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Does ultrasonics matter?

Performance above 20Khz is frequency neglected with the assumption that people would not be able to hear any difference. It is often assumed that sounds that by themselves cannot be perceived by humans will remain inperceptable when they are mixed with lower frequency audible components but is this really true?

It is worth noting that humans can actually directly hear single tones as high as 28Khz but that’s at over 100 dB (101.3 to 111 dB for 3 of 32 test subjects) which is much louder than the ultrasonic components in typical music (not even close).

https://pubs.aip.org/asa/jasa/article/122/3/EL52/852964/Hearing-thresholds-for-pure-tones-above-16kHz

Multiple studies have indicated that ultrasonics that by themselves are not audible (and doesn’t seem to be perceptable in other ways) can still make a difference with music likely due to these higher frequencies interacting with lower frequencies inside the human body.

https://journals.physiology.org/doi/full/10.1152/jn.2000.83.6.3548

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0095464

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00093/full

But when people are asked to guess which version that contained high frequency audio they typically struggle, this remains true even for experienced professionals.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257068631_Sampling_Rate_Discrimination_441_kHz_vs_882_kHz

When we design our speakers we will focus heavily in the 100hz to 10Khz range since that is very much audible but there isn’t much of a reason not to choose a tweeter able to reach well above 20Khz with decent performance.

Tweeters like all speaker elements have a range where they perform the best and when that range reach 18Khz+ the performance will typically be acceptable well above that.

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Under development: B-series

The goal with all of our speakers is to deliver great performance in a compact and convenient package. We believe that the role of speakers is to reproduce the actual audio delivered to them instead of distorting it in various ways.

We are developing a number of new speakers. Most of them will feature build-in subwoofers to eliminate the need for buying subwoofers separately (something a lot people lack the time and space for). The larger models will generally also be more expensive but also deliver better performance, especially at lower frequencies such as 10Hz.

All models in the B-series will have beryllium tweeters.

The speakers will not require any special electronics. Nor will you have to connect any of the speakers directly to a power outlet, instead you should connect them to a decent amplifier and an audio source but that’s pretty much it.

With the B-series the focus was delivering great performance in general and not make dubious assumptions regarding what people can actually hear/notice. We do not think any of our costumers will take issue with our speakers having better performance than necessary.

We design our B-series speakers to achieve accurate phase response in addition to also delivering accurate frequency response, this will to a large extent remain true even when you are not at the ideal listening position.

Target sensitivity: 95 dB @ 2.83V

Frequency response targets are ±1dB up to 22Khz and ±3dB up to 50Khz.

Due to our very high performance target finding suitable drivers for this project has been a big challenge.

Simulated performance (B4 model):

We are aiming for at least that level of axial frequency response in the real-world for model B0 to B4.

We also plan on launching more compact and less expensive models where B5 to B7 will cover frequencies down to around 100Hz and B8 to B9 will cover frequencies down to around 200Hz.

Phase response: ±20° up to 22Khz (Very important for transient response).