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Matching Speakers & Building Everything

212.42.175.73

Posted by Peter Qvortrup on August 10, 2007 at 08:11:38

In Reply to: RE: Peter Van Wellinsward (sp?) of Stereophile owns the AN E... posted by limono on August 7, 2007 at 22:32:52:

Dear Limono,

Let me say that I agree with you that blindly following anything is not a good concept, one should always keep one's critical faculties in tact and in place.

As far as making "the best of everything" is concerned, I think it is important to note that this project, if you will, has sofar taken over 30 years of my life and coming up to 20 of Andy Grove's, so nothing has been achieved over night, but is the result of a great deal of hard work and dedication, whether the end results are worthwhile in an absolute only really time will tell, but so far so good, I suppose.

The processes that make the speakers are industrialised, using proprietary computer programs, which have also developed over many years.

As far as the manufacture and sound of the speaker kits versus the finished speakers is concerned here is what I say on the web site, I quote,

"Will my kit be an exact equivalent of the finished AN-E/LX?

No, it will be close provided the cabinet is made with fine tolerances and from the right grade of Baltic birch plywood, BUT it is important to appreciate that a finished AN-E is always likely to be better that any equivalent kit version, no matter which one, as the drivers we use in the kits have a slightly wider "spread" in performance than the ones used in the finished products, basically the kits get the drivers which cannot be matched within the very tight criteria used in our finished products.

Also we do not spend anywhere near the amount of time setting up the Kit speaker's driver - crossover matching, we allow a tolerance on the finished products of 0.2dB plus or minus, in the kits this is increased to 0.6dB plus or minus, mind you this is still several dB better than anything done by other manufacturers, but it is audible in the overall performance of the speakers, if you do a direct comparison on very good equipment

This and the fact that it is necessary to rematch the driver - crossovers to the actual cabinets when assembled to maintain the tightest possible match, this is not possible for any hobbyist building a kit and means that a kit can never get close to the consistency of a finished product.

Again this does not necessarily mean that a Kit 03 would not be as good as or even better than a standard AN-E/SPe provided you can make a cabinet that is on par with our, which I doubt you can, as the production methods used have takes years to develop and there is much we do not disclose, but is it possible to get quite close if close tolerances are achieved."

Quote ends.

So, as you can see there are material differences between the finished products and the kits, and they do matter sonically, which is fairly easy to demonstrate if they are side by side, so in that sense you get what you pay for.

Sincerely,
Peter Qvortrup

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