Yeah, this is the Kuala Lumpur International AV Show 2008. Our debut at an audio show.

Note that source is from the Mac Mini on the far right.

St Cloud and the Hedlund Horn. The St Cloud is more suitable for this small room but can’t play that loud due to its 3″ driver. Most of the time we play the Coral Beta 6 in the Hedlund Horn. Most folks when they see both speakers, ask for bass!

Closer look.

2 digital source is used alternately. The modified Squeezebox and the CDPRO2-based transport.

The top rack shelf is for signal path only. Bottom shelf for power supply. Each power supply has its own balanced isolation transformers.

The all-in-one. Perhaps should call it “All or Nothing At All”.

Requires a digital input and output goes to speakers!

The best interconnects are NO interconnects.

Enough about the system! My thoughts are blogged here.

KL International AV Show 2008 – First day

KL International AV Show 2008 – 2nd & 3rd days

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Speaker Fetish!

So since I moved to this nice little shack here last year, I’ve been active with speakers! Actually not just me. Partner in crime, Master Speaker Builder — Gabriel, is guilty too!

I don’t know about you but surely one pair of speakers isn’t enough! There’s many other technologies to explore too! These drivers, 16 of them, were bought through the world’s Marketplace – Ebay, from David Dlugos. You may know him from the Transmission Line Speakers website. David also lists many amazing speaker drivers for sale on Ebay — a credit to the DIY Audio industry. I don’t know how he sourced for these treasures but I’m really grateful that he sold me these Monsoon electrodynamic planar panels. These were originally part of a computer speaker package. You need another driver for sub 200Hz (yes, these amazing panels go down that low) but as you can see, I haven’t gone there yet. As they are dipoles, and meant for near field listening, some cancellation occurs due to the rear waves “wrapping” the front. This cuts down the 200-1000Hz response. Thus I actually need a baffle 4 times larger. Hmm… maybe I’ll do this with acryllic? That said, what I heard so far was the most satifsying mids and highs ever (even though they don’t go that high). The sound is very transparent, very smooth and very “open”. Rather than the “speaker disappearing act”, what we have here is more of a “room disappearing act”. Very good potential for more messing around! Once I get back my SPL meter, I’ll widen the baffle and add a sub-200Hz driver. Stay tuned!

Inspired by the Hedlund, our intrepid Diyer Gabriel tried his hand at horn design and this is the excellent St Cloud! Named after his son (lucky kid!), St Cloud has only one bend too, like the Hedlund. Believe me, Mr Hedlund is right in insisting on just one bend. Just one word describes it best — Coherence. Note the compression chamber! At time of writing, Gabriel is trying out different drivers, hence the removable front baffle, which he HAS to route it nicely as well. I can’t remember which 4″ driver is this but St Cloud managed to pump out those heavy R&B bass notes from these puny paper drivers! Gabriel also tried with the Jordan JX92, and went head over heels!

Surely no Diyers’ home is complete without a home theater! My Grand HT Plan was to build 5 speakers with each enclosure utilizing a pair of these Aurasound NS3-194-8E, thus I bought 10 of them but when it came to building them, I realized my Home Theater corner is not really that huge. Must be all that Stout I had the previous night… So the Grand HT Plan shrinked to the Tiny HT Plan, reducing the number of speakers from 5 to a much more manageable… 2. Consulted Gabriel and he suggested 2 liter volume for each driver, so the box was built for about 5 liters. I had to build bigger as due to my “excellent” woodworking skills, it’s better to err on this end. What can I tell you about the sound? It belies its size! Though the driver specs not much output below 150Hz, I bet there’s at least 80Hz down there. I know, not sufficient for HT but we are getting an awful lot of mileage here! The sound stage is wide and opened, and I had no issue with “rough highs” even though they weren’t 100% aligned vertically (it’s really not easy to cut the holes right) nor as close as possible. Who cares? Allison Krauss is happy singing, T-rex is happy crunching bones, my wife is happy with 5-reduced-to-2-speakers, everyone’s happy! See those 15″ drivers? No, no, no. I wasn’t trying out a bass driver. Was testing them for a friend.

As you can see, speaker building is a lot of fun! Besides anyone looks cool sawing wood! I hope you’ll build some speakers now.

