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Fonel makes a very complete line of products including active speakers. Explain this focus and your fondness/experience of/with hybrid valve circuits.
Active speakers enjoy unconditional advantages over common passive designs. The first one is the absence of the usual crossover between amplifier and loudspeakers. Such crossovers contain inductance coils with ten of meters of wires, big capacitors and resistors. All of these parts suffer large nonlinearities and signal losses. The same tens of meters of coiled wire also offset all user efforts in the selection of quality external speaker cables. Inductors are highly sensitive to various EMI to boot. The accuracy of our active phase-linear crossovers is at least 1000 times higher by comparison. In active speakers the level of nonlinearity and thermal distortion decreases significantly. In active speakers the differences between drive units is lower and the resultant sound is cleaner and more precise. In an ideal acoustic system all drivers should be perfectly matched but in passive speakers with passive networks and various drivers this is almost impossible. Active speakers meanwhile can achieve proper driver integration for real.
Active speakers also provide the opportunity for response matching and adjustments to room and individual listener. In our active speakers each channel runs its own amplifiers and each of those amps is executed to perfectly match the particular pass band of its assigned driver. Such purpose-designed amplification for each drive unit is essential to reach the full capabilities of a loudspeaker and to maximize its accuracy.
It also allows the customer to build a complete system with just two components - the active speakers and a CD player with integral volume control. Traditional amplifiers are for people who already own passive speakers. For such amplifiers to sound excellent and be reasonably priced is almost impossible.
Dr. S. Buchakchiysky
The application of hybrid circuits bestows essential advantages over traditional solutions and better performance as a result. The key advantages are increased signal transmission speed with lower distortion, expanded dynamic range, very good bass control due to low-impedance output stages and architectures without high global feedback. The market of course is very competitive but components with truly advanced sound are practically absent. That's only our rather subjective opinion but we do believe that our designs are without peer at their price points. High End 2011 in München confirmed our position. We attended as mere visitors and were surprised that where 2 years ago exhibits with good sound existed, this year we could not find any. Instead we saw too many huge and unnecessarily complex systems with abnormal prices.
For Fonel to become a recognized well-known global brand takes time of course. We believe that it will happen eventually because there is a sufficient number of fans of top-quality sound who look for good components at reasonable pricing but cannot find them. Fonel gear has excellent sound and is capable of bringing to live the emotional textures encoded in recorded music. We constantly strive to improve upon that quality.
Personally I have been involved in many different projects at once. One of those was a game development which I oversaw and managed in its entirety. The first part was published in 2004 as Soldiers: Heroes of WWII and after several weeks of its release became a best seller. The successors were Faces of War (2006) and Men of War (2009). This project was highly successful. Subsequently however I put all my attention on high-end audio. That's what my heart prefers. So I first saw the game development project from concept to success and now I captain Fonel's high-end audio project to the same ends.
Andrew 'the fly', head of production
W. White, strategist and planner
V. Kaplun, lead engineer
With component and company background handled for the occasion, we'll now cover sonics for the review model.
