife allowing you to watch the Super Bowl with your buddies, then try convincing her of horns, horns and horns!

Yes, you know we are horny with horns. Forget about bass reflex, sealed box, transmission line, TQWT, Voight pipe, open baffles, your closet, your car booth (yankees call it trunk)… If you haven’t listened to a properly built horn, you are just kidding yourself.

Sure you are happy with the sound right now, but I know (and you know as well), there’s something better out there…

So the idea is, why not build speakers small enough to fit inside a Fedex 10kg box? We could ship to anywhere Fedex will go. We could now spread the joys of a horn speakers. Comprehende?

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It’s been a Long Journey

To be honest with you, various enclosures were tried before settling on Sophia.

Started off first with Jordan’s recommendation of a 7 liter bass reflex box. Spent quite some time adjusting the port as we are using resonance to help fill in the bass (that’s bass reflex for you). See that port sticking out there? Unfortunately, despite playing with it for so long, I couldn’t get it to sing satisfactorily. When the bass notes come in, you get a horrible b-o-o-o-o-o-m-m-m-m-m-m… This is the nature of bass reflex. Tried positioning, adjusting port depth, port size blah blah blah

Sorry, ain’t no peach.

Then I made right decision (how often can I say this?)

I passed everything to Gabriel.

As you should know by now, Gabriel is no ordinary diyer. He’s an EVIL diyer with a fetish for speakers. Nope, not regular boxy speakers but horns, horns and horns.

As far as evil diyers go, this guy ranks very high. Boy, he was playing Black Sabbath when I called him!

Gabriel took a look and said he’ll handle it. And this is what we have here.

The Jordans are now playing in the previous box but with an addition of a spiral horn. The previous port has been covered.Oh yeah, now we are courting some mojo here. And no more mood-killing b-o-o-o-o-o-m-m-m-m-m-m…

But wait, surely there’s more! More studies, experimentation later, and we now have a very unique horn loading system. As you know, in this age of Google, if we don’t give this horn loading technique a name, surely it’ll disappear into oblivion. So we’ll call it, the SeTH horn.

SeTH

Seth? Yup, Stairway To Heaven.

No kidding bro.

It’s not a simple horn, it’s not a bass reflex, it’s not a spiral horn… it’s a SeTH horn. And thus Sophia is born.

That’s the horn mouth at the top. Don’t place your coffee mug there!

Vital Stats

Driver is of course, the famous Jordan JX92 which already retails for around USD350 a pair. Enclosure is made from solid wood. 100% Malaysian nyatoh. Medium hardness but with an attractive grain. Height 11.5″, Width 7″, Depth 9″. 80Hz to 20kHz. Usable output down to 60Hz. This baby, coming from such a small box!

I want one!

When it comes to pricing our products, we want to be fair to everyone, and of course, ourselves as well. Since we are dealing with hardware here, the selling price should be at least 3x of cost price. Since this Jordan baby ain’t your typical USD30 driver, pricing Sophia isn’t an easy task.

And then we are so bloody fussy. If we just use plywood, or MDF, things would have been simpler — for us. But not for you sonically speaking.

Then I searched around the net and to my dismay, MDF bookshelves using the same Jordan drivers are going for USD2000 a pair!

Further search shows MDF bookshelf kits using USD30 drivers, crappy crossovers selling for USD500 and above. Hey, what kind of world is this?

Well, we are NOT going that route. We’ll try with an introductory pricing first.

So before we change our mind, and before we recover our sanity, grab Sophia first…. at only USD800 a pair.

Hee hee, don’t know about you but I better go now. Sophia is calling. She rocks and she digs Led Zep!