One lazy afternoon, a Pixabay image grab and some Photoshop netted this attempt at putting the ancient aurai/aurae wind nymphs of the brand into the frame. As an old sailor, Alain wouldn't have gone far without at least a gentle breeze. That j'aurai means 'I will have' adds a subversive little twist. With Alain viewing speaker design as a confluence of physics, measurements, art and a wee bit of magic, imagery of the elemental kingdom which the Irish remember as the fairies seems fitting. Whenever a musical breeze from our speakers hoists our feelings aloft like feathery dandelion seeds dancing on an upsurge, we're in good shape. Catch me if you can?

Back on terra firma, the Zero Junior project by then still awaited its custom woofer but published 95.5dB speaker sensitivity already promised unusual resolution. Now Alain asked about my experience with LessLoss products. I confirmed their efficacy and singled out the Firewall for Loudspeakers as most remarkable. He took a look at my review. "I know what this is. It's really the best place for a mechanical low-pass filter to eliminate Brownian noise, digital pollution, auto-magnetic induction and so forth. I believe they use carbon-sintered copper. It's very soft and very tricky to manufacture. But what really matters is understanding why we have such pollution in the first place, then how to remove it. I have a system at the output of my CD player which cleans up the signal of quantization noise. My analog circuit in the CD player is built around the same issue. I've been working on this for 30 years and have several answers for it. I even have it on the midrange driver of today's Zero Junior. Digital pollution is a real drama for performance audio."

By late June 2020, Alain had "a new type filter which I'll patent this winter. In the non-smoothed graphs below, the first is of the M1's 8" Accuton mid/woofer without any filter, the second with my new filter. Your review M1 will be the first to officially introduce this new crossover. It will also come in the bigger M Zero Junior and M Zero models.

"The new filter allows me to control resonances without needing disagreeable notch filters or Ω compensation. In the two next raw graphs, you see the 8" Accuton without filter then with a classic 18dB slope + Ω adaptation at left; and the Accuton with my filter versus the classic 18dB + Ω compensation on the right. This demonstrates the difference between a good classic filter and my new filter. I'm still surprised by just how well it works."

By August 6th after my M1 review had published, "I just read your Junior preview this morning. You put my ultimate Jason Bourne project under our Lady of the Guard in the shadows. This is going to shake up the senators of the audio world. This Western Electric type project won't transport easily but make the dreams of all mad audiophiles true: 4 x 38cm/15" woofers in a push/pull 4th-order band-pass enclosure; a 1.43m long horn with a 1x1m mouth with a geometry superior to all the exotic horns of Sven Puech, with 103dB/1m/1w efficiency. And I already have the tweeter for it. About the M1 loaner, for now hold on to it so you can compare it side by side when I ship Junior. I've now locked in all its parameters as a twin-tweeter omni-directional point source. We're on the 4th version of the 245mm Supravox which is approaching perfection. There's just one detail left to iron out so that the final production sample you'll receive this fall will be my maximum for this design."