Requesting info on Audio Kinesis ZEPHRIN Speakers

I have not heard the Zephrin, but I have the larger Dream Maker + separate LCS effect speakers, and they sound marvellous. The most enjoyable sound we've had in our house, by a good margin (and I've owned Dynaudio flagship speakers). Also, Duke/AK has been a pleasure to deal with.

If I might connect some dots here, on how the Zephrins are related to the Dream Makers...

It all started with me being a SoundLab owner (who became a dealer). There was something the SoundLabs did right that I hadn't experienced from other dipoles. I've owned nine other dipole speakers (not counting some DIY designs) that didn't sound as much like live music as the SoundLabs, so there was something they did that went beyond just being a dipole. I think it was their extremely well-controlled and consistent radiation pattern and in particular what that well-behaved backwave was contributing... namely, a well-energized, spectrally-correct, and (when set up properly) fairly late-arriving reverberant field.

I decided to try to do that with a dynamic speaker, and told Roger West that I was attempting to imitate his radiation pattern behavior as a sincere form of flattery. I told him that my goal was to build the second-best speakers, and it still is. Anyway the Dream Makers were the result of that effort, and they are bipolars with well-controlled radiation patterns both front and back.

Unfortunately the Dream Makers have the same placement requirements as dipoles, so they are quite demanding of real estate.

Enter inventor Jim Romeyn. After having heard the Dream Makers, he began using a bipolar setup with two small monitors per channel. At some point he tried laying the second monitor in each pair on the floor and firing it up at the ceiling, to get a long-path bounce before that extra reverberant energy arrived at the listening position. He made sure to "shield" the output of the upfiring monitors so that the "sidelobe" didn't arrive too early.

One advantage of his configuration is, the path-length-induced time delay on the upfiring array of drivers isn't a function of distance from the wall, so placement flexibility is greatly improved.

Well once I heard Jim's setup, I knew he'd evolved the bipolar concept to the next level. He called it "Late Ceiling Splash", for obvious reasons. I built a dedicated LCS system with two separate speakers per channel, one front-firing and the other up-firing. The upfiring LCS modules were optimized for their location relative to room boundaries, and have aggressive directional control built in so that a separate "shield" isn't needed.

The Zephrins are a one-box incarnation of this concept, which in turn is derived from the principles that drove the original Dream Makers. So that's the connection.

Duke
dealer/manufacturer/definitely got a dog in the fight

We used the Zephrin's in our exhibit room at the Newport Show last spring with both ours and Atma-Sphere amps. The set up worked quite well. Robert E. Greene stopped by our room twice to hear the speakers and was pretty giddy over the concept and how they sounded. If you can drive to the Chicago are for an audition it would be worth your time.

Disclaimer: I am a previously happy customer (Jazz Modules) and now a dealer for AudioKinesis, same for Atma-Sphere, and manufacturer of Electra-Fidelity Amplification products.

Duke

That's an interesting story to me. I have a small 12x12 sunroom that I have been challenged to conquer acoustically for years. It's my wife's room which limits options. I documented in my system thread recently adding a pair of isoacoustic monitor stands that seem to have finally solved the problem using my small triangle monitors, low placement near the floor for bass reinforcement, slight upward tilt and the isolation aspects of the stands. Results in terms of clean bass spacious soundstage and overall clarity and imaging are off the charts compared to anything else I've tried there.