04 l August 2013
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Davies Roberts’ claims have been dismissed in some quarters but found devotees in others. Love him or hate him, you certainly can’t ignore his Space Technology and the iconoclastic confidence of his approach to loudspeaker design. Dave Robinsonsat down for an exclusive interview with the maverick inventor
FLARE AUDIO has posed quite the conundrum for PSNEurope. The south-coast operation cropped up in the guise of a rental firm Purple Audio in 2007, but then disappeared from view. Reports of a disagreement with a former ally didn’t help the company’s profile. Fast forward to the autumn of 2012, and Flare is back, this time as a manufacturer armed with a radical new approach to loudspeaker design. “Space Technology,” claimed Flare’s founder Davies Roberts, “will open up a new frontier in sound experience for audio professionals through to home consumers.” Another day, another game- changer. It seems to happen a lot in pro audio, with dubious longer-term consequences. But Flare seems to offer something more solid, as it has won fans not only in the live and installation markets, but in the wider music business too. Key to this was the launch of a distinctive-looking studio monitor, the S1, followed quickly by a touring box, the X5 – both employing so-called Space Technology. Genuine praise for the sound and performance of the speakers has spilled forth: several high-profile names are already endorsing Flare, while others joined the board of directors in April. Following a convincing demonstration of the speakers at The Great Escape conference in Brighton, Flare agreed to an exclusive interview, promising to reveal the secrets of Space Technology and more to a still sceptical PSNEurope. Now cut to July 2013, and
Davies Roberts – very much the excitable schoolboy when he’s talking about his designs – and
the more measured Kristin Hanson, Flare’s COO, are sitting with your correspondent in the Flare HQ in Lancing, charting key points in the lead up to this interview. Roberts’ design for a bassbin, the Quadhorn, and the filing of a patent for ‘Nanoflow’ technology in September 2011, was the first milestone. (“The Quadhorn,” he posted to the Blue Room online technical forum earlier this year, “made me start to realise that the approach to building loudspeakers was misguided.”) Borne out of his experience with the Quadhorn was the formulation of a principle Roberts calls ‘Waveform Integrity’ (his take on linearity and accuracy in sound reproduction – he published a White Paper on it too). A compulsion to pursue this principle – to solve “what has been going wrong with sound systems” he says – led him to close the hire firm and focus on speaker design. The breakthrough came last June, he claims, and by October, Flare was filing a patent for ‘Space Technology’.
And so it began. Major Tom took a system on tour with Michael Ball in the spring. Richard Hawley and The Levellers used an X5 rig at Under The Big Top in Sheffield, while the Artful Badger collective requested X5s for their stage at the Secret Garden Party. Tony Moore could hardly contain himself after he used Flare speakers at Folkfest at the Bedford in south London. Industry demos at Hatfield House and the Brighton Centre have served to surprise other pro-audio influencers.
S1 studio monitor: first product attracted the attention of several high-profile names
What of that first ‘light-bulb’ moment? (Davies Roberts:) Sound is a simple wave. We have a simple piston in the form of a driver, so why can’t that piston operate [as it should] and produce a perfect sound wave? The light-bulb was that I suddenly realised I wasn’t relying on a chamber or box anymore, I was making the
Davies Roberts, Lancing, July 2013
drivers become pistons and work together to create an accurate waveform.
This led you to focus on the mysterious ‘Space Technology’. What is it? To explain it simply: if you pluck a guitar string, it resonates and creates sound. If you damp it with your finger, it stops. So that’s what Space is doing – stopping the vibrations that cause resonance.
How do you kill resonance in the enclosure?
Some designers take the ‘bury it’ approach: make the box so heavy that it can’t possible resonate. Mount it in a concrete wall, for instance, the ‘infinite
baffle’ approach. I needed a way to create this ‘concrete’, cheaply, effectively and easily, to remove resonance. And I came up with this idea using MDF. Rather than building a [regular] enclosure, I thought, get those bits of wood, layer them, drill a hole in each corner, and bond them together to create something that stops resonance within the box.
What is the scaled up version of that process? Layers of birch ply or MDF are cut on a CNC machine, and holes are bored in each [for the compression bolts]. The layers are glued together and then subjected to 10-tons of pressure in order to make the enclosure structurally sound. After painting, a pre-machined 15mm aluminium plate is applied to each face, then the bolts are inserted and tightened to a predetermined torque. In the X5s, the patent attorney calculated there was circa 200 tonnes of force in the bolts – but the actual torque is not mentioned in the patent and won’t be published. There’s no processing, no cotton wool or wadding in the box.
Space Technology therefore creates a rigid box which ‘unifies’ resonance but doesn’t interfere with the driver. Is there more to the design? For a sealed enclosure, it’s harder to push the loudspeaker driver than it is to pull it out. Like a syringe. You do this in the science lab when you’re a kid. Block the end of a syringe: it’s then harder to push the plunger in, compressing the air, than it is to pull it out, creating a vacuum.
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