Inside L/R: The Engineering Behind Our Active Speakers

[00:00:00]Hello. I'm sitting in the camera.

[00:00:07]>> [music] >> Hello, I'm Ollie. I'm the development manager for active systems at Cambridge.

[00:00:12]So, LR100 an active system, that means everything's everything's built in, [music] you know, source, amplifiers, acoustics, everything's in there. Let's say you wanted to get into hi-fi, you like the idea of hi-fi, but I mean, what's a preamplifier? What's it going to connect to? And even if you know what those are, what you know, what which one do I need and why? [music] That's quite intimidating for a lot of people. This product can allow a lot of people just to sort of say, like, trust us, buy this pair of speakers, everything's in there, it's all going to work.

[00:00:39]>> [music] >> What's good about an active system is that it's a closed system, so you've got, you know, acoustics, electronics, signal processing all built into the cabinet. That allows you to make some optimizations that you can't necessarily make in a passive system. So, one big thing is the [music] sort of speaker protection. Just means you can turn them up to 100 and they're [music] going to sit there and they're going to sound great and they're going to do it all day. Yeah, they're party proof.

[00:01:07]We were new to making active speakers, so we didn't want to do a simple like two-way rear-ported bookshelf speaker. We wanted to do something more interesting. We came up with the idea of doing a 2.5 way crossover design, so that's more typical on a floor-standing speaker.

[00:01:22]That allowed us to get loads more sort of bass and power out of the speaker and dynamics. And then the passive radiators they're a different degrees of freedom you can play with, so you can get a deeper tuning and get more output without other things like chuffing you might get from a from a bass port. The choice of a 2.5 way crossover and the passive radiators give us [music] different degrees of freedom, really, in the acoustics, so we can get deeper bass, more [music] powerful bass, better dynamics than pretty much anything at that size. So, in most tweeters like this you've got a a vent [music] behind the dome to let the the same sound is coming out the the as coming from the rear, so you need to do something with that energy. So, having a big [music] tapered shape allows you to to direct that more gradually away. It's also the benefit to the customer, I guess, it's just enhanced clarity, lower distortion, just more natural sound.

[00:02:10]I've spent a lot of time listening at home, you know, probably a thousand hours at least from this point, just living with the system every day, trying different all sorts of genres of music.

[00:02:21]So, [music] once you set up the kind of high-level stuff, it's more about, "Okay, well, how do they sound? Is there too much energy here? Is there too little energy there?" You're listening to music ultimately, and then trying to correlate that with what you can measure and what, you know, what you're hearing.

[00:02:34]And >> [music] >> and then on on an active speaker as well, you've got the dynamics processing, too. So, when you, like I said earlier, when you turn them up, you've got stuff in place that >> [music] >> keeps the woofers in their linear range, so you can get the absolute most out of them and keep you sort of maintain the music after even when you go right up to the limits. What's the weirdest thing you tested on?

[00:02:54]Some probably some terrible drum and bass remix of something. I can't I can't even think of some Prodigy remix, I think.

[00:03:01]But it could be like choral music, uh all all sorts of stuff. They're they're in the same playlist.

[00:03:10]So, Dynamic EQ is our volume dependent loudness.

[00:03:13]At a given volume level, you hear a certain balance. If you if you turn it down 30 dB, the same frequency response, you won't perceive it in the same way.

[00:03:22]>> [music] >> And and you you effectively have to add some bass and some treble to kind of maintain the same perceptual balance.

[00:03:28]So, that's that's exactly exactly what it's doing.

[00:03:30]That you don't over overblow certain tracks and >> [music] >> underdo other ones. Street Magic's great. So, when we worked on Evo 1, we put >> [music] >> a load of signal processing pipeline inside to allow us to do all the crossover. So, naturally to then take that and put it in LR made a lot of sense. But also on top of that, um certainly on the on the the larger two products, we've got lots of stuff in the app as well to allow you to tailor it for your space.

[00:03:57]LR is an adjacent market to our existing hi-fi separates, so it's not going to overtake it. We're not completely pivoting and alienating all our old customers. That is not not the point of LR at all.

[00:04:08]I'd say it's minimalist, [music] but there's some pops of color. It's quite striking, but understated at the same time. It attracts the people that are really into >> [music] >> the performance of the product, but also people that want something easy to use, and it kind of sits nicely in the middle of those two things.