Build a Satorique S3 and the curtain falls by itself - no other loudspeaker has to enter the stage yet. And as always, our decency dictates, we thank our development team for this wonderful construct, which should settle as a finished box sonically in the five-digit range. So I anticipate the recurring question, "What does something like this cost out there?" Here, the upscale self-build more than pays off.
Sound: Authentic with additional highlight
Certainly, there are always speakers that reproduce the sound authentically, open up an excellent stage and project the music into the listening room as a flawless hologram, so to speak. The Satorique S3 manages that easily. The Satorique S3 plays completely neutral and level stable. It is a true high-definition speaker, capable of reproducing the sound quality of high-resolution sources without question.
Sonically, the Satorique S3 thrives on its particular attention to detail combined with tonal neutrality and a dynamic range that few speakers are capable of reproducing. These dynamics enable both quiet listening with an unusually clear clarity and loud music listening without any coloration or annoyance.
So, if you have an unexpected visitor at home, you should be prepared for a longer evening if the visitor is only halfway music-savvy. Which is certainly something you're happy to put up with, right? After all, you like the doubtful faces when you oute yourself as a speaker self-builder. The speaker kit includes all electronics, speakers, parts and accessories, except the wood for the cabinet. Completely built crossover included.
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Satorique S3 – high definition for your ears
Perfectionism or not? A two-and-a-half-way speaker with or without beryllium dome ...
The same speaker in two versions - one with and one without beryllium dome - is an exciting approach. Both speakers carry the same characteristics and yet the one still offers an ounce more of audiophile resolution in the important high-frequency and especially also in the brilliance range, so that the higher-quality dome has the sound property of an excellent diamond tweeter.
With the appropriate crossover update, the box can even be upgraded from the cheaper to the perfectionist variant - after all, idealism won out in the development and we still do not want to deprive you of the cheaper variant.
The Satorique 3 / Satorique 3 Be stands for HiRes audio and offers a very special experience for the ears. For more and more audiophile sound gourmets, streaming MP3 files is by far not enough anymore. What to do when the demand rises above the data volume of 64-320 Kbps? Then we are talking about high-resolution audio files of the formats 24bit/192kHz as Flac-AiFF and -WAV. So fed, the Satorique 3 as well as especially the Satorique 3 Be celebrates high-definition for our ears - because in the end it always depends on the speaker, which has to convert an input signal, no matter how good, into sound before we can enjoy it.
In many cases, these studio-quality recordings sound much cleaner, more spacious, and more detailed. Singers also sound much more natural in the timbre of their voices. Many small details simply present themselves better with the appropriate clarity. What factors play a role in encoding analog sound?
Many audio systems encode the analog sound (i.e. the natural sound waves) using a method called PCM (pulse code modulation) and convert it into a digital format in this way. Here, the quality is composed of bit depth (16 or 24 bits, for example) and the sampling frequency. The number of bits in the encoding is particularly decisive for the sound: the dynamic range increases with the number of bits - this makes the difference between the background quietness or the softest and the loudest sound.
Digital music databases are now plentiful. Even classic analog records from the 1980s have long since felt the change of the times: Naimlabel or Linnrecords, to name just two, have adapted to the modern music world.
Anyone who doesn't keep up with the times today is missing the boat. This can also be related to the modest budget of the self-build developments: There's not much room to maneuver when it comes to the ever-increasing demands of customers. This forces us to rethink: The developments must be targeted, "less is more" is the motto, because always the same would not do justice to a modern target group, which has the demand of many different music sources. For this very reason, higher-quality kits will be the goal of our developments in the future - they don't have to be equally expensive, as our trick with the tweeter variant proves.
But how to get such a speaker in the DIY?
Years ago, it would not have been possible to build such an optimal loudspeaker in this price range - today, however, the modern drivers and the merged team from the fields of room acoustics, development and cabinet design result in completely different possibilities in product development.
And how can one still create a highlight with the mass-produced loudspeaker designs if everything is just a copy of old designs? So we came up with the approach of sending a proven design - with a 6- to 7-inch woofer and a tweeter - into new development without compromise. How is this supposed to work?
Concept: The tried and tested 2.5 and 3-way
rom the past we know a 2-1/2 way speaker usually with two identical loudspeaker chassis for the low-mid range, which then have to master this frequency spectrum together completely acoustically. But there is another way: It is indispensable that the lower bass-midrange driver in the 2-1/2 way speaker is a pure woofer and the upper one is a bass-midrange driver playing over a very wide frequency range. Therefore, ideally one needs a level-firm ("loud") bass driver as well as a low-midrange driver playing almost like a full range driver, which then usually cannot be quite as loud. The art is then to integrate these two into the cabinet in such a way that in total a deep, clear and resilient bass with a detailed midrange is created, which reproduces voices and instruments in all their fine nuances. This special design thus combines the advantages of the two-and-a-half-way speaker with its high efficiency and the advantages of the three-way speaker with its detailed performance in one loudspeaker.
This is exactly what is so special about the design of the Satorique 3.
In practice, the Satori 19 cm plays as woofer with its immense level stability - as it has already proven many times in the Satorique 4 - and as bass-midrange driver the Satori 16 cm with its exemplary broadband performance. With this bass-midrange speaker, the seamless transition to virtually any decent tweeter is possible in many crossover variations.
Crossover: Acoustically optimized
When developing two-and-a-half-way speakers, one has to deal with the problem that the high frequency range tends to be annoying due to its strong emphasis or the speaker sounds strained. There is a remedy for this: the 6 dB crossover. This is without much effort electrically correctly constructed, but as a rule acoustically cruel, because the low-midrange distorts the high frequency range by membrane resonances and the tweeter is exposed to immensely high loads in its free resonance frequency. This even tends to spoil the fundamental range.
For the Satorique 3, the initially theoretically calculated crossover is acoustically optimized. This is a long process, as both extensive measurements of the loudspeaker are required as well as extensive listening sessions, each with slight corrections of the individual components. The usual crossover development with simulation serves only for the normal crossover tuning, which is the basis for further acoustic optimization.
With this basic tuning, which aims at a linear play, a harmonious transition between the chassis and a balanced omnidirectional behavior of the box results. Already in this way, a normal loudspeaker plays well in a balanced way, which is quite sufficient for normal chassis, since the nuances of the music simply dampen away or cover up smaller inconsistencies - this is how many finished loudspeakers are developed in practice.
Then comes the real freestyle: Before the crossover optimization, the finished loudspeakers must first be run in for a week, because with such high-quality chassis, the crossover can only be finalized after the run-in, since the mechanical properties only set after the run-in process.
In the acoustic crossover optimization, interference - acoustic cancellations due to phase shifting - between the individual drivers, which inevitably occurs due to the spatial separation and arrangement next to each other on the baffle, also plays the decisive role.
For the area of the chassis in which it plays acoustically undisturbed, this effect is rather unimportant, just as in the areas in which only one chassis plays. The transition from one to the other chassis and, in addition, disturbances relative to the ideal behavior of the chassis - which is the rule above t