Auditorium
23 Rondo
was
our next challenge - in the true sense of the
word.
When
we began working on this speaker, our initial
goal was to create a very simple enclosure.
It should be the sum total of our knowledge,
including experiences with earlier cabinets
and different kinds of wood. At this stage,
we had no inkling that it would become our most
expensive, most complicated - and most amazing
speaker yet.
The
basic intention was to develop an enclosure
at low cost to our kit clients. Ideally, we
planned to take a thin, pliable sheet of wood,
bend it backwards, and fix both ends into a
short "tail". Then we'd saw a hole
in the front, mount the speaker chassis, and
presto you'd have your speaker.
Things
went pear-shaped; or, as a German saying has
it: "The devil dwells in details."
The tension of the bent wood was so high that
its curves broke, and it would break invariably,
no matter what modifications, tricks or coaxing
we tried. Sometimes, it would shatter a few
days after we'd already felt moderately triumphant,
but shatter it would. Obviously, we had to change
our approach to the whole thing: We separated
the front from the side flanks and knew instantly
we'd hit the right track. The different prototypes
will be shown in a separate story some day.
After
many months of hard work, the final result was
a slender, curved cabinet. It avoids the disadvantages
of designs with parallel sides and is crafted
with elaborate workmanship. The side walls are
not pre-formed and are bent into shape under
high tension: a difficult process to master,
even more so as the floor is open and the flanks
can be fixed to three sides only. Again, the
design follows the rationale that a loudspeaker
housing is comparable to the corpus of an instrument;
it should use rather than eliminate energies
from the driver. Thus we carry on a tradition
of reverberating housing concepts that Western
Electric and Altec Lansing first formulated
in the Fifties.
The
speaker debuted in Germany at the Frankfurt
HighEnd Show 2000.
At a time when few full-range speakers were
available, it received much attention for its
unusual shape and aestethic appearance. We couldn't
predict that a segment of the DIY-scene would
react by staging a run on vintage radios, only
to gut them and fit the speaker units into plagiarized
Rondo enclosures. We are sorry about this and
share the chagrin of the original collectors
of those items (www.6moons.com/rondo.html).
Rondo
was the sum of our observations, experience,
and research, the bottomline of years' worth
of building enclosures in different types of
wood, thickness and volume with one and the
same speaker unit. Arriving at vastly different
results by changing just a few, often minute
parameters has been a profound experience.
We
are immensely grateful to Prof. Dr. Nico Schalz,
professor of musicology at the Bremen Conservatory,
who was the first to privately give this speaker
intense attention, praise, and feedback. (www.auditorium23.de/Nico.html,
only in German language).
We
couldn't come to a better conclusion than our
French representative in Paris, Alain Choukroun:
"Rondo, c'est poesie".
For
further reading, please see the review about
Rondo in Image-HiFi
3/2000 by Roland Kraft
and
by Thierry Soveaux in Diapason
Juli/August 2002
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