Final sEARius touches (Patreon)

Just wanted to let you know that I spent the last couple of days to optimize the sound and I think I have managed to finish the tuning for the searius speaker now. It was an odyssey and the sound has changed a lot since again my last demos, hopefully for the better. I have shot a video demonstrating the final sound which I will post next.

I am preparing the next steps now, I ordered 7 new samples that should be finished within the next days and which will hopefully arrive soon. I am still finalizing the logo which you can see as sketch in the attached images. It will be slightly smaller than shown, I am still refining the shape and size. This logo makes sense in both directions vertical and horizontal, although the vertical one is the "correct" orientation. This should immediately point you to the driver side of the speaker. The speaker will also get additional feet at the back side in order to allow for an omnidirectional placement with the drivers firing up.

I would also like to share some measuements of the final tuning which were done outdoors. These are single sweep measurements from 50cm pointed at the center of both speakers respectively. The KH80 as reference in white and the searius in blue shown at different volume levels. The measured bass reduction is a result of the sinesweep. You should get a more realistic representation of the actual bass reduction when analyzing music, as the compressor will usually release pretty quickly after a stronger kick unlike with a sweep.

You can see that at lower levels the searius follows the bass response of the KH80 pretty closely, with more extension and just some additional slight boost below 60hz. Upper bass and lower mids are slightly less than how the KH80 measures. Treble is slightly boosted compared to neutral, the dip you can see around 14khz cancels out off-axis. I tried to keep the treble smooth and unobtrusive regardless of listening angle, which was the hardest task as the dip you can see measured from front becomes a peak listened off-axis. The goal was to create a sound as natural yet exciting and joyful to listen to as possible regardless of placement or room.

I am still trying to optimize the compression levels which I will do once the new samples arrived to be also able to judge sample variation and adjust the overall sound even better towards this if necessary.

The plan would be that once the speaker is produced, in case this should ever happen, all units will be checked by me again to ensure that they meet my own quality expectations. I want you to get exactly the result I intended and want to stress that to avoid any quality issues all units will go through my own personal check before sending them.

The speaker can play pretty loud and stay quite dynamic up to maximum, although it can become scratchy at highest levels with particular recordings. I could limit maximum volume more, but I wanted to keep this headroom for older and softer recordings which should all be played perfectly clean up to maximum. I remember most Klipsch speakers distorted heavily if pushed to higher levels, the KMC3, KMC1 etc all didn't play clean either, and I would need to reduce either bass or dynamics also at lower levels if I tried to keep distortion perfectly under control. I want to mention this, as many seem to have some severe problem with distortion if speakers are pushed to the max. In case of the searius this was simply the necessary compromise in order to get the deepest bass and also retain enough dynamics and punch at high levels, the built in DSP didn't allow for better control over this. If you encounter some distortion simply reduce volume 1 step or 2.