Wood + Wires Documentary by Ben Rupp (2018):
(Click to play video)
The Message
“Set up your stereo and dance, listen seriously, or just sit back in your favorite chair and enjoy the calm ambiance. Find yourself happily enjoying the music.
Through the lens of an audio/music historian, I’ve carefully sought out the core engineering lessons from each major era of audio technology. Specifically, I would consider my audio design approach to be a synthesis of the two “golden eras” in audio history.
1930’s early American high-efficiency speaker designs now meets the practicality of the 1970’s and 80’s miniaturization era of Japanese audio design.
I come from the “ultra-fi” scene of international DIYers. Every detail inside a Blumenstein loudspeaker or audio cable is made in my own style.
I have incorporated acoustic instrument building techniques in ways that are specifically tailored for high-efficiency speaker cabinets responsive enough for the kinds of challenging music made in the 21st century and beyond.
Form follows function. I have chosen materials that are kept as close to the way they are found in nature to assure maximum longevity of my speakers’ groundbreaking performance - especially in terms of detail retrieval.
Blumenstein Audio’s ongoing independent research into acoustics is a survey of both digital simulation programs as well as numerous real world acoustic environments. I weigh both subjective and objective measurements in order to find the truth.
Every day production details are rounded out with a variety of traditional acoustic instrument building techniques such as faceted solid wood internal braces similar to a guitar, traditional (pre-industrial style) wood joinery and traditional wood finish products.
Over the past 20 years, I’ve shipped my gear to music appreciators on every continent (Antarctica included). My audio designs stand apart in solidarity from the mass techno-mill of endless hype.
Traditionally wired speaker designs are obvious to use and timelessly simple in aesthetic and long term maintenance.
The goal of my gear is to give back to you over the long haul. With basic care, the speakers and audio accessories you’ve purchased from me are going to bring musical enjoyment to your household for generations. Enjoy! ”
Design Philosophy
Blumenstein Audio = minimalist design + maximum sound quality.
True point source speakers in anti-resonant cabinetry facilitates the authentic reproduction of spacial cues found in music.
The new musical information many of our clientele experience is due to an uninterrupted frequency range coupled with smooth frequency response often comes as a surprise to long time musicians, audiophiles, and single driver afficionados, but we promise you - this information was supposed to be there all along.
We’ve gotten a little closer to the source by optimizing this simplest, earliest type of loudspeaker technology (wide banders/single drivers) with some of the modern materials and machine tooling that are available to loudspeaker manufacturers today.
Disambiguation: single driver ≈ full range driver ≈ wide band driver = point source speaker ≠ coaxial drivers.
Typical multi driver type speakers, even coaxial drivers like Tannoy, KEF, Altec, with traditional (~2khz) crossover points in the midrange, ruin some of the cohesiveness and magic in the original signal.
Wide band drivers, on the other hand, send all 8 octaves of primary musical information to a single voice coil which is connected to a variety of cones, whizzers and dust caps which have “mechanical crossovers” between them. These are inherently much more finely tuned and subtle designs than the vast majority of other driver types. The remaining two octaves at the extremes of the audible spectrum are reproduced by an optional subwoofer or supertweeter.
Class D subwoofer amplifiers have improved in recent years and are now viable to control heavier cone car audio type drivers to be fast enough to keep up with the delicate paper cone wide band speakers we’ve already developed, sharing the same internal bracing architecture we iteratively developed for the past 20 years, together opening the door to precisely tunable point source full frequency response in small or large spaces - but from cabinets that are smaller than ever before.
High efficiency single driver speakers are compatible with all types of amplifiers because they place the easiest load possible on the amplifier outputs, being a single voice coil.
What sets Blumenstein Audio products apart?
Our wide band driver based speakers have been designed in collaboration with feedback from clientele on all seven continents. Over the past 20 years, we have honed in on peoples’ needs and distilled this collective wisdom in the form of our main production speaker designs - the Orca, Marlin, Triton, Octopus, and Uni, as well as our lineup of active and passive subwoofers. Our primary goal is to be making peoples’ final speaker systems - especially for our clientele that are difficult to please from a sound quality standpoint.
