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With the facilities and product covered, we'll now take a virtual stroll through the designer's head to get his perspective on the audio business in general and his design work within it. What follows was culled and transcribed from many taped hours of casual conversations.
Kevin Scott talks shop. On what makes them tick: There’s a high-end dealer from whom I buy equipment I like. This is the second time he told me this. "I’m so bored with it all, I don’t listen to music anymore. I’ve got a life now." I hope he gets over it. Losing interest and love for exploring music would be the end for us. Likewise on the manufacturing side of this equation. Some people make product because they have to. Some make product because they want to. That's us.


On reviews: At one stage we did lots and lots of hifi shows like Bristol, Manchester, London, CES and Hong Kong all in one year. That gets expensive fast but we had reviews in all of the publications. At one point the editors of World, Choice, Plus and others were all using OBX-R2s in their domestic systems as primary speaker. We had reached this sort of critical exposure mass and I saw this as a problem. We’re not a company after all which changes products every 18 months. A good loudspeaker today is a good loudspeaker 15 years from now. It’s not suddenly a bad loudspeaker. But a lot of big companies need to refresh their brand consistently to keep up with the competition. Suddenly they want a yellow or piezo tweeter, a woven or carbon-fiber reinforced diaphragm when fundamentally, there's no real change. It’s just window dressing.


So we withdrew from having reviews. At first I was uncomfortable seeing us move into a publicity decline. After a slight dip however, the if you like enigma of not being visible in the media yet having loads of buzz and vibe going on in the forums and chat rooms kicked in and we saw an actual upturn in business. Since then we haven’t really had reviews. Edward Barker wrote up the R2 for you and I didn’t even know he was a reviewer because he'd bought the pair. He has listened to the Olympian while it’s been squeezing itself through the sausage machine and he has heard what you heard. He also heard the first through third prototypes and I hope he can make something of it as that would be quite interesting. But I’ve had nothing else reviewed, just one informal coffee table exposure in one of the annual majors. This has been the state of affairs for us for years. Yet business has improved. I think with reviews everything has been turned up to the max. There no longer is any pianissimo and mezzo forte. All descriptive categories have been set to redline at 10 and shout at you from the high-street magazines: “Amazing, amazing, amazing. 5 star review. Editor’s Choice.”

On evolution: Instead of replacing our loudspeakers, they have evolved. Our R2 and RW did so significantly but only when necessity became the mother of invention. Quite often those improvements happened reluctantly because a capacitor manufacturer went bust or a cabinet supplier closed his doors. In other words, it was never about components or parts we grew eventual reservations about. I loved the cabinet we used to source from Castle right here in the UK. When they folded, it was a very long road to get those Danish Hornslet cabinets to sound right.


From a marketing point of view this sounds like a terrible confession to make but our Auditorium and Avatar cabinets are made from chipboard – a very particular type of chipboard but not MDF. Compared to MDF which is saw dust set in glue, chipboard uses very large shaggily shaped softwood particles. The reason for our use of chipboard is that when I started out, I sold JPW speakers which came out of the Dartmoor prison's inmate rehabilitation scheme. Those boxes were made of veneered chipboard and sounded great for what they were – real budget wonders. Then JPW polished up the range (same crossover, same drive units) by making the enclosures from MDF. That killed them. They suddenly sounded very gray, dull and ordinary. The Snells with their life and vitality too used chipboard. 


During our initial prototyping, I had to learn about just the right grade and thickness of chipboard to use. We tried 400, 520, 640 and 750 densities and neither the most nor least dense were best. We got to a grade we liked for that speaker with those drivers and were very successful with it. Once we moved from having the cabinets made by Castle to Hornslet, we had to supply the Danes with our chosen substrate. We used to get it from a Welsh plant which supplied Castle. Suddenly we had to source it from a multinational company with suppliers all over Europe.

