Ravenous

The bottom rear slot is no port but a cubby hole for a small streamer for example.

Late December 2024: "Dear Srajan, wishing you and Ivette a wonderful New Year. Purely for self gratification, can I ask whether you have plans to review that Raven speaker you put in your news room? It looks like a lot of speaker for the money and you obviously know the designer. If his claims are accurate and this new flock of birds eats the originals from when he was still working out of San Diego, this should be quite the overachiever. Here's to hoping you can get your hands on a pair. Cheers, Fred." I replied that "I don't believe Pat does overseas audio business these days. He makes architectural mouldings and detailing for East Coast American wood-trim houses. If I read the crumbs correctly from the distance, his speaker design today is on a domestic per-order basis not in volume retail. He's been there and done that. Asking him to now cover 2-way ship fees between the US and Ireland for a worldwide review that won't suit regional word-of-mouth business doesn't seem useful. If it's a great speaker as we'd expect; if I say so and suddenly people from well beyond the US want to buy it with a pricing structure that's custom-shop and within the US so not set up for global shipping… that would really create a lot of grief all around. So unless I misread all this and suddenly get an email from Pat asking for a review, I don't see it happen, sorry."

SB Acoustic drivers used by Meadowlark.

A few weeks later on the HiFiHaven Meadowlark blog, Frugal Audiophile posted that "in hifidom, in the last 20 years of the 50 that I have practiced this hobby, I belong to the church of Srajan Ebaen of 6moons. That’s how I found out about the Raven and present Meadowlark Audio… I firmly believe that if Srajan had a chance to review the Raven in the context of his credo—perfect mini monitors plus great subwoofer(s)—the Raven will show as a spectacular achiever." So what did my news post say that so got Fred and Frugal aflutter? "Ravenous. Meadowlark Audio's new fully active Raven is with its dual 9½" subwoofers beneath a 4" 2-way head. A 5th-order DSP high pass at 18Hz protects and linearizes the critically damped sealed bass system by allowing 6dB of built-in boost driven by 250-watt nCore. A matching class D module powers the SB Acoustics midrange whilst a 100-watt module fronts the Seas ferrofluid-less soft dome. 24/192 digital inputs cover coax, AES/EBU and optical, analog is on RCA/XLR with auto signal detect. At 85lbs and available in a range of real-wood veneers, Raven is very compact: a square-foot cross section rising to just a few centimetres past a metre. That's really small for what promises to be true full bandwidth of high output with uncommon dynamic linearity."

Since working as Pat's San Diego-based marketing manager—at right cutting the necessary ties when hair was dark and long—my wife and I have lived in Cyprus and Switzerland for a combined ten years, then made our home in Ireland for the past eight. Pat relocated Meadowlark from SoCal to the East Coast for Meadowlark v2. With the recession following that move, his business then ran afoul of 9/11. Meadowlark v3 rose from those ashes more than a decade later. And it's not only the location and business model which changed. Pat's original passive 1st-order + transmission-line credo became nCore Fusion active with preferred drivers from SB Acoustic's top Satori range like the above. Now carefully curated DSP does work which passive filters never could. Think of Raven's rumble-filter-reminiscent 18Hz steep-slope high pass; its brickwall 5th-order Butterworth low pass to keep the midrange in its heavily stuffed triangular wave-trap chamber clean. Think of the 6dB LF boost which bolts to willing drivers more linear bandwidth and dynamic range than a compact cab would otherwise support. Throw in high-feedback class D's extreme damping over sealed woofers whose drive is no longer diluted by energy-absorbing slow resonant passive filters. Because Pat's main business today isn't audio, his current speaker flock is small-scale custom. Want a 14Hz infrasonic generator? Pat has already been there and done that. Want veneer from a tree you felled in your own backyard? He can probably accommodate you. Want an ex employee to review his latest speaker? With enough time having passed, only the terminally suspicious would protest. And it's not as though either of us proposed it. Our readers did. What were they thinking? Clearly the same as I: this looks like a speaker ravenous for some in-home performance commentary. Should we feed that black squawker? Hey buddy, don't bite me!

It goes without saying. Pat's to-order model cuts out the usual dealer/distributor margins. With them go brick'n'mortar preview ops. Forget trade shows. In fact, "we do have an unusual business model – paid-for plant and equipment, no payroll. Our audio biz basically runs on the spare capacity of our family-operated architectural millwork business. That lets me price product rather more aggressively than if we ran it through a normal operation. Funnily enough, we're as busy as we care to be without putting a dime into adverts which is a big component in the price of most audio gear." Should this short page have you hot and bothered, you're on your own figuring out remedial action. More without saying applies to Pat coming from classic speaker design. He's well versed in passive filters so not the type to board the DSP bullet train to avoid proper xover execution. He's still about tightly optimized driver, filter and cabinet parameters. What DSP and active drive allow is digital time alignment to no longer require slanted baffles for physical voice-coil alignment; far steeper filters regardless of freq to pursue dual bandpass LF systems in bigger models; response compensation to avoid dynamic compression when bass goes loud and low. But for our man, DSP is no shortcut to fix shoddy work. He is however into stout SPL so we would expect dual-woofer Raven to have quite the appetite. Hey, I said don't bite me! That includes active acrimony whereby the legacy High End craps on class D and DSP. Remember how popular the Kestrel, Shearwater and Heron were back when? Now the same designer calls Raven one of his more impressive NextGen efforts. Passive speakers? For Pat the distant past. Fully active DSP filtered? For Pat the unavoidable present and future. Granted, I've not heard me a Meadowlark in ~18 years. But if progress is a matter of more experience, by now 30+ years for Pat; if better parts and the latest tech matter; and given how I loved my HotRod Shearwater back in San Diego county… checking out the Raven in County Clare now could be very cool. But with Pat already doing all the business he wants, why would he spend on advertising via the costs involved in a foreign review? Sorry Fred 'n' Frugal, that's just not gonna happen…