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A chat with Eist. Gerry: My first foray into making loudspeakers was when, in my teenage years, I rescued a few PA columns from a church renovation dumpster. I experimented with the drivers in various cabinet shapes and sizes mostly made from waste chipboard. It was obvious to me even then that the cabinet design was so important. But at that stage it was craft and making that appealed to me. Electronics were deep science and complete anathema to me. And so a long trawl sometimes painful on the wallet followed through various types of speakers. Looking back now I think that probably just like most of us, my interest in high-quality audio reproduction comes from my love of music. Like many others out there, when I heard high-quality reproduction I wash bitten by the bug. It’s not a new story!


Fran: I've had a long history on the DIY side of audio particularly focused on valve amps and preamps. The DIY slope is a slippery one. Very soon after starting with DIY valve amps, I got hit by the desire to try some low-power and/or SET amps. This led naturally to experiments with horns. The low power rating of at least some SET amps means that you will never get optimal sound with regular speakers. And so I began experimenting with horns. I built lots of varieties culminating in a set of Nagaoka-style folded horns. Despite using fairly cheap drivers—the Fostex FE206—the sound was sublime and extremely dynamic. They did need a little help on the bass end but I was hooked. Here were speakers that gave a near full-range response, matched electrostatics for soundstage and immediacy and would work well with lower powered amps. I lived with these for a few years but eventually my roving ear wanted more. My long-term reference had always been Quad 57s – initially a single pair, later stacked à la famous Mark Levinson 1970s arrangement.
Stacked Quads in a photo from DIY Audio
I started to miss that extra little bass more and more. So I started to experiment again. Around this time I became aware of MarkAudio, a then small company based in Hong Kong and run by Mark Fenlon from the UK. Mark was making a new generation of full-range drivers with impressive specifications and great looks to boot! It didn’t take long before I ordered up a pair and started to experiment. The hifi scene in Ireland is small. Word got around and I soon made contact with Gerry who was also interested in some horns. This has been a marriage made in heaven as both our energies compliment what the other lacks. I had worked on design but my execution was always poor (piano black was not in my vocabulary). Gerry on the other hand produces high-end very high-quality shop-fitting furniture with the skills, materials knowledge and facilities needed for top-notch manufacture.


Gerry: We have excellent craftsmen, CNC machinery and the design resources that allow for accurate modeling. I knew that we could do better than the commercial speakers I'd owned. And I knew the kind of sonic signature I wanted: immediacy, soundstage, realism, great voices and so on. All the good stuff that we all really like!


Fran: So we worked together for almost two years trying various permutations and combinations but always sticking with the MarkAudio drivers and a folded corner-horn design. The Eureka moment came one day when we hooked them up in front of my stacked Quads, put on a test track and both of us looked at each other. These sounded better than the Quads.

Gerry: This was quite the realisation for us. There and then—encouraged by friends etc—we knew that we wanted to make these available to others. At time of writing in early 2014, that's now almost 9 months ago. It has certainly been a challenge gearing up production, doing our best to keep pricing as low as possible whilst ensuring the quality of what we are doing. The business advice we received was to outsource manufacture to China. While I realise that we could probably increase profits by doing that... it just wasn’t what we wanted. Our aim then as now is to make extremely high-quality speakers that will give both us and the owners joy every time they listen to them. We want to make and assemble them ourselves, we want to test and voice each pair to make sure they sound as they should before they leave our workshop. We want to be able to continue our practice of running in the drivers for a full week before fitting them to the cabinets and check and cross-check the build. You get the picture.


Fran: I think when someone commits to owning a pair of horns, they rarely change to other speaker types afterwards. So it is always a considered decision taken in conjunction with the sources and amplification used. Such a customer (or listener if you prefer) usually appreciates the personal touch, honesty and advice. So if you contact us and ask "have you tried your speakers with XX amp" – well, if we haven’t we will tell you. Likewise if you ask "will my amp be suitable". If we know it isn’t we will tell you so even if it costs us the sale.  


Gerry: We chose the name Eist Audio because 'Eist' (pronounced aasht) in the Irish language means listen. We christened the horns Dubh (pronounced duv), a word that means black which we thought nicely reflected both the design aesthetic and that they go deep. I guess some people will want to know more about the design and specs. As mentioned above, they are a compact folded corner horn and no bigger than most of the other conventional floorstanding speakers. We didn't try to reinvent the wheel. We started with a tried and trusted folded horn concept using modern materials and manufacturing technologies and lots of extended testing and listening arrived at this design. I guess we have a unique combination of design theories, electronics and materials in original combinations. The architecture and engineering of the cabinet results from many experiments. Even the flexible bond of baffle to cabinet significantly impacts the sound. In-room frequency response is 45Hz-30kHz ±3dB and they have a sensitivity of 92dB/W/m at 1kHz. Room loading and positioning do make a difference although not as much as with other horns I have used. So adjustment in the room is a vital part of obtaining the finest results.


If you read around you will see many horn designs where invariably people will use either a super tweeter or a subwoofer to augment the main driver. Our goal was to make a horn where you didn’t need either of those add-ons. The driver has a very wide frequency response which covers all this naturally. Some may be surprised at the relatively low sensitivity of the Dubhs – many horns quote >100dB/W/m. While that means they will work well with 1W and 2W amps, the very high sensitivity can also cause other problems. Hum and buzz can become a major issue that often is not easily fixed. The lower sensitivity actually works in favour of most amps. Low-level hum is not nearly so noticeable at the expense of the loading on the 1 and 2W amps. The resultant improved frequency response at the low end makes it a very worthwhile trade-off.

We employed a baffle step correction circuit in the Dubh. This can be thought of as 'crossover lite'. While it does mean extra components in the signal path, it also means that the rising frequency response of the full-range driver is tamed just a little resulting in a sweeter sound. We initially planned to have this circuit arranged so that the user could switch it in or out. However when we ran listening tests, everyone preferred it in place so we kept it. We use great quality Mundorf and Jantzen parts after extensive listening tests. Our internal wiring is 16AWG silver-plated copper in Teflon and we use high-quality 5-way binding posts.


The cabinets themselves are made from a combination of MDF (the front baffle and base) and resin (the horn chamber). This combination of materials bonded together with a semi-flexible material hugely influences the sound and particularly the bass response. The wide baffle and extended frequency response allow for an excellent soundstage. As I mentioned, the point of reference here were stacked Quads. The Dubhs mirror these for soundstage and realism. One of my pet hates is sibilance. There is a fine line between natural sibilance and harshness. Despite the high-frequency response, the Dubhs do not emphasise sibilance. If it is there on the recording you will hear it but it doesn’t push it over the edge so you can enjoy your Louis Armstrong and Motown classics! We have conducted listening tests with a pretty wide variety of amps and the Dubhs are very revealing of the sonic signature of the partnering equipment. We have gone from low-powered valve amps to high-powered solid state with good results. Normally when you think of horns, you think of flea-watt amps but these work excellently with higher powered solid-state amps too. We have a standard recommendation to stay above about 4-5W for valve amps not because the 1 and 2W amps won’t work well but because we do not have direct experience with a wide enough variety of these, whether SET or PP.