Loudspeaker History
Loudspeakers have been around for almost as long as recorded sound. In their long history, they’ve gone from single drivers to multi-driver systems, and from using no crossover at all to a single capacitor or a single coil; to multi-order conventional crossovers; to electronic crossovers operating in the digital domain and claimed to be “time and phase perfect.”
To house the drivers, designers have taken every possible approach, from no enclosure at all; to horns; to sealed boxes (infinite baffles or “air suspension”); to resonant enclosures of various kinds (bass reflex, passive driver, distributed port, etc.); to “transmission lines”; to back to panel systems that require no enclosure at all.
Driver designs have varied even more widely: Drivers have used cones of almost every conceivable material; “hard” domes, “soft” domes”, and “inverted” domes; small flat panels of styrofoam, of honeycombed metal, or of other materials; giant flat panels, electrostatically or magnetically driven; ribbons, piezoelectric elements, triboelectric elements analogous to piezoelectrics, but using polymers instead of crystalline materials, and even plasma, corona discharge and other elements that use no physical diaphragm at all.
Any number of approaches have been tried to make modern loudspeaker systems better and better-sounding and there has certainly been improvement -- never enough, though, until the AERO driver, to actually bridge the gap between just great reproduction of recorded sound and the convincing recreation of a musical event.
A Bold New Approach
The problem has always been that loudspeaker designers have tried to defy the laws of physics or to somehow get around them instead of using them to their advantage. With the AERO loudspeakers, all that has changed: Designer Paul Paddock has invented a completely new type of driver -- NOT a cone, NOT a dome, NOT a panel or a ribbon or some dangerous ozone-producing high voltage device1 – but an electro- mechanical transducer utterly unlike anything ever seen before – that uses the laws of physics to effectively revolutionize the art of sound reproduction.
The new AERO driver (US and world patents applied for) is the heart of all AERO loudspeaker systems, and brings with it a new level of resolution, transparency, harmonic and timbral accuracy, and a kind and degree of imaging and soundstaging never before possible. Because it works differently than any other driver, the AERO driver can and does do things not possible to any other driver: It requires no baffle; it can be made in almost any size, to produce almost any range of frequencies; because it’s an extremely “easy” load, it can be driven by almost any amplifier, tube or solid state; and because of its near perfect dispersion characteristics (see “Polar Pattern”), set-up of complete AERO loudspeaker systems requires practically no effort to get perfect imaging from almost any position in almost any room.
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1. Plasma and corona-discharge drivers use very high voltages to produce a non-material diaphragm equivalent. A natural by-product of these high voltages is ozone, which can be a health hazard in excessive concentration.