Solus/Clemens, Atlantic Present Big Bass Design
By Joseph Palenchar -- TWICE, 9/10/2009
ATLANTA — A new speaker-cabinet design will deliver targeted bass output with smaller drivers in 50 percent smaller cabinets, according to speaker suppliers Solus/Clements and Atlantic Technology.
The design will also potentially reduce manufacturing costs for suppliers, the companies said.
Atlantic plans to demonstrate a proof-of-concept speaker during CEDIA Expo this week.
Solus/Clements invented the design, called H-PAS (Hybrid Pressure Acceleration System). Atlantic will license the design to other companies and collaborate on additional design development with Solus/Clements.
For it demo, Atlantic will pack two 4.5-inch drivers in an enclosure of about 1.4 cubic feet to produce bass that extends to 29 Hz (-3dB), the company said. The speaker's sound pressure level will exceed 105dB with harmonic distortion at less than 3 percent. “Conventionally designed loudspeaker systems would require bass drivers of at least triple the size in an enclosure at least twice as large to produce comparable performance,” the company said.
Atlantic will ship its first H-PAS product, the H-PAS-1 floorstanding speaker, in the fourth quarter. Solus/Clements will deliver a tower and bookshelf model early next year.
The completely passive patent-pending design requires no active electronics and no special drivers, and it's compatible with conventional amplifiers and A/V receivers, Atlantic said. H-PAS combines elements of bass-reflex, inverse-horn and transmission-line cabinet design, the company explained. The designs “are cascaded one to another to pressurize and accelerate low frequencies,” and the audio signal is passed through a passive resonance/harmonic distortion line filter, Atlantic continued.
“This new system,” Atlantic president Peter Tribeman contended, “is the first ever to break the famous iron law of loudspeaker design.” That law, he said, states that among three major goals of speaker design — deep bass extension, a compact enclosure and good efficiency — speaker designers must chose two at the expense of the third.
H-PAS “has applications in almost every corner of the loudspeaker business,” he added.
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