It is from this admittedly unconventional perspective that I approach the design of loudspeakers: that it is the frontier of my craft and science to strive for the perception of reality in the reproduction of music, that it is my job and hope as a lowly technologist to convey that rare and delightful essence of the human soul that is music, and that in order to this I must build devices that conserve all three of the physical dimensions in which that music was created. Oh, yeah, and then they have to work in that living room!

So, we arrive at the pivotal questions: What is it that we ‘record’ when we record music? And what, then, does the speaker need to do to reproduce it?

In answer to the first question: As we all know, the ‘music’ that is made by musicians’ voices and instruments is actually a three dimensional series of compressions and rarefactions of air called ‘sound’. Ask any musician what the fundamental tools of his trade are, and you’ll get an answer that , more or less, boils down to pitch, loudness and timing. It comes as no surprise at all that what we are actually recording as ‘sound’ is a representation of how the air at the performance moved in terms of frequency (pitch), amplitude (loudness) and time (timing).

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