Unbeknownst to us, our original substrate had been made from seasoned and recycled various wood species (up to five) whereas the new material from Finland was simply virgin spruce and nothing else. The density of wood fiber and resin was identical but we just couldn’t get the same sound. We looked at glues, how Castle had assembled the boxes - at anything that could be conceivably different. We finally tracked down the real reason. This was a really painful process.
The right chipboard created a naturally vibrant, energetic, powerful and radiant sound. Thicker panels made those qualities diminish so we use 18mm thickness, not 22 or 24 which any marketeer would prefer. What's annoying is that veneer on high-quality MDF looks fantastic. The same veneer on chipboard doesn’t look anywhere near as sheer because it isn't as flat. Hornslet did figure out how to lay on a perfect veneer over chipboard but that was another learning curve. Their workers don’t like working in chipboard. It eats their blades and cutter heads from three to four times faster than MDF. The second problem is that seeing chipboard, the workers assume a cheaper product which means they don’t pay the same kind of care and attention. This initially multiplied our rejection rate of cabinets.


I eventually wanted to use a different material in these cabinets somewhere to break up the uniformity. So I tried an MDF front baffle for the money shot and had some other cabs made with MDF in the back. Of course the Gods decided that the penalty for pursuing better sound came from the MDF back plate and chipboard for the sides and front. It was so much better having the drivers seated in this very lossy dispersive material. By the way, the other thing which sounds very good but which we don’t use is waterproof flooring-grade chipboard. You recognize it by being green.


In the early days we’d go to hifi shows and people would like our sound but then come up and put their hands on the cabinets and complain that they could feel them vibrating. I’d ask whether they could hear any troughs or peaks or resonances that interfered with the music. Of course they couldn’t. 

But it was a real perception hurdle to overcome when the prevailing paradigm was the high-mass loudspeaker which acts as a black hole for the energy that’s supposed to be released from the diaphragms. They call it very uncoloured but that’s deluded. The sound has lost all its color.


Back on enforced evolution. Vifa lost the tooling for our driver and we didn’t care to have our drivers made in their new Indian or Chinese plant. We wanted to remain with Danish driver manufacture but were presented with a fait accompli. Had I not been so very old-fashioned to sit on very substantial driver stock, we’d really have been in an untenable spot. It took about 9 months to get new delivery of many hundreds of drive units and we first had to reverse engineer them from the units we had evolved together with Vifa over the years. Prior to the financial crisis, we had been too small a business for their accountant to want to bother with custom orders for discontinued transducers. Ordering 500 at a time wasn’t very interesting for them then.


When the world changed in 2008, they did want our business back badly. Reverse-engineering our original driver was simply a painfully horrible thing to do. As it turned out, the redesign was better. It had evolved. But, we haven’t called the speaker R3 or R4 as a result. It’s still the OBX-R2. So when we became overexposed in the media, I didn’t have nor want an R3. I am very happy with the R2 as it is. If I could make it better—within this format of speaker—I would. So we withdrew from having reviews.


On boutique and generic parts: In our £3 - 8K Auditorium/Avatar range, we use the Scanspeak Revelator tweeter which is a fantastic conventional driver but the real DNA of course is the crossover. That goes back to having a fantastic gastronomical experience. The ingredients must be good but without the vision of the chef, it’s all for naught. It’s what you do with the ingredients, their proportions and balance and interactions with each other that matter. Call it advanced judgment and finely honed sensibility.


On listening: You wouldn’t put on a talking book and then have dinner and chat with friends. But that’s exactly what a lot of people do with music. It’s disrespectful and wears out their sensitivity to the medium’s ability to transport them. There’s not just dynamic range but emotional range. The listener has to provide that and make it available. As dealers, we don’t expect our clients to know anything about audio. It’s our job to deliver the experience. The only requirement this places on the prospective buyer is his or her emotional availability.

On battery drive: The amount of clutter and artifacts battery drive gets rid of which you previously blamed on the loudspeaker or electronics is amazing. If I go into the mill on Saturday or Sunday—and bear in mind that we’re the only business there which occasionally works over the weekend—we’re on a separate power sub station so all of those powerful solenoid winches that lift things up, all the office computers and assembly machines are off. Then the sound quality from the national grid is fantastic. You’ve got that vanishingly low impedance and no turbulence or hash on the ground. The sound is calmly powerful, beautifully resolved, succulent without being overripe and has that heterogeneity of the emotional expression, the separation of the textures. The whole thing is just so calm and assured and actually better than the batteries. But every other time of the week I plug the system into the national grid, it’s just awful. There was a time when I couldn’t do any demos on Thursdays at all because that's when the textile plant in the vicinity ran its big dying machine which agitates all of their fabrics with that massive solenoid. The sound on Thursdays was simply appalling. With anyone coming in from London for an appointment, we’d be utterly humiliated and embarrassed.


