Components
Our rock maple wood horns are legendary and provide a truly immersive listening experience, with a smooth response on and off axis out to the carefully engineered 70 x 110 degree listening window. This provides uncanny stereo imaging across a wide listening area whilst limiting unwanted reflections from ceiling, floor and walls. Unlike a traditional dome tweeter hemispherical radiation the Augspurger® horn’s directivity puts more direct energy where you are and less where you aren’t!
The other business end of the horn utilizes a massive 4” 99.5% pure beryllium diaphragm. We chose beryllium (#4 on the Periodic Table of Atomic Elements) as it is one of the lightest metals and has one of the highest melting points among the light metals – 2,348.6 degrees F or 1287 degrees C!
To geek out a little more, beryllium’s modulus of elasticity (or ratio of the stress to the strain!) is about one-third greater than steel, making it ideal for forming into a dome. Beryllium is nonmagnetic and even resistant to concentrated nitric acid. It also has superior thermal conductivity and resists oxidation in air in normal temperatures. But perhaps most important of all, unlike other materials commonly used, beryllium dissipates vibrational energy (aka sound) very, very quickly. It is quite the opposite of a church bell, it hardly rings at all. So, when used as a diaphragm in a compression driver the sound reproduction is incredibly pure.
All of our drivers are carefully engineered for high sensitivity and power handling as well as the most musically honest expression. During the design phase each model’s driver components are carefully chosen to complement one another across a wide range of operating parameters. For instance, our drive units have uncommonly high sensitivity – between 98 dB (1 watt @ 1m) and approaching 110 dB for the beryllium equipped horn. This is an important element of why our systems sound so “limitless and effortless”, as many of our customers testify. Power handling, cone material and magnet type are just a few of the other parameters we consider when developing and choosing drivers. Because we engineer systems, every piece of the puzzle must fit together.
To further deliver a sense of limitless capability we power every system with powerful advanced D-Class amplifiers featuring low-noise and musical DSP for complete system control to provide personalized and perfect tuning to your room. A typical 3-way stereo system boasts 7,000 watts RMS, translating over 2500W for the LF band, nearly 1,000W for the mid band and nearly 300W for the horn! Peak power output is even more – over 8,000 watts! There is nearly always a lot of available headroom for the system, even under the most demanding conditions.
Construction
Every system is engineered for performance and built by master craftspeople using advanced CNC and shaping tools providing exacting consistency unit to unit. We use rugged MDF cabinet material, which is nearly inert, meaning non-resonant, and we use extra thick 1.5 inch front baffles and 1 inch sides and back with bracing as needed to further strengthen and reduce an unwanted resonances.
This approach delivers cabinets which can withstand the enormous energy generated in daily use in top recording studios around the world. 20Hz can hurt coming at you, but imagine being inside one of our subwoofers! That’s why we build them tough.
The Augspurger® horn alone is comprised of 11 separate pieces of rock maple and takes many days to produce, involving milling of raw materials, cutting of blanks, CNC and shaping machine processing, hand sanding and more. There’s nothing quite like it in professional use today.
But, we’re not finished here. Our durable standard matte black and silver finishes fit elegantly into any environment and custom finishes can be ordered to match any décor and add to your personal vibe! If you like that lime green on the Lambo, you can have it on your speakers!
Put simply, every Augspurger® system is hand-built with care and passion, with lasting quality, and we stand behind every system.
Configuration
Every AUGSPURGER® system is custom configured for the room it is going into, taking into account room volume, listening distance, placement, acoustic treatments and more to ensure the most accurate and exciting full-range sound reproduction, no matter the content being produced in that room.
We know a thing or two about what makes a good sounding room good. We work closely with many of the world’s top studio designers and builders to ensure the room design will work and details are paid attention to. Room dimensions and geometry, front wall design, primary listening areas, acoustic treatments all need to work together to create a space that sounds real, solid and inspiring. After all, there’s a good possibility next year’s Grammy winners will be produced in our rooms!
Once a system is delivered, whether it is free-standing or flush-mounted, care is taken to set up and position the monitor system correctly in the room. No amount of DSP can fix a poorly set-up system, so the time is taken to iron out the subtleties of positioning. Only then can our expert system tuners step in and create the final magic.
Each Augspurger® system is meticulously tuned to our decades-in-the-making reference mix curve, which ensures compatibility between other Augspurger®-equipped studios around the world. By matching the response curves from studio to studio, clients can work in any Augspurger® room worldwide, and trust what they’re hearing — even at high listening levels when feeling the music is equally crucial.
Our Augspurger® Power SXE Series amps can store up to 99 separate settings, allowing for our reference curve and a number of client-personalized settings. System tuning is among the most important aspects of Augspurger® ownership, and room-to-room compatibility is one reason why we take it so seriously. Another reason is the joy we see on the faces of our clients when a familiar mix reveals something new or the magic they infused into a certain song hits them with renewed detail and depth. When they are inspired they create better art, and for so many Augspurger® Monitors are an essential part of that experience. Let us build a pair for you.