Extreme Audio Performance

We solved some fundamental aspects of speaker design. This enables advantages that are way beyond the ordinary.

Let’s explain.

The promise of the horn

Most companies make box speakers even though horn speakers have very clear advantages.

  • Higher sensitivity

    Horn speakers amplify the sound acoustically, so they require much less electric amplification to provide the same sound pressure. With less electric amplification, you get less distortion of the sound.

  • Less driver movement

    In a horn, the driver movement is only about one fourth for a given sound pressure level compared to the same driver in a conventional speaker box. Driver movement is the biggest source to distortion in a driver, so less movement gives significantly lower distortion.

  • Small and agile drivers

    Horn speakers can also reproduce any given frequency range with much smaller speaker drivers than a box speaker. And with a smaller speaker driver, you also get much faster impulse response and higher breakup modes providing less distortion of the sound.

  • No distorted reflections

    The nature of the horn is to guide the sound into a controlled dispersion pattern, and some designs even do this over a wide bandwidth providing a tool that can direct sound where it is wanted, avoiding reflections off surfaces that distort the direct sound towards the listener.

Box speakers and their challenges

  • As the speaker driver plays audio both ways - the direction towards the listener which corresponds to the input signal, as well as the other way which is unwanted, the speaker box needs to eliminate the sound generated into the box. This will ever only be partly successful, at best, and sound pressure and resonances from the inside of the box will always contribute unwanted, distorted sound back to the listening room.

  • As the speaker driver moves outwards at high SPL, it generates a «vacuum» inside the box. This «vacuum» pulls the diaphragm back again, keeping it from moving as it should and to create the sound it is supposed to, adding distortion and an adaptive high pass filter dependent on SPL. The opposite effect contributes to distortion when air compression gives more and more resistance towards the movement when the diaphragm moves inwards into the box.

  • In addition, most speaker manufactures add bass reflex ports, which is altogether another chapter of distortion. The audio is generated by creating resonance at the port hole, using the air pumped, at inverted phase, through the box. The resulting low frequency sound has very little to do with the signal that got to the speaker driver in the first place - it's rather just the result of using the stored energy of compressed air in the box to create a low frequency sound defined by the port. To be blunt, this is the low frequency noise that is masking the music in conventional speakers.

"Horn speakers are much more energy efficient and has a lot faster and more correct impulse response, they have controlled dispersion, and less distortion for any given sound pressure. That’s more or less all the main ingredients for making good audio." Rune Skramstad, CTO

So why haven’t speaker manufactures abandoned the box speaker a long time ago? It turns out that horn speakers aren’t easy to make, and powerful amplifiers are available at a low cost.

  • The rear chamber of a horn speaker needs, in theory, to be infinitely large for the speaker driver to move undisturbed. This is rather impractical, and makes most manufacturers choose between making sub par horns or box speakers, believing that the perfect horn doesn’t exist.
  • We have found a way for the speaker drivers in a horn to behave as though the rear chamber is infinitely large. This enables all our speakers to benefit from the extreme advantages of the perfect horn.
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