The e.chievement. On the off-chance that you shrug off easefulness as so what, some context. For all its 'esoteric' virtues, the widebander genre always battled compromises. First and most obvious was bandwidth. A big stiff heavy cone perfect for bass would gas out in the treble whilst the opposite would falter in the LF. Enter the TQWT or tapered quarter-wave tube cabinet and its many variants. It adds bass output but necessitates a big cab and often injects bloomy textures and subliminal time delay where the alignment's acoustic gain kicks in. At the other end, the bi-cone aka whizzer takes on tweeter duties on a cone otherwise too large and heavy to suit. The infamous 'Lowther shout' of earlier such whizzer cones pointed at a forward ragged response anywhere in the 800-4'000Hz range depending on driver diameter. Cube's multi-whizzer solution combats that with deliberate wave interference. Given the genre's niche existence, I seriously doubt that university labs anywhere bothered to invest in simulation code for whizzer-cone modeling. Anyone plying this fertile soil faces endless physical prototyping. That's time and money a typical investment group owning a speaker brand scoffs at supporting. Even a big still privately owned speaker brand practicing annual product cycles needs more predictive quicker R&D. Add a non-standard driver requiring in-house design and production to an enclosure expected to provide acoustic low-frequency gain without an easily modelled port – and between their optimal summing awaits more time-consuming physical prototyping. It takes atypical madmen to plow this forgotten acre.
Aside from tonal balance aberrations, another classic widebander challenge has been nonlinear dynamics. A big whizzer cone light enough to do the job wouldn't just prematurely expire on raw LF reach without being backloaded by a big cabinet. It would also drop dynamic response with descending frequencies. Whilst steady-state signal of a 10-octave scale descending from top to bottom might not trigger hot spots in the amplitude domain, actual music signal with dynamic fluctuations would still show more boisterous scaling in the upper midrange and lower treble then get dynamically more sedate and compressed below. This dynamic forwardness in the wider presence region paralleled certain Mark & Daniel 2-ways which ran a wideband AMT down to 800Hz. Their folded driver's 4:1 to 5:1 velocity edge over its dynamic mate could trigger perceived brightness because dynamically it would overshadow the more compressed slower classic mid/woofer.
In widebanders, dynamic brightness atop excellent timing could routinely come across as speed first particularly when music's engine room of the upper bass churned at clearly lower RPM whilst the octave/s below it were ringy or hollow. Whilst making for a very exiting sound, it could also make for a slightly exhausting inherently lean somewhat tipped-up sound. Against this generalized earlier lay of the land, you might now appreciate better what Marek & Grzegorz have wrought with their Lotus 10. Bleeding out residual heat and spotty glint in the amplitude domain whilst broadening dynamic tracking downwards to remove common imbalances without otherwise compromising the breed's known strengths against as awarded a precursor as Nenuphar v2… that was a tall order. I decided to paraphrase the compound effect as greater more holistic easefulness because fundamentally, that's exactly how it informed my listening. It simply doesn't exist aloof like a waterbed that floats in outer space during a silly TV commercial. It operates within/atop all of the genre's known parameters – easefulness' waterbed set up in a wonderfully decorated room as it were.
'So what' becomes 'so whoa' and Nenuphar v2 pilgrims with bigger rooms and more welly in their music arsenal have a new carefully evolved option whose sensitivity is still more SET happy. Against the accolades for the original single-driver lotus of Nenuphar, dual-driver Lotus 10 is a real achievement indeed. To spell it out in slightly different terms, it further normalizes the single-driver concept to give diehard detractors even less aim other than high price and considerable cubic volume. Normalizing simply doesn't mean making it the same. That's the trick. How to have the usual multi-way cake of full bandwidth, linearity and high resolution then eat it with high efficiency whilst leaving spherical horns alone then topping the lot with point-source dispersion and superior impulse fidelity as the most unique selling point? Cube Audio's Lotus 10 is how; now!
Cheers to their madmen Marek & Grzegorz for taking the path less travelled and arriving us at otherwise hidden vistas.
