Sound Intended – Ed Kuepper
Ed Kuepper has been a dynamic force in Australian music since his first band The Saints sent a musical shockwave around the world with their classic debut single (I’m) Stranded in 1976. In a career stretching across 50 albums, great sound has always been paramount.
Humans detect ‘spatial’ acoustics by observing the amount of ‘sideways’ energy a sound creates. The presence of sideways energy means the sound either came from a direction not directly in front of you, or it means a reflection of a sound has arrived at your ears from a direction other than from directly in front of you. Through this mechanism, presented as differences in the ear signals, we are able to create a perception of our surrounding acoustic reality.
Audio, be it stereo or multichannel, creates this sideways energy though the recorded differences between the right- and left-channel signals. We are thus able to perceive ‘space’ from the audio signals therein. This is also true for headphones, because there is little space between the headphone and your ear that can corrupt the acoustic. The downside of headphones is that sound is being perceived as existing inside your head. This happens because real acoustic patterns are created as sound passes by your head – this isn’t possible with headphones as the sound never reaches the outside of your head.
There is also a problem with using a conventional speaker cone to create sound, due to physics! The industry calls a conventional speaker cone a ‘piston radiator’. Piston radiators create a large amount of un-intended sideways energy by their very action – even when there is no difference between the left and right audio channels. Every piston radiator; bass driver, mid range driver, or tweeter, will create significant amounts of un-intended sideways energy above a critical frequency. These critical frequencies are those with wavelengths of the size or smaller than the speaker cone. So the larger the cone the lower the frequency at which the spatial cues will become corrupted by the physics of the piston radiator.
This manifests in real life not only as un-intended sideways energy but also as severe ‘lobing’ off axis where the sound levels decrease or even disappear at particular angles and frequencies. The smaller the speaker cone the less the un-intended sideways energy problem but also the less the power that it can handle. DaS technology overcomes the power versus sideways-energy constraint of conventional speakers. Through its unique ability to create a diffuse sound field in the sideways (lateral) direction, A3D effectively prevents sideways energy movement.
Consequently, the acoustic energy can travel only directly towards the listener. The sound field becomes a purely laminar flow around the listeners head, just as it would in real-world acoustics. Silencing un-intended sideways energy, A3D loudspeakers deliver only the intended, recorded audio differences in the channels to your ears uninterrupted. The acoustical-spatial cues of the audio are presented in unadulterated form so your perceived sound stage behaves like a hologram, placing the audio in the listening space as though the band where performing in front of you. DaS creates the intimacy of the original performance in your listening space.
