Hand crafted, truly advanced, precision loudspeakers for professional production environments.

The professional production engineer only needs one thing from a loudspeaker system.

 

To reproduce faithfully, without coloration, distortion, or limitation the original captured sound to the highest technical standards available.

 

Loudspeakers should ideally be inaudible, the listener should hear nothing from the loudspeaker itself, only the original program material should be heard in all its splendour, detail, and originality.

 

 

To engineer a product so transparent, so clear, so clean is an incredibly difficult feat of engineering.

 

No one single aspect of the loudspeaker reproduction system can be left uncontrolled in the pursuit of the ideal electro-acoustic reproduction system, every single path in the signal chain, the input device, the loudspeaker processing, the amplification, the transducers and the overall package has to be meticulously engineered to the highest standard and delicately refined over thousands of hours of development work to achieve the ultimate result.

At Electromotive Laboratories we develop all our own systems in-house from the finest components the industry has to offer.

 

We apply decades of collective experience, measuring, testing, and university study carried out on our behalf to the engineering processes that lead to our incredible end results.

 

Everything we do is based on solid science, proven techniques, years of development, and countless

real-world trials in the field.

Our systems are developed to work in parallel with precision engineered acoustic spaces for the best result, from the deepest lowest infrasonic notes all the way up to beyond human hearing limits our systems deliver effortless clarity and excellent time response that are towards the limits of modern technology.

 

Using the absolute latest in amplification, DSP, and transducer technology, combined with an acoustic coupling device designed over many years in one of the world’s most respected university acoustic departments the whole package combines to deliver the best sound we are able to achieve with advanced techniques.

At Electromotive Laboratories we don’t believe that human perception of sound suddenly stops at 20Hz, there is no real evidence to support this theory in the way there is at high frequencies. It has been shown that systems with the ability to perform well in the infrasonic region can add great dimension and depth to audio signals that enhance the realism of the overall experience.

 

It is not an easy task to engineer a system that performs at full power well below 20Hz, nor is it an easy task to engineer an acoustic space to perform well in this region, but simply because something is not easy shouldn’t mean that we should not do it. Quite the opposite, we should rise to the challenge and master the problem in our pursuit of a better result.

To work effectively in the infrasonic region needs a highly engineered system, a lot of careful work on the transducers, cabinet, and drive system must be done to ensure optimum performance in this region, to avoid this problem many engineers simply ignore this low frequency region, they simply filter all the infrasonic band out of the audio chain conveniently declaring this region of little use. It has been claimed that such frequencies clutter a signal, waste power, or damage loudspeakers, but we think that this kind of thinking is wrong.

 

A well-engineered infra-sound system will have considerably more detail in the lower octaves than a high-pass-filtered, less capable system ever will. Any cabinet tuning and remaining resonance is pushed well below the bass range and into wavelengths so long that the issues become less problematic.

 

It requires careful cabinet tuning and a very well-engineered drive unit to achieve a good output in this range. Small, compact cabinets simply will not do for such purposes. Infrasonic frequencies require large volumes of air to be moved relative to the output level and only a large well-engineered source can do this.

All Electromotive Infrasound series loudspeakers are engineered to work into the infrasonic range in order to provide the most accurate low frequency response possible.

 

It is an error to assume that as the end user may well not ever hear such frequencies, that we do not need to hear them in the production chain. As a quality control stage, a production monitoring loudspeaker should reveal all, material should never get to market with unheard, unintentional program material in the final result, it is hard to understand how we can be controlling the production of something if are unable to monitor it properly.

 

Only loudspeakers that cover the widest possible audible frequency range can ever be said to truly be professional monitoring loudspeakers.

In any loudspeaker system, the amplification is as critical as the loudspeakers themselves.

There are many factors that can alter the sound of any particular loudspeaker-amplifier combination, and each combination will differ slightly in how they perform together, and furthermore with associated cabling and power supply.

 

The loudspeaker-cabinet-amplifier combination is a complex interdependent system, change any one of these items and the final sound can change.

 

How a loudspeaker cone is loaded by the source impedance of the amplifier can vastly affect the resonance of that cone. A completely blocked cone, theoretically, has no low frequency free-air resonance. How an amplifier loads a cone has a significant effect upon the tuning of a system. As the connection between the cone and the amplifier the cables can also improve, or degrade the loading of the cone. It is a key aspect of our infrasound systems that low frequency resonance of the drive units is damped and controlled by the amplifier in order to control piston movement below natural, undamped, resonance and prevent drive unit damage.

No loudspeaker system can be said to be precise if it does not include tight control of every component.

 

Leaving amplification and cables to chance always leaves the end result to chance. This is no way to ensure a precise instrument that a monitoring system is intended to be.

All Electromotive Laboratories loudspeaker systems connect every drive unit to a dedicated amplifier, that amplifier closely matched to the drive unit.

 

We do not believe that any loudspeaker with a passive crossover or passive filter inserted between the amplifier and the drive unit can be considered professional.

 

The insertion of any degree of passive components between an amplifier and the drive unit prevents the amplifier from having proper predictable control of the loudspeaker piston, some even introduce different artefacts depending upon different cable and amplifier properties.

 

The same passive loudspeaker can sound vastly different with different cables or amplifiers, and as such can never be considered a professional reference source unless it is used with the very components it was developed with.

 

It is not adequate to view an amplifier as a device that simply amplifies a waveform, it is not sufficient to say the output waveform is exactly the same as the input, just bigger, therefore the amplifier must sound the same.

 

As amplifiers act as a controlling load to the loudspeaker motor systems they can have a huge effect on the motion of the piston. Amplifiers are required to brake the motion of the piston from moving beyond the desired position and to damp any spurious resonances, they have to present a backwards load to the piston when the piston is generating current to stop that piston. How an amplifier does this will affect the sound of the loudspeaker. Some amplifiers can even have varying frequency response related to load impedance, others not, it can be surprising to see the response on an analyser change simply because an amplifier was changed, but it does happen.

For these reasons, all Electromotive Laboratories loudspeakers are self-powered, fully actively filtered, one amplifier per driver configured systems.

 

Our amplifiers are assembled in-house from carefully selected components supplied by some of the world’s most expert OEM engineers and suppliers of high end amplification technology.

 

Each frequency band and drive unit has a specially chosen ideal amplifier associated with it, no compromise is made. High frequency bands have specially tailored amplifiers to deliver the most delicate of detail without excessive noise or power, while low frequency bands have amplifiers with incredible motion control, response right down to DC, feedback sensing from the drive unit (certain models) and adequate power to drive the piston effortlessly.

 

Only with this ideal control of drive unit motion, amplifier interfacing, and cabling properties can we then begin to use our specially tailored precision control of system response and timing to the precise degree that we need to ensure an optimum result. Every filter, adjustment, crossover, and time correction must be the correct inverse of the acoustic output of the end-user system in order to work correctly. Introducing any variable will render all the hard work pointless.

 

Only by building our own specially tailored amplifiers, could we be absolutely certain that every Electromotive Laboratories loudspeaker system will perform as intended, no compromise has been made on this aspect of our design.

 

While our smaller systems ship with integrated amplification, our larger systems are connected to our custom engineered Electromotive Power packs. Our Power packs are intended to stand below or next to the loudspeaker, additionally they can be wall-mounted, but, in any case they must be no more than 1m from the loudspeaker system to ensure precise control of all the drive units. The EMP range of power packs all integrate with a loudspeaker front control panel to provide easy access to power controls and status indicators.

 

 

Electromotive Laboratories

A Division of Newell Acoustic Engineering

Funchalinho, Caparica, Portugal

info@electromotive-laboratories.com