D-day. As I wrote in a recent feature, think d-coupling not spiking of speakers. I've lived this easy concept for many years with isolators from Boenicke to Carbide, HifiStay to sound|kaos. Today Børresen, Magico and Wilson Audio have their own. Others are catching on and up. At the same Munich show, IsoAcoustics demonstrated how their viscoelastic footers improve Mårten's Parker Trio Diamond, Gershman's Grand Avantgarde and Perlisten's S7t. They also showed how Sonus faber fully integrate their decouplers inside the Suprema tower and subwoofer. The subtext is plain. Coupling acoustic energy generators like loudspeakers to the structural mass of a room causes resonance and time-domain smear. The rowdy posterchild for such bad behaviour is the adolescent boom truck. Big woofers hard-coupled to a car's metal carcass turn the entire structure on wheels into an annoyingly ringy beast. The V01 applies the same D-day concept to its main drivers. A speaker enclosure is structural mass, too. It responds to the mechanical energies we unleash when we hit 'play' and turn up the volume. It's one aspect of box talk where the loudest part of the room is always inside the speaker enclosure.

Going far beyond classic gaskets, the V01 exploits more effective physical isolation. Pushing against the top icecream cone moves it a bit like a roller-ball isolator will shimmy when displaced. Ditto for the 8-incher. Its hidden suspension disrupts mechanical energy transfer into the box. "The main idea is to minimize kinetic energies from leeching into the box then kicking back into the drivers. This cleans up a lot of garbage to create far more sonic 3D. People always ask whether I don't sacrifice energy by suspending my drivers. I do but only below self resonance, not in the actual bandwidth across which I run my drivers. It's a trade-off whose benefits clearly dominate. And remember the ancient war catapults. Their main pivot rode on a sled which moved in the opposite direction of the charge. Though counterintuitive, projectiles flew farther that way."

The remaining aspect of box talk is the acoustic pressure of the driver's rear radiation which assaults the enclosure from within. Only the rare open-baffle dipole avoids it. Our solid-wood build simply argues a sonic signature more benign than metal. With aluminium builds from Magico to YG Acoustics, MonAcoustics to Stenheim, other designers argue the opposite. Benno Baun Meldgaard's new brand exploits a hi-tech composite which weighs like aluminium, exceeds the strength of steel then adds impeccable self damping. Æquo are still massaging their own Diluvite super composite. The V01 prefers wood. That certainly helps on the scale. Versus ultra-hard composites, it should also help on wallet wince. Ubiquitous sawdust set in glue obviously wins on coin. Some even call MDF and its HDF cousin a 'wood-based' material which by definition is certainly true. The V01 simply has nobler ideas. Aside from sonic effects, this segue back to Tonmöbel and whether we prefer ours in Ikea chip board and plastic laminate or pebbled leather and oiled solid hardwood.

If you enjoy some witchcraft with your next Pfister furniture delivery, the V01 obliges as well. In established Boenicke fashion, invisible to the naked eye are tuning tweaks like the parallel resonator shown in Munich outside the enclosure in the next insert. I imagine Sven dead tired over being asked to explain or justify his love of esoteric solutions from Bybee, Stein Music and others. With extensive experience recording live concerts on his own equipment in the reverberant field of the venue so not in an isolated sound booth, he simply trusts his ears. It's when the accountant sits him down that decisions are made about how much and what type of sorcery a given model can pack before pricing itself off the map. It's why the Boenicke catalogue has long since offered three trim tiers of basic, advanced and maxed out. Those always look identical from the outside since the difference lives inside. In the tiered scheme, the client decides how much extra to invest on invisible exotica.

Piotr Misiewicz, Basel Acoustics | Sven Boenicke, Boenicke Audio | Aron Heinrich, Green Harmonia | Paddy Hablützel, Boenicke Audio assembly, QC & dispatch

To secure its target price, the V01 comes in just one flavour. That limits internal witchcraft to what Sven considered the essential voodoo: a parallel electro-mechanical resonator; directionally oriented silk-wrapped Litz hookup wiring; curated drivers carefully blended with a purist minimalist filter network then mounted floatingly; a solid-wood enclosure with carefully shaped internals. This seems a good place to reiterate the obvious. Even though it's brand new, the V01 benefits from a solid 26 years of R&D and market research when Boenicke Audio launched in 1998. Born with a fully educated high-IQ brain straight out of the womb seems a good way to put it. "Our website update including first distributors' list and new photos will complete by end of June. Dealers and distributors will receive their orders before I promote the brand online. Given that and the loaners' requested preconditioning, I could arrange delivery at the beginning or middle of September."

… to be continued…