The full story. To the TNT tracker email, Mads had added "sent from Mårten AB with whom we have some cooperation but not on speaker design". The next email would have the added tech info I'd asked for. While awaiting its arrival, I checked out US importer Mark Sossa's catalogue. Beside Qln, I saw the brands Aqua Hifi, Innuos, LinnenberG, Qualiton, Rethm, Clones, Gigawatt and Nasotech - all high performance and quite off the beaten path with its High Street shops. But with our Aqua Formula DAC and LinnenberG Liszt monos, I could actually assemble a full WellPleased AV system. Now back to Mads for the whole tech. "Our core design philosophy is that only the driver should create sound. So we strive to keep the level of parts influence in the signal path to a minimum because we have come to understand and respect how, even at small levels, all parts in the audio chain affect the final result at both a micro and macro level. However, one fundamental part is of utmost importance: cabinet design. First off, the drivers should be acoustically in phase. This is achieved with an angled time-aligned baffle. All of the area around a driver affects the sound so we utilize a truncated pyramid shape to minimize the area around the tweeter. This combined with the felt around it reduces the baffle's effect on the tweeter's dispersion. The rounded baffle edges minimize edge reflections. With the truncated pyramid shape, we also avoid the issue of standing waves within the cabinet. This functional design offers a fundamental advantage and foundation for optimal driver performance to further mitigate the cabinet's influence on the sound.
"Next, a speaker cabinet should be rigid, stiff and quiet. Achieving this is not as easy as one may think. On paper most the stiff rigid materials have low internal damping and materials with high internal damping are too soft for speaker cabinet design. What is normally done to get around this is using hard materials and applying damping materials such as bitumen or similar liners inside the cabinet. This works but is not the most effective solution. We address this issue with a sandwich design—Q-board®—where the damping material is placed inside the board which the cabinet is built from. Vibrations are hereby optimally damped and subdued, with noise substantially reduced. By first building the cabinet to be heavy and rigid, we reduce the initial amount of structural resonance. By then utilising Q-board® which converts vibrations into heat, remaining vibrations are absorbed far more effectively than with any other material. The first Qln speaker was based on this cabinet design. It was called the Qln One and introduced in 1980. Q-board® came by 1984. For drivers, the Qln Signature S3 uses a specially developed 7" Kevlar woofer with a 19mm long voice coil which allows long linear movement. The voice coil is made from Hex-formed pure copper wire. This Hex-formed wire minimizes losses by increasing the number of wire turns inside the magnetic gap. Copper sounds better than copper-clad aluminium, hence no manufacturer bases speaker-cable design on aluminium as a conductor. We use a T-shaped pole piece which creates a symmetrical magnet pattern on both sides of the magnetic gap. This also creates a symmetrical magnet pattern outside the gap."
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