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Artison Turns To Crowd Funding To Promote Tiny High-Performance Sub

New York – Speaker maker Artison is launching first crowd-funding campaign not just to raise money to build and market a tiny high-performance DSP subwoofer but also to promote the product “to the average person who will never see or hear about it,” said Artison president Cary Christie.

Artison’s first campaign, launching through Kickstarter, will “create demand for dealers,” he told TWICE. The Minden, Nev.-based company could turn to crowd funding again to launch other audio industry firsts, he said.

Through its first Kickstarter campaign, the company will launch its first freestanding subwoofer in years – the 300-watt Nano 1, promoted as the world’s smallest high-performance subwoofer. It features dual active 6.5-inch long-throw aluminum drivers on opposing sides to deliver “significant volume” down to 35Hz in an extruded-aluminum cabinet measuring only 7.5 x 8 x 9 inches, including feet and grille, Christie said. It will be available late in the fourth quarter or early in the first at $899 MAP, including an embedded frequency-hopping wireless receiver. A compatible wireless transmitter will be available at $99 MAP.

Sometime in 2015, the company will launch Nano 2 and 3 subs, which will incorporate the same dual-driver design with dual active 8- and 10-inch drivers, respectively. They will be only slightly larger than the Nano 1, Christie said.

No other company offers a subwoofer with dual back-to-back active drivers firing in opposing directions to cancel reactive forces and thus eliminate cabinet vibrations, he said. By eliminating the vibrations, the subwoofer delivers more natural sound and more sonic energy into a room rather than wasting some of that energy on creating cabinet vibrations, he said. “You can put a wine glass on top and not see any ripples,” he said.

“The Nano 1 is the culmination of everything I know about subwoofers,” said Christie, an audio-industry veteran who co-founded Infinity Systems in 1968, then worked for Recoton’s Acoustic Research division in the 1990s and started Artison in 2003. He called it “the most technologically advanced freestanding subwoofer in the market.”

Because the Nano is so small, enthusiasts will be able to more easily make room for two subs in a room to eliminate room modes and thus deliver a high level of uniform response throughout a room, he said.

To integrate with a sound system, the Nano features a 60-160Hz low-pass filter, 0-180-degree phase control, choice of 12dB or 18dB per octave crossover slope, high- and low-level inputs, signal-sensing input, and 12-volt trigger and hardwired IR input for custom integrators.

Users can simultaneously hook up the high- and low-level inputs if they want to connect two separate audio systems, one for music and one for home theater, as is often done in Europe, Christie noted.

The sub also comes with its own IR remote and front-panel LEDs that indicate volume level and choice of music or movie modes.

Christie acknowledged the importance of crowd-funding campaigns by saying that Pebble, the smartwatch maker, probably wouldn’t have existed without Kickstarter’s exposure. Kickstarter generates 6 million views per month for all of the products that it promotes on Kickstarter.com, he said. “It’s a good way to introduce a product to the world,” and its importance has grown because banks are doing a lot less lending to business, he said. Venture-capital companies “want a quick and easy hit and aren’t interested in the business,” he noted.

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