We do not use MDF or particle board (typical speaker enclosure wood). MDF is technically wood, but contains a significant amount of glue in order to hold all those little shredded wood particles back together. MDF is also poor in humid environments because it will absorb water out of the atmosphere and expand, causing structural failure of the cabinet joinery. All in all, MDF does not have sufficient strength or longevity to be used as a highest quality speaker enclosure material, but many manufacturers keep using it because it is cheap and machines like foam.
Observing the proliferation of cheap materials in the audio industry, it is likely that the very science of acoustics is tainted by the rampant use of MDF and particle board in mass market and DIY speaker enclosures, often without a second thought.
Instead we follow a path set forth hundreds of years ago by luthiers (stringed instrument makers). We use only lumber core hardwood plywoods for the speaker enclosure walls, braced by solid wood internal braces, in order to attain a level of cabinet wall strength that is unparalleled in the vast majority of the speaker industry.
Strength to weight ratio is what creates the most ideal speaker cabinet acoustics. Our main goal is to allow the delicate paper speaker cone to do all the shaking. Cabinet walls are thickened and then braced to the point that they do not resonate at low frequencies, which would muddy the signal.
Our enclosure walls are damped minimally - acoustically and mechanically, in order to retain the efficiency of a speaker cabinet that relies on the overall strength of the enclosure to resolve unwanted resonance.
Lumber core plywoods are the ideal material for speaker enclosures because the axis of strength is alternated for each layer of wood used during the construction of the plywood (simultaneously creating the stylish lines in the end grain of our Birch enclosures). This alternating grain also creates strength across the entire span of each wall in the enclosure. MDF and other wood particle composites are actually quite reactive to acoustic input because they lack any axial strength, having essentially random grain direction.
Blumenstein speakers are made of just wood, glue, and finish. We use only the finest woods we can source, the strongest glue on the market, and the most traditional wood polishing and finishing processes available. The entire recipe of design and materials produces a totally natural sound—free from typical mass market speaker anomalies such as frequency, phase, dynamic, and impulse response.
For over 18 years, every step of production including pattern making has been done with hand tools or hand operated power tools.
Delicate, low power voice coils means a thinner voice coil wire and therefore lighter weight cone structure, making detail retrieval easier at low power inputs.
We have only ever made full range single driver type speakers (commercially). We are specialists in this niche field because we truly love what full range drivers have to offer both the casual and serious music appreciator as well as musicians during the mixing and mastering process.
You can find any musical experience you like within our tidy minimalist product range that expands exponentially in terms of speaker size. We make speakers as lightweight as 4 lbs each (Orca TT) and as heavy as 55 lbs each (Octopus TT)
Over time, our designs have become smaller and simpler in appearance, yet contain an intricate network of internal bracing and specific panel thicknessing in order to describe a more complex sound, resolve detail effortlessly, and communicate delicate musical nuances to the listener like never before from such compact speaker cabinets.
These highly evolved full-range speaker and subwoofer cabinet designs prove that the presentation of far larger loudspeakers can indeed come from compact but higher quality wooden speaker enclosures with full range drivers.
Ultra long product lifecycle. Our designs are “right to repair.” Using off the shelf drivers whenever possible. Assuring availability of replacement parts for generations.
Single drivers + Single Ended Triodes = next level.
Devotees to the traditional “four pin” low power Single Ended Triode (SET) vacuum tube amplifiers (like the 45, 2A3, and 300B) now have an option for compact, beautiful wide band speakers that dovetail into daily life.
The earliest types of SET amplifiers were also around at the same time as the invention of the paper cone wide band speaker in the 1929.
Paper cone wide band speaker technology, at nearly 100 years old, stands out from the sea of other speaker technologies as the only one that has had time to fully mature as an artform unto itself in tandem with slowly evolving SET amplifier design.
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