FinkTeam writes: “OK, let’s be honest, the original idea was a completely different one. Last year, we sat down with the team in our office, and we thought about what to do next. Our big flagship to follow the WM4 was still under development, and the sales team asked for a model between KIM and BORG.”
So the development started, and several prototypes have been made, tested and rejected. Whatever we tried – the sound was not good enough, or the price to make it was so high that it would not make sense to produce it. So finally, we decided to skip the model „in-between“. So you could think we ended up frustrated, but it was really not the case. As we looked into every detail of our existing speakers, we found that we did it right.
So we sat together again and discussed what to do next. And what was the result? BORG EPISODE 2. The original BORG has been on the market for five years, launched in 2018 on the High-End in Munich. So what could be improved, using what we have learned in the last five years?
The cabinet stayed almost the same – still the best way we know to produce a speaker with low cabinet resonances. Only the bottom plater got a new shape to tilt the loudspeaker slightly backwards for better image control. The woofer stayed the same and the tweeter only got a small modification for better decoupling from the cabinet.
The big jump for better performance was the crossover – the heart of every loudspeaker. All the experience with great sounding parts we made over the last 5 years went into it. Instead of using resistors to adjust the tweeter level, a transformer is in charge. Such a transformer (Autoformer) has been used in classic BBC speakers, but also in big monitors from JBL or TANNOY. The version in BORG EPISODE 2 is made in Germany and potted in Wax for protection against vibrations. The most important capacitor of the whole speaker – the first one in the tweeter feed – is a special Duelund PP and Silver Hybrid type plus a second MUNDORF capacitor in parallel. A new terminal panel with new settings helps to fine- tune the system..
It is possible to upgrade existing BORG speakers in the factory to the new version.
The retail price for the new version is very similar to the first BORG (29.990€ including 19% VAT) , the upgrade price will be announced later.
About FinkTeam
For those of you who don’t know FinkTeam, it is ‘what it says in the name’. A team of experts in their respective fields, who decided, with Karl-Heinz Fink as their head, to create a brand and to design products that they wished to. Their day jobs, in general, are as specialists working for Fink Audio Consulting, Europe’s leading acoustical consultancy. FinkTeam products are designed combining the skills of the team to allow designs that deliver more than the sum of their parts. Their first commercial product was the WM-4 — a behemoth of a speaker — designed initially as a reference. The WM-4 allowed them to hear small differences in set-up/optimisation of other products they were designing that would have been missed on less revealing loudspeakers. For more information on the team members, visit www.finkteam.com