The brand new ($21,500.00) JansZen 9.5 loudspeaker is modeled after Arthur A. Janszen’s famed KLH Nine, but modernized by his son, David Janszen, with vastly improved performance and practicality along with an updated look.
The result is a loudspeaker that can make you doubt the sound is coming from speakers, regardless of the music you are listening to.
Deep, spacious, natural, nuanced, inspiring reproduction of live acoustic instruments and voice are on tap, yet with plenty of dynamics and punch to reproduce orchestral crescendos, live rock, house, or really any bombastically forceful music you can name.
Woofing. Each speaker system has six 8”, ceramic cone woofers operating open baffle. They’re exceptionally light, responsive, and linear. They produce absolutely natural and impactful bass that will have you checking your navel for unintended consequences.
Tweeting. Since the electrostatic panel crosses over to the woofers at only 200 Hz, it handles most of the audio spectrum.
The panel is 8” wide and 48” tall. It’s configured as a synthetic aperture line array, which is truly unique. What this means is that it is divided into narrow vertical stripes — five of them in this first transducer.
The central segment gets the straight signal, with sequential, analog time delays to each pair of flanking segments. This makes the entire 8” wide array have dispersion similar to a merely 1.2” wide strip — ±20° at 10 kHz — yet it produces much higher SPL than a 1.2″ wide strip.
Line array configuration. With woofers and the electrostatic being line arrays, the tonality is invariant with listening height, there’s no floor bounce dip, and when listening from off axis, the sound from the farther speaker doesn’t get much quieter as it does from point sources, so the image doesn’t collapse onto the nearer speaker.
Specifications
- Driver complement: one 8” x 48”, individually hand made, synthetic aperture, electrostatic line array, and six 8” ceramic cone woofers per loudspeaker
- Recommended amplifier power rating: 80W – 500W/channel into 8 Ohms
- Impedance: 5 Ohms nominal, 4 Ohms minimum
- Sensitivity: 82 dB/1W/1m (pink noise)
- Maximum SPL: 110 dB in room in stereo at a 2m listening position, with 6 dB headroom available for transients
- Size: 6′ high x 2′ wide x 3″ thick
- Weight: 90 lb per loudspeaker
- Electrostatic panel back wave is partially absorbed to avoid excessive room excitation and conserve image focus
- Electrostatic panel sensitivity is adjustable downward by up to 6 dB for bass-shy or bright rooms
- Construction: Solid hardwood frame (choice of hard maple, cherry, and walnut) with high grade corner joinery, plywood baffles, hard maple base with choice of natural poly finish or post catalyzed paint that’s scratch resistant and impervious to solvents, powder coated steel base plate, open weave linen grill cloth, hard anodized, perforated aluminum rear grill, power coated steel electronics enclosure.
- Designed and hand made in the USA
- Price (introductory launch, sold and shipped direct): $21,500/pair