So Nobilis Sonum 98 is a near complete hifi system inside two unobtrusive matte-black towers rather more petite than the competing Sotto Voce Stereo 3 I reviewed earlier. Just add source/s. In this picture a €20K sticker needn't necessarily spike your ticker. To accomplish the same in legacy mode needs a super integrated or separate DAC, preamp and power amp/s plus bigger passive boxes with more or larger drivers. The 98 is altogether smaller and smarter. It does more with less. That's going Dutch in style. It's definitely not seeing a divorce attorney from Noble & Noble because your better half had it with refrigerator-sized speakers in the lounge fronted by hardware altars to hifi. With the Nobilis Sonum 98, you get to have your cake and eat it; or thereabouts if we keep to PG13.
3 digital inputs of AES/EBU, coax and Toslink, 2 analog inputs of RCA and XLR, 2 digital outputs on coax and AES/EBU, one analog XLR output. Entering analog first meets an AK5554 ADC. The internal DAC is an AK4454. Analog and digital domains are separate so analog input signal cannot be routed to a digital output or vice versa. Standby power draw is ½ watt, latency for analog is 350µs, 1.8ms for digital. If not overridden by the remote, source selection is automatic. It scans from XLR to RCA to coax to AES/EBU to Toslink.
Who are the makers of our family-friendly movie which started shooting in 2017?
For engineering that's virtual film director Rob Meijst of MC-Systems. His MP 3.1 at right with dual tube-connected 16cm main drivers is the conceptual if passive platform from which he evolved Noble & Noble's active still more refined implementation.
For set design aka industrial style, it's Roderick Vos of the eponymous design studio.
Acting as de facto producer and script writer by managing the project and resultant company is Jacob Gunter. Amongst his former ventures was being Benelux importer and distributor for Goldmund and Rauna later export manager for then startup Siltech. Noble & Noble are based on team work between experts from different fields. The location of our movie shoot is Groningen, a university town in the northern Netherlands and former member of the German Hanseatic League. As a quasi precursor to today's EU but from the 13th-17th centuries, that was a merchants confederation of guilds and market towns. It was headquartered in Lübeck of what today is Germany's northernmost Bundesland of Schleswig Holstein. From that historic perspective, our speaker's DNA must be strong on trade, team work and self defense. The latter battles cabinet-induced noise even surround distortion if company claims are true. Team work we've covered already. Trade remains to be seen. That should depend on Mr. Gunter's marketing moxy; and what reviewers and customers will say about the speaker's performance.
About which, thinking readers still have basic questions on -3dB bandwidth, filter choices, presets, the mid/woofers' Ø and the precise geometry of the connective rod plus unusual open-backed loading with port.
The expanse of the Hanseatic League ca. 1400. The pin shows the location of Groningen.
Rob Meijst [upper left] or Jacob Gunter [far right] had the answers. Their chosen nCore electronics make consumer provision to load one of three response profiles if a designer decides to add that flexibility. Would the Nobilis? Force-cancelling woofers have been popular since Joachim Gerhard's early days at Audio Physic. In fact Rob was granted patent N° 8902556 on his own vibration cancellation system in 1989. Today KEF's KC62 sub takes up the mantle of advancing the concept. Its horizontally opposed woofers share one motor with concentrically sleeved voice coils. Fashioning a simple mechanical connection between two motors which face each other is child's play. Bolt them together butting up; or use a longer bolt if they space apart.
Today's spooning small drivers prefer the opposite orientation. Their rod attaches to the visible driver's motor then penetrates the second's diaphragm which lacks the aluminium phase plug of the first. The original Noble & Noble video of this screen shot didn't yet show that detail of this mechanically more complex geometry. That on MC System's Facebook page did. The switch in the wiring inverts the second driver's polarity. In phase, coupling resonates the surface the drivers sit on to loudly rattle the two glasses. Out of phase, the same noise cancels out. Mental noise might still trigger in those allergic to loud marketing once they read impossible claims of "world's first resonance-free cabinet". Competitors like Rockport will quietly chuckle. To set itself apart and claim unique ground, any new product needs a story. So what if that story has been told many times before? Pretend that it hasn't and soldier on. Let the customer notice; or not.
