The Skiny's unique all-wood sub baffle/basket assembly.

The speaker's teenage number points at its widebander's diameter in centimetres. Designed and built by Germany's Armin Galm of Enviee just like the 21cm whizzer-equipped bicone of the Wave 40 is, that makes the de-whizzed SK16 driver with the pointy wooden phase plug five centimetres skinnier, i.e. 160mm or 6.3". Oh the glories of being a trim teenager. To eliminate a conventional metal basket and rim, this new driver's pleated paper surround which seamlessly continues the actual cone bonds directly to the two-tone wooden sub baffle which also houses Armin's own 25mm soft dome tweeter. The widebander's basket structure then gets crafted from solid wood which bonds to the same sub baffle for improved mechanical unity. Rubberized stand-offs decouple the magnet structure from the driver mount plate. One also assumes avoidance of metal-induced eddy currents and related effects which led the UK's Dennis Morecroft decades ago to shun metal enclosures for his electronics in favour of acrylic boxes. Hence also the non-metallic plinth which doubles as xover housing.


Firing sideways, Martin's established 'scoop loading' is a quasi port with some functional overlap to a very short rear horn. Being mirror-imaged, most users should run the SK16 tweeters out. Obviously the reverse is just a quick try away for rooms or setups which might prefer that. For absorption exhaustion of the rear wave, Martin lines his Swiss-made enclosures—like the matching sub, those are available in solid Maple, Cherry or Walnut—with Aramid honeycomb. That's a bit like converting a speaker's insides into an anechoic chamber. At right we see an early SK16/D8 prototype combo as previewed at the Munich 2014 show. For the early skinny, the scoop still exited low. Final production has repositioned that opening a bit higher, refined the plinth and added the teardrop detail.


On tech talk, for the Wave 40 veteran critic Paul Messenger admitted that "quite how this scoop-shaped outlet actually works is just as controversial as the attempts to describe it, though it does appear to reinforce the bass across a rather broader band than a regular port. The port (whatever it is and how it actually functions) is tuned to around 44Hz and the fundamental free-air resonance of the driver is a little above 50Hz, so the absolute bass weight and extension is bound to be somewhat limited. (Inevitably perhaps given the high sensitivity.) Under our in-room conditions the bass rolls off quite gently below 80Hz, so is overdamped with a slower rolloff than usual; it’s still only 6dB down by 30Hz so is going to sound dry but will still add some impression of scale and worthwhile bass extension." To really get the scoop would require chatting with Martin Gateley's design consultant Christian Ellis of CE Electro-Acoustics in the UK. But there's always the pesky need to protect IP. We'd give our gents a pass on the matter if they preferred. As it turned out, Martin did have something.