As for me, it’s time to plan for… more speakers!

Bass module for the Monsoon planars, a horn subwoofer for the Aurasounds…

diyparadise.com

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Sophia Rocks!

//

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!

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Blood, Sweat, Tears and a Bloody Tan
a. k. a.
How to Drive Your Wife Nuts

Congrats Mr Jan Hedlund for such a wonderful design! Mucho gracias, arigato, merci beaucoup, vielen Dank, thank you very much!

Thanks a lot too to Master Craftsman Gabriel who really has wonderful hands with wood!

Now, you may not know this but I have been really lucky. I mean really really lucky. I have been fortunate enough to listen to the Coral drivers in various enclosures. Open baffles, Sealed box, Bass Reflex, Mini-Array, TQWT, Spiral Horn and now, the Hedlund Horn. Each has its virtues but for sheer quality, the last 2 deserves special mention.

Why so? It’s a belief that paper drivers need special tender loving care, just like your long-suffering (in my case) better half. When a driver pumps out sound, there is a reverse wave that goes into your enclosure. If you don’t take care of this sound waves, it’ll wreack havoc every where especially when it bounces back to your driver and thus distort the intended sound. So how you deal with this backward waves in the enclosure, determines how macho you are! And when you have successfully dealt with this rear wave, not only your bass notes improve, the mids and highs improve as well! As there’s less “junk” to destroy everything now. Comprehende? And this is where horn designs are so highly prized! Due to the expanding volume from driver location to horn mouth, you now have a mechanical “amplifier”. The rear waves have an easier path to “get out”. There’s a lot more theory than this but my simple mind only permits this. : ) So Gabriel suggested building the Hedlund Horn and he helped me built it. Actually, you can almost say he built it! Parts where I “contributed”, he needed to do more work to undo the damage! I better stick to soldering… Macho men only need these tools to build…

When we started building, I envisioned the smooth curves will make a baby with high Wife Acceptance Factor. However, after it completion, this baby has grown to a monster! At 6 feet 7 and weighing almost 60kg, it’s no fun to carry around! Despite the horn length, the Hedlund doesn’t go below 50Hz. At least that’s what my measurement shows. 50Hz is still strong but below that, it drops like a bomb. That said, who cares about quantity when you have such quality! Listening is an experience itself!   Coral Beta 6 The Coral Beta 6s are no ordinary drivers. Designed more than 25 years ago, in my books the best speaker driver listened to! Listening to the Betas in the spiral horn reveals the best mids and highs I have ever heard! The level of detail and ability to convey the slightest of nuances in well recorded material is unmatched by any other drivers I have played with. With poor recordings, you don’t stand a chance though. Thus, With Great Drivers, comes Great Responsibility. Build a crappy amp, you are going to suffer. Build a crappy DAC, you are going to cry.

Thus we didn’t mind suffering in building the Hedlund for the Coral Beta 6. There’s definitely our blood and sweat in there! I suffered so many cuts and bruises and now the scars suggest I’m a veteran of many squabbles. So stay your distance ok? Tears came when we listened to her! Either tears of joy or tears of despair and fortunately, ours is the former. The tan? Well, no thanks to our Malaysian sun…

The sound?
Don’t ask! Build it yourself! Ha ha! Anyone who doubts single drivers can do bass opt to listen to the Hedlund. Although she doesn’t go lower than 50Hz, the quality of the bass is beyond compare! Fast, natural, distortion free and NO BOOM at all! In comparison, bass from non-horn designs sound “constipated”, sound “forced”! All this while maintaing the brilliant mids and highs of the Beta! Also, one of the pet peeves most folks have with single drivers is the “lightweight” sound, particularly the lower midrange. Fear not now folks! It’s not the driver’s fault but your enclosure! Male vocals have never sounded better!

The System as of March 2006

CDPRO2 feeds Monica2 with Grounded Grid tube gain stage, feeding Charlize, then the Beta 6s in Hedlunds.

Monica2 in GG with Amperex 5842s. Will be trying other high transconductance tubes soon!
Note I hate RCA sockets so am using XLR now.

Charlize in a simple Hammond box.

Will stop here. Got to go listen to music! (And make amends to my wife!)

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