7/28/2023 0 Comments Audionote speakerThe cable itself, inside and out, is Audio Note's best copper Litz, sold separately under the model name Lexus XL ($226/meter pair, less termination). The speakers themselves are hardwired, with separate meter-long cable pairs for the woofer and tweeter, terminated with Audio Note silver banana plugs (footnote 2). Peter Qvortrup builds this model's crossovers into individual outboard enclosures (alloy chassis and cover, acrylic front panel), not only to protect them from the microphonic effects of speaker vibrations but to accommodate the sheer physical size of Audio Note's upmarket paper-in-oil capacitors. Some electrical padding is used in the crossover for level matching-Qvortrup suggests that the woofer's theoretical maximum sensitivity is in the neighborhood of 100dB-and the overall system sensitivity is stated as a very high 98dB.Ī lot of what makes the Lexus Signature special lies outside of the box-literally. Audio Note's silver wire is also used for the voice coil of the 8" paper woofer, manufactured in Norway by SEAS and also appearing here in a high-efficiency configuration. The AN-E Lexus Signature's 1" tweeter is a special high-efficiency type, with an impregnated-fabric dome and a voice-coil wound from silver wire that Audio Note supplies to the tweeter's manufacturer, Tonegen/Foster of Japan. Its rear-firing port is 5" long and 2.5" in diameter, and although I wasn't able to pry apart the review samples and see for myself, a photo supplied by Audio Note's US distributor, Triode & Co., shows the use of some strategically placed hardwood braces. That brings us to the AN-E Lexus Signature, whose cabinet is made entirely from Russian birch plywood (as opposed to the particleboard of its antecedents). I suppose the Type E would have been a pretty decent mate for some of those low-power tube amps that didn't yet exist (footnote 1).īut over the years, Peter Qvortrup worked to refine the E formula, in an effort to wring even greater efficiency-among other things-from the very same box. According to a spec sheet from 1984, it had an electrical sensitivity of 90dB and a nominal impedance of 8 ohms. The original Snell Type E was a bass-reflex design with a 1" soft-dome tweeter and an 8" paper woofer. Thus, more than two decades after his death, you can still acquire Peter Snell's finest "bookshelf" loudspeakers, the ensuing evolution of which may be in keeping with their designer's intentions. After that, Qvortrup took the only route left: He sought and obtained permission to continue building Js, Ks, and Es on his own, crediting the original designs to Snell and selling the finished products under his own label. He bought up all the remaining stock of Snell Js, Ks, and Es, and when they were gone, he bought the remaining unfilled cabinets, too. That left Qvortrup-who would soon team up with Hiroyasu Kondo to sell products under the Audio Note name-in a bit of a jam. Almost immediately, Voecks began to take Snell's product line in a direction that had nothing whatsoever to do with Peter Snell's original work, as far as Peter Qvortrup was concerned. As Snell's distributor, Qvortrup enjoyed particular success with three relatively efficient models: the Snell Type J, Type K, and Type E.Įverything went swimmingly until fall 1984, when Peter Snell dropped dead on the factory floor-and his surviving business partners hired Canadian designer Kevin Voecks, late of Mirage, to take his place. Qvortrup admired Peter Snell's design innovations-not only were their cabinets precisely sized and shaped to support a particular range of frequencies, but Snell Acoustics was among the first companies to hand-match every crossover component to its own unique set of drivers. Audio Note's involvement in the loudspeaker world dates to the early 1980s, when audio maven Peter Qvortrup represented the Snell Acoustics line throughout Europe. So it goes with Audio Note's latest, the AN-E Lexus Signature, which takes the company's basic E-size loudspeaker-at just under 70 liters, the largest of Audio Note's cabinet sizes-and refines it in a number of subtle and mostly invisible ways.īefore tackling the specifics, some history is in order. What you wouldn't expect is how they go about doing it, since none of the 20-odd models in their speaker line appears to be much more than a plain-Jane two-way box, with nary a horn or whizzer in sight. Given Audio Note's early dominance of the low-power scene, you'd expect any loudspeaker from them to be a high-efficiency design, and you'd be right.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |