PEI330Ci

This is one of my views into the car audio crystal ball. It is in no way attached to statements or people associated with Focal America, or it’s agents.

All of what is below is available to the general public; you just have to know where to look, and how to read between the lines.

A while ago, I posted a statement with regard to Focal France limiting their involvement in the home DIY market. At that time, all that happened was the links to drivers listed on the Focal France website went dead. Sure, dead links appear from time to time, but this was a selective event. The links to ONLY the DIY drivers were dead, and all the car audio driver links were still live. (Archives included) I contacted a couple of North American distributors, and they subtly suggested that raw driver selection would be reduced, but not eliminated. This got me hunting for more information. What I found, was that the company was shifting development and manufacturing resources towards their own complete products; these being home audio speaker systems, and car audio speaker systems. And it made sense, why built parts for your competitors to limit your own sales.

So, what can we, as car audio enthusiasts look forward to?

Here’s my guess…the inevitable trickle down effect from the ultra expensive home speakers. Imagine the same driver and cross over technology employed in the $80K US Utopia Grand, making it’s way into your car. It happens from Racing to Road Cars, so I don’t think this is too far fetched for car audio either.

This is what I believe to be the future of Focal Car Audio:






There’s more…but I’ll save that for later.

Adam

PEI330Ci

Wierd, pictures are working for me here...

That's a valid point Dukk, but I'm refering to the trickle down affect here. It's a technology transfer, same as what resulted in the original car Utopia line. I think what ever has been learned through the Utopia Grand Be process will follow into the car audio program.

Last I checked, B&W has never been in the raw driver market. Focal is the reverse case of this, having to carefully cover it's tracks, while focusing on the B&W business model.

I have in the past tried to obtain a few home drivers, and the situation was the same as what you describe for B&W. Simply put, you send them the broken product, they send you a new peice. There are no extra pieces floating around. (Although I know of a couple, but they are for developement feedback to the manufacturer.)

Here is what I propose we will see:

1.) An updated Utopia line with a new motor structure.

2.) Diaphram core desity and thickness will be improved.

3.) A new tweeter diaphram material. (hmmm what could that be?)

4.) Sealed cross overs. If you are going to take the time to do something really right, you'd better make sure nobody is reverse engineering it. This is very common in high end home audio.

5.) A possible decrease in model selection. I'm thinking a couple of 2 ways, 2 woofer sizes, and an uprated tweeter option.

The down side to this, is a market that isn't very receptive to ultra high end product. As I'm sure a few of you know, there are very few people that will pay for this stuff. And of that group, many will not understand or appreciate it in it's entirety. North American culture is that of pay less and get more. We consume voraciously along these lines in every aspect of our spending. Sure, much of it is marketing, but I think the bulk of this is the result of the culture. There are other parts of the world, where the culture is in pursuit of excellence. This type of culture isn't cost driven the way North America is, it is content driven. And this is the market that this type of product is taking aim at.

SQ Chris

Since we are in the topic of RAW driver's....I do think Canadian manufactured speakers are up there and definetely cost effective. I have taken my Veritas tweet/mid combo apart and considered using them in my olden days in the IASCA circuit. However due to inherent install problems it was also impossible. Anyone has access to Paradigms Reference drivers, Mirage or Paul Barton's ?????

Brandon

iTrader: (1)

I've seen those pic you posted over a year ago now.

Also, I've heard talk of the berillium tweeter coming into the car line at some point in the next couple years. And that's not what I've heard from some car audio "guru" on another forum....I have that on good authority.

I have to agree with your theory Adam. I have been seeing it for quite some time now. Not nessicarily ONE company using home audio technology in a car audio driver. But MANY companies using the same technologies as major home audio drivers use and have been using for quite some time.

The Utopia's being the best example with the W cone technology transfered to a car audio driver.

and these "nipple" tweeters will be the next big thing.....I can't say I'm not looking forward to this "trickle down effect" but you also really need to look at it from a home audio stand point and how it will affect home audio technology

PEI330Ci

Dave, check the price of the 907 Be home speaker. I can't see a 2 way car kit costing more than that, considering the cabinet in home speakers is the most expensive peice of the puzzle.

Cool info about the production process and the prototype progression.

I'm sorry, being overseas alot...I missed your K2P review. Is it available online?

Adam

PEI330Ci

Dave, I thought a more in depth response about the diaphragm core material would be interesting.

A little bit of cone theory first: Speaker cones are not perfectly rigid; they flex and resonate as sound is reproduced. Some cone materials offer extreme rigidity at the expense of resonation. (magnesium comes to mind in the Seas Lotus mids) The rigidity offers the benefit of linear cone movement throughout is its bandwidth; simply put the entire cone surface reproduces all frequencies in its bandwidth. This is not a bad thing, but there are some other forces at work that need to be considered. Not all of the energy radiated by the cone gets transmitted directly into the air for you to hear. Some of it gets transmitted into the cone’s suspension system. This comprises of the cone surround and the spider. Now in a perfect world, these suspensions would be able to “absorb” this energy while simultaneously doing it’s other job; centering the cone and controlling it’s piston-like motion. But this being the real world, some of this energy gets reflected back into the cone, and this causes both resonant nodes on the cone’s surface and cancellation nodes. Both resonant nodes and cancellation nodes interact with the signal being input for the cone to reproduce causing distortion and cone breakup. There are 2 ways to approach this problem. (or a combination of both) The first method is to create a suspension that absorbs as great an amount of energy as possible while allowing linear cone movement. The second method is to dampen the cone. Damping the cone can be done by adding damping material to a rigid cone, or by using a cone material that naturally absorbs resonation. The second method of damping a cone requires a less rigid cone material by nature, and this promotes a slightly flexible cone structure. B&W for example uses a combination of the above on their 800 series midranges. They use a cone design that increases flex and simlutaineously absorbtion properties as you move away from the center of the cone. Then the suspension around the edge of the cone is matched very close in property to the outer edge of the cone material. Sure excursion is limited, but the amount of energy reflected back towards the center of the cone is greatly reduced. (Focal uses a suspension foam on their tweeters for this exact reason, damping properties. The old version of the Focal Ti tweeters such as the T-90ti used a rubber surround suspension, which added a degree of harshness.)

Now how does all the above relate to foam core density and thickness?

The “W” cone uses an extremely stiff base material which of course will resonate on it’s own at higher frequencies. A layer of the fore-mentioned foam is bonded to the base material to add damping properties. Focal can vary the density and thickness of this foam to achieve the best compromise of bandwidth and low distortion. Adding too much foam will increase the cone’s mass and lower the drivers high frequency output. (causes the driver’s response to roll off earlier) The foam density is also variable with the same type of result. The final layer of the “W” sandwich is a fiberglass tissue, which is bonded to the foam. This can also be varied in thickness, and additional layers can be added to further tune the cone. So with all these variables, you can see there are a lot of ways to tune the sound and bandwidth of a cone. Well…there’s one more.

Dave, this is more specifically what I was referring to about the foam core material. It is possible to vary or taper the foam’s thickness and even density from the center to the outer edge of the cone. This would allow the outer edge of the cone to absorb a greater amount of reflected energy from the suspension, while allowing the inner cone area to have a lower mass and higher frequency response.

To date, there are very few 6” midranges that can reach above 3khz with good off axis response and low distortion. Of those, very few can accurately reproduce good dynamic response in the midbass region due the limits of their suspensions. I think it’s possible, using the varying foam core technique, to increase the upper limits of frequency response while maintaining good midbass extension.

Of course…I’ve got a few more ideas, but I’ll save those for later.

Adam