Ohlala, you mentioned Essential Audio's Sound Lab room last year. I'm not about to claim that my little Zephrins are going to fill the shoes of the magnificent Sound Labs, but in a way the Sound Labs were their inspiration.
You see, one of the things the dipolar Sound Labs do so well, with that curved panel and with correct positioning (far enough out into the room), is to generate a spectrally-correct and fairly late-arriving reverberant field. This more closely mimics the sort of sound field we encounter in a live venue, and it does some things that the ear/brain system likes a lot (and I believe in designing for ears vs designing for test equipment where the two paradigms diverge).
Some years ago I started building "conventional-driver" speakers that sought to emulate this correct-reverberant-field characteristic of the Sound Labs. As I told Roger West (of Sound Lab), my goal was to build the second-best speakers. Anyway I built bipolar speakers with fairly well-controlled radiation patterns, and while there are some characteristics of a high-quality full-range electrostat that are simply out of reach of conventional drivers, my bipolars did seem to have some of the same "feel" when positioned far enough out into the room.
My friend James Romeyn began a series of very much outside-the-box experiments that explored different directions for the basic bipolar concept, and one of those directions was, firing from the floor up at the ceiling! Briefly, he found a way to get the fairly long time delay for that rear-firing energy that otherwise would have required positioning the speakers well out into the room. And I think his "Late Ceiling Splash" concept does some other things very well too, but the details on that will have to wait for the show.
So in a sense the Zephrins are an attempt at approximating the (imo ideal) in-room behavior of the Sound Labs in a more small-to-medium room, medium budget friendly package. Of course I try to get other things right too, but the basic concept that led to the Zephrins was an attempt to imitate the behavior of the Sound Labs in some ways. Consider it to be a sincere form of flattery.
Looking forward to meeting you and Milpai and anyone else there.
Duke
You see, one of the things the dipolar Sound Labs do so well, with that curved panel and with correct positioning (far enough out into the room), is to generate a spectrally-correct and fairly late-arriving reverberant field. This more closely mimics the sort of sound field we encounter in a live venue, and it does some things that the ear/brain system likes a lot (and I believe in designing for ears vs designing for test equipment where the two paradigms diverge).
Some years ago I started building "conventional-driver" speakers that sought to emulate this correct-reverberant-field characteristic of the Sound Labs. As I told Roger West (of Sound Lab), my goal was to build the second-best speakers. Anyway I built bipolar speakers with fairly well-controlled radiation patterns, and while there are some characteristics of a high-quality full-range electrostat that are simply out of reach of conventional drivers, my bipolars did seem to have some of the same "feel" when positioned far enough out into the room.
My friend James Romeyn began a series of very much outside-the-box experiments that explored different directions for the basic bipolar concept, and one of those directions was, firing from the floor up at the ceiling! Briefly, he found a way to get the fairly long time delay for that rear-firing energy that otherwise would have required positioning the speakers well out into the room. And I think his "Late Ceiling Splash" concept does some other things very well too, but the details on that will have to wait for the show.
So in a sense the Zephrins are an attempt at approximating the (imo ideal) in-room behavior of the Sound Labs in a more small-to-medium room, medium budget friendly package. Of course I try to get other things right too, but the basic concept that led to the Zephrins was an attempt to imitate the behavior of the Sound Labs in some ways. Consider it to be a sincere form of flattery.
Looking forward to meeting you and Milpai and anyone else there.
Duke