One of my clients has a house in the Far East and a yacht. For his marine Kondo/Living Voice system, I wanted a battery supply that would be separate from the general power for his boat. That’s how we first got in contact with the right people for whom we laid out our requirements and who then programmed how various power inverters and chargers should work. The same client had four power cuts in his house alone while I was there to install our off-the-grid supply. This battery solution became a real life saver for him. With another customer in the south of France and a big Kondo Gakuoh/Living Voice system, the sound was atrocious yet I had no explanation why - until I stuck my multi meter into his power line and measured 192V instead of 230V. Undervoltaging a filament on a valve amp is worse than overvoltaging it. With the wrong high-tension voltage, wrong negative grid supply and wrong heater voltage, he wasn’t listening to the amplifier as it was designed to operate. Line voltage stabilization from batteries was the perfect solution - again.


When I combined this case evidence with my own work situation, it was a clear case of getting on with it and I’m thoroughly delighted with the outcome. Ours are sealed gel rather than water batteries so whilst having higher impedance, they’re incredible safe and durable and work in difficult circumstances. You can use them on their sides or upside down without problem. There also are ludicrous 2V cells which you would use in a forklift truck or milk float. For all 12V applications, you'd parallel six. These are massive and I'd fancy having 12 or 24 of those. They have incredibly low impedance and massive surge capability. That should really be saucy. They’re very long but narrow so you could lay them sideways and slide them into a special rack like torpedoes. An amplifier after all is no more than a modulated power supply. Many people would be better off with a more modest system that's run off such a stable battery supply.


On rules: My dogma is, don’t be dogmatic. Don’t be precious about anything. It’s the classic audiophile dilemma. There's your basic grilled tomato which tastes quite bland. They put a pinch of salt on it and suddenly it’s oh good morning. Now they put salt on everything because they believe that’s the universal panacea. For example, because the 2-meter Kondo power cords are quite dear, I once decided to roll my own and cut them back to size to 1.5 and 1 meters. That didn’t sound as good - very annoying. But it was a valuable lesson because now I can look someone straight in the eye and explain that the 2-meter power cord, even though more expensive, clearly performs better. I’ll happily let them compare it to a shorter version.


As many DIYers would, we’ve looked into putting Kondo silver wire into our smaller speakers since we love that wire. That was a major step backwards and thoroughly unexpected since we use Kondo jumper wire from the outboard crossover to the binding posts. So we took the silver out and put our own recipe back in. Much better. Now we wondered whether our recipe wouldn’t also work better between the crossover and binding posts. Not.


On the Vox Olympian, we tried all manner of things. The one issue we had in the end was with the cabling to the 15-inch Vitavox. The Kondo cable was clearly superior everywhere else but for that driver—as you heard for yourself—our flat ribbon copper is equally if differently persuasive than the Kondo. We actually considered running an additional pair of binding posts just to let you have two instant choices for internal bass wiring because this difference is not obtainable by adjusting the tonal balance elsewhere. We were in a real dilemma which of those two wires to choose. If you listen to forward-moving staccato, the copper ribbon is my choice. If you listen to the big chromatic passages, there’s something scrumptious about the Kondo wire. So we did our best to optimize the speaker for the Kondo because on balance, that matched my own disposition. Still, I can entirely understand someone like you making the other choice and we'd accommodate that. It’s how we do all our development work. You put on more than one cable on a driver and compare. On the bass driver we doubled up the cable to drive down the impedance. This didn’t sound better at all. So the point is, there are no clear-cut rules, just endless well-documented and systematic trials. It’s having the care and inclination to doing that much spade work. If we worked for a corporation, we’d be given a clear time line. On the other hand, we wouldn’t want to replace our speakers with a new model in 18 months. And we won’t have to. We take the time to get them right the first time around.


On the super-tweeter orientation: The 45° outward angle is unequivocally the right thing to do. I’ve listened vertically and in very fine gradations from there. Going inwards was plain wrong. I’ve even used a Sugden A21 to dumb down the ancillary electronics yet the basic flavor remained. If one had the balls, wouldn’t it be fun to go to a hifi show and run the Vox Olympian off a Sugden A21 with an Opus 21 front end? It’d be gorgeous.