October 2019 | Newsletter No. 7

• Borderlands in a studio

• Building an Emperor

We would like to welcome new subscribers to our newsletter and thank our existing subscribers for their continued support.

We have two items this month.

First, we have an item about a pair of our Borderland Mk IV loudspeakers that are being used as monitors in a studio in Brazil and have transformed the way the engineer there is working.

Second, a look at our Emperor Mk II loudspeakers and some pictures showing how they are put together.

Borderland Mk IV at PlayCo.Studio in Brazil

Recently, while browsing on Instagram, we spotted a pair of our Borderland Mk IV loudspeakers in photograph of a studio in São Paulo, Brazil. As you don’t often see omnidirectional loudspeakers in a studio, we wrote to them to ask for the story behind how the Borderlands came to be there. Elias Assunção, the owner of PlayCo.Studio very kindly wrote back to us:

“I'm really a big fan of the speakers you produce.

I know that these speakers of mine are speakers for personal use, not for professional studio use, but I bought them for use in the studio as a reference to the sound that people would have at home, and I adapted a lot with them, and they became my speakers. most important for mixing and mastering.

What I see that the difference from these speakers, compared to conventional speakers, is that their frequency range is much larger, and even working at low volume, the frequency response is very interesting, completely different from conventional monitors.

The precise highs give me the exact notion of what's going on. If I go into the mix a little more high, the boxes already deliver ... Anyway ... it's sensational.”

“These boxes are a tourist spot that everyone who comes to the studio hears and is impressed with.”

Our thanks to Elias. We hope that his Borderlands will provide many years of excellent service.

Visit the Borderland Mk IV web page.

The Emperor without
his clothes

Our Emperor Mk II is a large loudspeaker. It is 1.01 metres wide, 1.96 metres tall and 0.81 metres deep (39.8" (W) x 77.2" (H) x 31.9"). It is also heavy: it weighs 425 kg (935 lbs). If this was a one-piece unit, delivering it to the customer would be a nightmare. It would be too big for many elevators and getting it up a stair-case would be a Herculean, as well as a dangerous task. Despite these problems, there are some very big one-piece loudspeakers on the market.

Not wishing to shorten the life expectancy of our dealers and having had to move more than our share of heavy loudspeakers up narrow stair cases in the past, we designed the Emperor to break down into manageable sections. Each loudspeaker comprises 10 major sections. These arrive at the customer in 9 large wooden crates, weighing in total around 1,700 kg (3,750 lbs). It takes one of our engineers about 3 days to unpack, assemble and set-up an Emperor system. This is a long time, but quite a lot of work is involved and we allow extra time to make sure that everything is as good as it can be.

The pictures below show the main steps in the assembly of an Emperor. Our apologies for the inconsistency of these pictures. We had to scrabble around to find shots that showed the views we wanted.

The first step

Assembly starts with attaching the base plate to the central column. The base plate has 16 nylon casters recessed into the underside to make the completed loudspeaker easier to move. Once the loudspeaker is assembled, these are invisible. This is a much neater solution than using large external casters. The central column houses the actuator motor and control electronics that move the beam that the DDD driver array is mounted on, back and forth.

The bass cabinets

The base system comprise four cabinets:

• Two woofer cabinets, each fitted with two 6-inch drivers and which cover the range 180Hz to 70Hz.

• Two subwoofer cabinets, each fitted with one 12-inch driver and which cover the range 70Hz to 18Hz.

The bass cabinets are stacked on top of each other on the base plate. They are held together using an interlocking collar that does not require any screws. The cabinets are heavy, so it takes two people to safely lift them into position and avoid either damaging the cabinets, or scratching the central column. Even though you would not be able to see any scratches, we want to make sure that we deliver a product in perfect condition.

Short jumpers connect the upper and lower cabinets as you can see above. In this picture, the person attaching the jumpers is hoping that his colleague does not loose his grip and drop 40 kg of loudspeaker cabinet on his fingers. This is trickier than it looks, as the person on the left is trying to hold in place a cabinet that does not have any convenient hand holds.

Front trim panels

The top plate is fitted next, followed by the two front trim panels. These weigh about 25 kg (55 lbs) each and require careful handling to avoid damaging the finish. Each one is secured by 16 small screws. We supply a custom made miniature ratchet driver to do up the screws on the sides of the panels adjacent to the central column. This is a job for someone with small fingers. A thick piece of felt placed under the bottom of a panel, just visible under the left panel, raises it up just enough to align the screw holes.

DDD driver array

Next the jumpers from the top of the central column, to the sockets on the tops of the upper bass cabinets are fitted, followed by the infra-red receiver for the remote control system that operates the DDD driver actuator beam. This is the small bump you can see on the top panel.

The DDD driver array is then bolted to the actuator beam. This is another two man job: one man to hold the DDD driver array and another to fit the securing bolts.

Finished

Finally, the cables to the DDD driver array are attached and power connected to the back of the loudspeaker. All being well, when the remote control is pointed at the loudspeaker and the appropriate buttons are pressed, the DDD driver array will move back and forth, as shown in the picture above.

While this may look rather bizarre, it is far from a gimmick. The DDD driver array covers the range from 180Hz to 24,000Hz: almost the entire range of the loudspeaker. Moving the DDD drivers is effectively the equivalent of moving the entire loudspeaker and this allows you to make fine adjustments to the position of each loudspeaker from the comfort of the listening seat. This is much easier and quicker than having to physically move the entire loudspeaker and you can compare different settings very easily. Each DDD driver in the array covers the same frequency range. Four DDD drivers are used in order to provide the required maximum output level, which for the Emperor Mk II is 118dB. This is significantly louder than most conventional loudspeakers and provides very realistic, live-music-like dynamics.

The remote control doesn’t use a conventional battery. Instead, every time the remote is moved, a generator inside it charges a special kind of capacitor. This ensures that you should never be faced with a remote control with a flat battery.

The Emperor has to be tri-amped, so it requires 6 channels of power amplification. These are driven by the electronic crossover that is supplied with the loudspeaker. For future Emperor deliveries, this will be our Emperor DSP-X crossover. This is supplied pre-programmed with the standard Emperor crossover filters. The customer can modify the crossover’s overall characteristics using an ap that runs on Windows, OSX and iOS devices. This allows the user to set up to 8 filters, where they have the choice of the filter type (bell, shelf, notch, or all-pass), centre or turnover frequency, Q or bandwidth and gain. 100 user memories are available for the user to store their custom settings.

For more information please visit the links below.

Visit the Emperor Mk II web page.

Visit the Emperor DSP-X crossover web page.

Until next time…

Due to overseas travel commitments, there will probably not be a November newsletter. In December we are back in China at the Guang Zhou audio show and hope to have some interesting pictures and news to share with you.

Thank you again for signing up to our newsletter and thank you for your continued interest in our products. Please don’t forget to visit our Facebook page.

If we can be of help with anything at all, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us here. You can find your national distributor here.

Holger Mueller | German Physiks