On April 1st, former contributor Edgar Kramer had published his review of the Dellichord FR2035 for SoundStage! Australia. That Aussie effort combines a petite passive sealed 6" 2-way monitor with a wider 10" isobaric sealed bass bin to then become a DSP-controlled 500wpc nCore-powered 3-way with active high pass to the monitor. The electrical connection is via short speaker cables plugged into banana terminals atop the bass bin. The handover frequency is 235Hz. This €8.5K or $14K AU system presents as obvious parallel to our Move/Groove combo. I simply don't find the cosmetics successful. It's a challenge to dock a narrow shallow head unit on a bass box that houses one or multiple woofers of the necessary size to achieve a realistic ~30Hz without ending up with disproportionate width/depth; or undue height that screws up midrange/tweeter alignment. How had Norbert attacked this challenge?
"The Groove is a duo just like Move. A magnetic lock keeps the monitor in place. Each Groove contains an 8" woofer plus 8" passive radiator. The alignment is 6th order which includes a 2nd-order active high pass tuned to -3dB/30Hz. The active high pass to the Move is a single-capacitor 1st order at 100Hz. This combines into an active speaker whose point-source head covers 100Hz to 10kHz on a single voice coil whilst we extend bass and treble to 25Hz and 40kHz -10dB respectively. The Groove runs fully analogue circuity without any DSP or processing hence zero latency. The main class A voltage gain is via excellent Fet-based opamp. The class D buffers only add ~12dB and are driven by up to 10V balanced input signals. Power output is up to 60W to the Move, 400W peak to the Groove."
With Norbert for size reference, his twosome reaches no taller than Move on its stand. The light finish of the bass extender does its part to keep the profile less imposing. To my eyes this presents cohesively but still accommodates two bass drivers per channel for the needed cone surface. Even though this bass bin is still slightly wider and deeper than the head unit, it doesn't disrupt visual continuity as much as Dellichord's stack. Regardless, any customer who dances the upgrade 2-step will start with an external amp which subsequently becomes redundant. Converting a speaker from passive to active can't avoid that double trouble. In this catalogue the obvious choice is the music:book Combo on the Move solo, the music:book Source II on the stack. The Combo packs a variable RCA 1V/max output to drive the docked boxes, only leaving its own nCore boards idle. That keeps late Groove adopters who start with the passive monitor off the buy'n'sell carousel. If we start with the stack, Source II has us covered.
In 2023 Waldemar Novak of infoaudio.pl had published this photo of an earlier Groove still taller and wider. The final 2024 version clearly didn't fall from the idea tree fully formed. To sharpen its final appeal, it underwent at least one big iterative shape shift after testing public response to the original concept. Worthy of repetition is the activated stack's all-analogue nature which avoids internal A/D conversion for subsequent DSP processing. Though purity is often just semantics or ideology, Lindemann's solution will appeal to those who view DSP with ill-disguised apprehension. From the old Grecian know thyself to contemporary German know thy audience, product positioning matters. That's especially apt in any overcrowded market. Here the Move/Groove combo is wrapped in a tidy background story which across the majority bandwidth includes doing away with the resistive energy-absorbing spider that's standard with dynamic drivers. As far as I know, only the custom units Audio Physic have built by Wavecor plus some Fertin exotica and finally Belgium's radical Illumnia without traditional spider or surround do likewise. How would all that foreplay culminate in the listening seat?
