But I wonder how they sound? I mean, wow, I think they look gorgeous. I just love how sparse and simple looking they are, and I must say I am intrigued by the use of “eco-friendly materials”. However, I must say I’m a bit skeptical. I found this speaker at a blog called BornRich.org via gizmodo. First I was a little put off by a blog called BornRich, and I became more skeptical of the product as their blog post sounded like marketing material directly from the manufacturer than an honest opinion.

The loudspeaker was the baby of out-of-the-box thinking and beats all conventional loudspeaker theories according to the maker. So, how different is this one? The loudspeakers are handcrafted with eco-friendly materials of the highest quality and promises musical transparency to the music aficionado. By utilizing Controlled directivity that is achieved by using Dipole Bass, Cardioid Midrange, Wave-guided tweeter Gradient Helsinki is here to change the way people perceive music. This room independent loudspeakers come in birch, walnut oiled, oak oiled, black, and white models with cherry or black finish to help you pick the one that matches your décor. Quality and finesse comes with a price tag, and you can expect these limited edition speakers to have a high one!

Now either BornRich is just assuming the manufacturer tells absolute truths in their marketing material, or they don’t know what they are talking about so they decided to just rephrase what the manufacturer says and take it all as good.

The most egregious thing to me is the dipole bass configuration of this speaker. For those that are unfamiliar with the term, dipole bass refers to a specific radiation pattern of the sound waves. I’m about to get a bit technical here folks, so bear with me.

Above is an animation of the dipole radiation pattern. This is basically what you would get if you had a single speaker on an open baffle where the speaker was facing to the left or right. You’ll notice that side to side (0 and 180 deg) there is strong performance, while up and down (90 and 270deg) there is a null - no waves at all. That’s because along that axis the sound waves from each side cancel each other out and you get no sound. In general using dipole radiation in Open Baffle speakers is a great way to get clean, precise bass. And it is true that this radiation pattern does not excite room modes as much as normal box speakers do, allowing them to be a bit more “room independent” as the manufacturer says (independent is a strong word… “less dependent” is probably a better phrase).

Okay, so now you know what they mean when they say dipole bass, so where’s the beef? Well there is a HUGE flaw in the Gradient Helsinki design: The way they have positioned the woofer is 90 degs from how it should be, thus positioning the null directly in front of the speaker! So if you were to take this speaker outside, and sit directly in front of it, you would hear no bass!! Now they claim that the speaker is room independent. Well, if you think about it, since you aren’t hearing any bass directly from the speaker, I would think that makes the speaker extremely room dependent. As far as I can figure the only bass you would hear is the bass that is reflected off the walls, unless you are sitting fairly off axis from the speaker, in which case I can’t imagine the tweeter sounding very good.

So what’s my verdict? Well without hearing the speakers it’s pretty hard to say. Maybe I’m not understanding the speaker design here, but there appears to me to be a gross design flaw (or misleading marketing material), and I think what you’ll end up with if you buy one is a $7,500 sculpture. Then again sometimes speaker designs contradict popular conceptions and what doesn’t appear to work that well on paper ends up performing pretty darn well. Either way, if you’re laying down $7,500 for a pair of speakers, hopefully you already know to try-before-you-buy.

[image source http://physics.usask.ca/~hirose/ep225/radiation.htm]
[source BornRich via gizmodo]

Filed under: Art | Design, Gadgets | Technology, Home Audio — Santi @ 8:32 pm