Klinger Favre Audio writes: “In our quest of « full size sound » we are achieving a new model of large speakers : the Studio 38. We have been using MTM layout for a long time all ready. And as we know how to handle it quite well, we’ve used it in our New Studio 38, to accomplish a sophisticated sound system with a pure design, adopting the style of the smaller Studio Models (as Studio 20 and Studio 30) made of a central horn surrounded by 2 woofers.”
“This project has been done and undone for more than 40 years (attached, a few pictures testifying this article…) Facing allways the same difficulty : how to get a loudspeaker heavy enough to play sub bass, and light enough to reach the crossover frequency needed to have it working with a 2 inches compression drive ?
In 1982 allready, Jean-Jacques had made a system inpired by Onken System, with an Altec 416B boomer and a JBL 2441 compression driver, but the cross over was very tricky.
The option of adding an intermediary way led him to realize in the 90’s 2000’s, nice (and quite crazy) 3,4,5,6 and 7 way-systems ! Those were very ambitious and sounded quite well ! On the other hands, not many people could afford this kind of equipment neither could they host it in their living room.
Continuing our research, we’ve tried all the best available woofers, until we decided to build our own. In 2005, Santa Claus made us a wonderfull gift : he brought us Francis Ibre, a genius electro-acoustician who designed for us an extremely clever driver, that would totally free from classical woofers parameters issues. Our ideal 38cm woofer was born. Born but not finished…It took us about 10 extra years and many prototypes, until we met Klement (from Kartesian) who took over the project and brought it to its ultimate achievement.
Besides other specs, our 38cm woofer is dismountables, that could let us methodically variate the parameters one by one, without wasting anything.
This time, we have it : KF woofer plays as low as the lowest sub woofers, and even higher than needed.
Now, the question of the compression driver remains. Which one should we use ?
In the old times, at the dawn of talking pictures, compression drivers were meant fill entire theater rooms with very week power amplifiers. For that reason efficiency was the main parameter, disadvantaging other aspectssuch as bandwitdth and distorsion.
For some reason, compression drivers builder still self-impose efficiency as the main objective, while it is pointless in our configuration.
Free from this restraint we could modify the membrane to throat ratio, the membrane to phase-piece distance, in order to create our own large bandwidth and super low distortion compression driver… that is anyway still to efficient for our use.
One century of technical progress, new composite materials, 3D printing, and neodyme magnets highly helped us to elaborate this speaker.
Our wood workshop was also a major ally in the Studio 38 elaboration: we could build as many boxes as needed, for sound, and for design exploration .
The development of our Studio 38 is still in progress but our visitors can allready listen to a very since prototype in Saint-Dié. Sorry for DSP and FIR, but our Studio 38 sounds better with our high-quality components passive filters. Thought, a very particular and inovative active version is being studied. There is still a lot of work to do, but we think this KF flagship will be released over the year 2020.
