Auditorium
23
Background
information
Auditorium
23 was not founded, in the common sense of the
word. Rather, it playfully came into being through
our enjoyment of music in the early 80s. Soon
this love of music led us to France, where we
encountered people who'd gained a certain notoriety
by following a path entirely different from
the rest of the world: L'Audiophile. At a time
when the power output of a transistor amplifier
was as prestigious and coveted as horsepower
is with sports cars, L'Audiophile boldly moved
against the mainstream. They unearthed historical
tube amplifiers with a mere 3-5 Watts output,
connected them to sensitive horn speakers and
had the audacity to present this to an amazed
public. The results struck us: Here, we experienced
a quality of music reproduction that modern
components had so far denied us. The annual
presentations which L'Audiophile held in small
movie theatres are now legendary, their cult
status secured.
We
understood that this could be our only way.
What we had experienced at L'Audiophile's shed
a critical light on so-called technical progress
and made us look back. On our journey into the
past we learned a lot: It became evident just
how much had been sacrificed on the altar of
cost-efficient production, of analytical measuring
and of blind trust in the alleged advantages
of modern materials.
But
to say so was considered heresy. Consequently
our road in Germany was hard, and we polarized
the field from the beginning. The first 300B
amplifiers, efficient loudspeakers of Triangle,
Roiene, Altec, Vitavox and WE, a mass record
player with magnetic bearing of Laboratoire
Verdier, Ken Shindo's tube amplifiers in Europe...
all of these things came too soon for the German
market when we set out in the early 80s.
Times
have changed since then. The market share of
Triode amps keeps growing, and tubes are back
in production. Efficient speakers are being
developed left and right, horn speakers are
in vogue again. Mass record players with or
without magnetic bearing are in, lightweight
record players, on the other hand, are almost
extinct. By looking forwards with eyes attuned
to the past, many people have begun to collect
historical hi-fi gear, and are amazed by the
new worlds of sound they encounter. People start
to re-evaluate things almost forgotten. Reissues
by Macintosh, Marantz and Quad are being launched
and lauded as if they'd never disappeared from
the market.
However,
a few companies like L'Audiophile with its authors
Jean Hiraga and Philippe Viboud, and Uesugi,
Eltus, Kondo, and Shindo in Japan didn't have
to make this laborious, retroactive comeback:
They hadn't veered off course in the first place,
always using small output (Triode Watts) and
large speakers like Onken, Altec, JBL, Siemens,
and WE to enjoy music to the fullest.
Sadly,
the chances to obtain good pairs of authentic
old speaker units diminished with time, while
the production quality of later models didn't
maintain previous standards for cost reasons
or the altered requirements of modern amps.
Hence, speakers became the problem. Auditorium
23 concepts like Latour, Marsannay (best
sound of the High End 95 in Stereophile)
and Morgane each were unique designs created
from our historical stock of Altec, Siemens,
and Western Electric and thus limited. Thanks
to Bernard Salabert and his company PHY-HP who
developed a 21 cm full range and a 30 cm wide
range, we can now construct speakers on a par
with historical models, even surpass them at
times. The H21LB15 proved the absolute equivalent
of the legendary WE 755 wide range unit. "Not
a single present-day speaker can compare to
H21LB15 - the only competition comes from the
best units of the 40s and 50s," wrote Jean
Marie Piel in one of his editorials in DIAPASON.
With
another master in his field, Ken Shindo, we
made further forays into old knowledge, sharing
his grasp of the use of energy. The magic didn't
reside in comprehensive, allround dampening;
it didn't lie in "deaf" wood kept
from vibrating; neither was it found in sandfilled
soundwalls nor in lead-mantled cabinets. We
learned to appreciate a speaker cabinet as a
supporting body of tone, similar to the corpus
of a musical instrument.
Bearing
this in mind, we developed speakers like Provence,
Appassionata and Rondo. Appassionata was probably
the first speaker made of special panels normally
used for the sound floor of pianos, and ?Rondo?
consequently acted upon the idea of the speaker
cabinet as sound body. It made careful use of
arising energy instead of eliminating it.
Often
we would embark upon paths unknown, and each
of these projects could have led us astray.
Sometimes, they did, while being remunerative
and rewarding in other ways. They gained us
something invaluable, though: experience. No
compendium in speaker building, no taken for
granted parameters could have replaced the practical
application of seemingly rogue ideas.
When
people talk about "musical speakers"
today, hinting at thin, resonating enclosures,
they tend to neglect the fact that such a concept
calls for congenial speaker units. Frankly,
most units currently found on the market aren't
up for the challenge. The construction of a
heavy, rigid enclosure with Medite, chipboard
or similar materials, layered with carpet sheeting
or leadplate is much easier than that of a light,
reverberating soundbody of carefully planned
proportions, stabilized in exactly the right
spots. And just that final touch of veneer to
the surface might have tipped the balance again.
Our
new approach to theories of speaker building
was further engendered by working with original
old Western Electric loudspeaker enclosures.
Initially, we had purchased them in order to
learn more about the characteristics of vintage
speakers. While co-operating with L'Audiophile
for some of our clients we had built "Voice
of the Theatre" enclosures strictly according
to guidelines in "L'Audiophile" magazine,
issue #38. We found, however, that these rigidly
constructed cabinets failed to generate the
same musical credibility which emanated from
the lighter, venerable originals of the "golden
era."
Our
first move to introduce PHY speakers in Germany
was the development of a variety of enclosures
for the kit market, using the PHY H21LB15 as
the company's very first and (then) only unit.
The first finished speaker concept turned out
to be Provence, born in a vacation mood while
staying with friends in the South of France.
It was our first finished speaker realisation
in open baffle manner, to be presented to the
public at Frankfurt's HighEnd Show 1997.
We still fondly recall the surprise on our visitors'
faces whenever they stepped around to inspect
the speakers from the back: Whatever they expected
to find, it certainly wasn't this open, undamped
box.
The following pages show the chronology of our
speaker concepts around the PHY 21 cm unit which
has provided us so much inspiration. Without
effort, these speakers showcase the abilities
and characters of amplifiers as well as the
quality of the signal coming from the front
end.
Provence
RA 605
Appassionata
Rondo
SoloVox
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