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When we began working
on this speaker, our initial goal was to
create a very simple enclosure. It should
be the sum total of our knowledge, including
experiences with earlier cabinets and different
kinds of wood. At this stage, we had no
inkling that it would become our most expensive,
most complicated - and most amazing speaker
yet.
The basic intention was
to develop an enclosure at low cost to our
kit clients. Ideally, we planned to take
a thin, pliable sheet of wood, bend it backwards,
and fix both ends into a short "tail". Then
we'd saw a hole in the front, mount the
speaker chassis, and presto you'd have your
speaker.
Things went pear-shaped;
or, as a German saying has it: "The devil
dwells in details." The tension of the bent
wood was so high that its curves broke,
and it would break invariably, no matter
what modifications, tricks or coaxing we
tried. Sometimes, it would shatter a few
days after we'd already felt moderately
triumphant, but shatter it would. Obviously,
we had to change our approach to the whole
thing: We separated the front from the side
flanks and knew instantly we'd hit the right
track. The different prototypes will be
shown in a separate story some day.
After many months of
hard work, the final result was a slender,
curved cabinet. It avoids the disadvantages
of designs with parallel sides and is crafted
with elaborate workmanship. The side walls
are not pre-formed and are bent into shape
under high tension: a difficult process
to master, even more so as the floor is
open and the flanks can be fixed to three
sides only. Again, the design follows the
rationale that a loudspeaker housing is
comparable to the corpus of an instrument;
it should use rather than eliminate energies
from the driver. Thus we carry on a tradition
of reverberating housing concepts that Western
Electric and Altec Lansing first formulated
in the Fifties.
The speaker debuted in
Germany at the Frankfurt HighEnd Show 2000.
At a time when few full-range
speakers were available, it received much
attention for its unusual shape and aesthetic
appearance. We couldn't predict that a segment
of the DIY-scene would react by staging
a run on vintage radios, only to gut them
and fit the speaker units into plagiarized
Rondo enclosures. We are sorry about this
and share the chagrin of the original collectors
of those items. (http://www.6moons.com/industryfeatures/rondo/rondo.html).
Rondo was the sum of
our observations, experience, and research,
the bottomline of years' worth of building
enclosures in different types of wood, thickness
and volume with one and the same speaker
unit. Arriving at vastly different results
by changing just a few, often minute parameters
has been a profound experience.
We are immensely grateful
to Prof. Dr. Nico Schalz, professor of musicology
at the Bremen Conservatory, who was the
first to privately give this speaker intense
attention, praise, and feedback. (http://auditorium23.de/Kommentare/Nico1.html
, only in German language).
We couldn't come to a
better conclusion than our French representative
in Paris, Alain Choukroun:
"Rondo,
c'est poesie." (Rondo is poetry)
Read the Review by Jean Marie Piel in Diapason
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