Bombshell: Why loudspeaker salesmen will soon hate LessLoss (a pending new product release from LessLoss Audio!)
LessLoss is soon going to disrupt one of the largest margin, complicated and bulky aspects of the audio business. We've come up with a way for you to connect a small, relatively inexpensive set of devices to your speaker terminals which will, for little money, open the doorway to a completely new horizon of performance. You will get results comparable, if not better, than upgrading your speaker's tweeter, or the caps, or the internal wiring. And you won't need to tinker with anything like that.
After successful production and delivery of all pre-ordered
C-MARC™
Firewall 64X units, we have gained a lot of loyalty form customers all over the world. When LessLoss says of any new product, "It's time!" we really mean it. Never is a product released without first making absolutely sure it delivers the goods, and in a most obvious manner. You can read many user feedback entries on our website's board, but here are just a few examples:
-- "These are component level improvements."
-- "...music that I have been listening to in some cases for 20 years: ‘that’ was there for all those years and I only hear it today?"
-- "The most incredible soundstage and imaging I have ever heard, bass that no stand mounted monitor should be capable of."
-- "The musicality is outstanding ... a totally relaxed and satisfying listening experience."
-- "Nearly had me in tears such was the emotion in the female vocalist voice and that she sounded like she was in my living room!"
-- "Congratulations to you and your team, you have done it again."
Let's now work downstream from the power source.
We all know how getting that next speaker upgrade involves difficult decision-making, big financial outlay, complicated logistics, and often times even new amps in the process. Acoustic room-matching issues are often the bane of those involved. And if that weren't enough, there is the ordeal of matching visual decor... need I say more?
All of this trouble will soon be circumvented by a simple little gadget that opens the doorway to a new level of speaker performance, without having to upgrade your speakers or to mess with any of the internal crossover parts.
What you get by using this small device is:
- Much better focus. Did somebody switch out the tweeter to a much more expensive model?
- Much less "fog" in the soundstage. Did somebody replace the internal acoustic damping material?
- Pure sonic colors to die for. Did somebody redesign the crossover for improved cross-driver impulse response?
- Meticulous control of bass. Has the bass driver's moving mass been halved?
- You save a lot of money. Did I just steal a new level of loudspeaker? Am I dreaming this or is it real?
Oh yes, it is real. And it is now available on pre-order basis. The Early Bird release is ever popular here at LessLoss, due mostly to the rock solid track record we have of never letting anybody down. No overpriced "audio jewelry" just for looks. No 'snatch the cash and disappearing' acts. Just rock-solid performance with every dollar going directly towards massively increased audio performance. The gear is always functional and aesthetically clean. After all, we're all in this for the sound, and that definitely comes first. Sound, and real-world accessibility.
What is the product compatibility, and how will it be structured?
The new
Firewall for Loudspeakers will be made of four separate units. These will be placed between the speaker end of your speaker cables and the speaker terminals themselves. Each unit will have its own speaker terminal which accepts both banana and spade connectors from the speaker end of your existing loudspeaker cable. The terminal will be housed in a small transparent enclosure. From here, a short
C-MARC™ loudspeaker cable umbilical, highly flexible, will extend to a termination of either banana or spade (you choose which for your application). This will connect directly to your loudspeaker's terminal. One complete set of this new
Firewall for Loudspeakers will consist of four such separate units. One for Left positive, one for Left negative, one for Right positive, and one for Right negative. All will be marked clearly for easy installation.
Firewall for Loudspeakers Production, or How DARPA missed the Audiophile Boat
Years of Effort
The LessLoss Firewall has gone through a lot of research and development since its inception. What began as a novel idea about implementing Skin-filtering by exploiting the naturally occurring Skin-effect of current running through a wire has been expanded upon many times since its inception. Today we are actually using field structuring around the conductor in unique ways. The
Firewall 64X is a LessLoss proprietary technology, based on precisely positioned directional metallic particles within a thermoplastic carrier. The result becomes kind of a micro-transformer. Kind of a ferrite core filter. Kind of a directional set of A/C diodes. Very much kind of a near field Blackbody for signals. That pitch black background, so important to stable "3 AM" type sound quality, is getting set to a higher and higher bar at every step of our way. People keep asking, 'Can it really get any better than this?' Answer: you bet! When the Firewall for Loudspeakers is connected to the signal at the speaker terminal, it brings a cosmic change to the sound quality.
How do we make it?
Well, we don't. We assemble it. The core production of our proprietary technology is carried out by a certified specialty lab by men in what can only be described as hazmat suits. This is actual photography from their state-of-the-art facilities:
The above machine makes the proprietary Firewall components.
How is it done?
It's done by laser.
Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS), also known as
Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF), is an Additive Manufacturing (AM) technique designed to use a high power-density laser to melt and fuse metallic powders together. This process has the ability to fully melt the metal material into a solid three-dimensional part, unlike Selective Laser Sintering (SLS).
SLS was originally developed in the mid-80's under sponsorship of DARPA. This process has the disadvantage that resulting parts have porous surfaces. Expensive post-processing methods such as Hot Isostatic Pressing are required to reduce the pores. In other words, the parts must be placed in a high pressure argon atmosphere and raised in temperature, then quickly and uniformly cooled, in order to achieve stability and reliability.
More advanced than DARPA?
We are using an even more advanced system, called
Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS). Research on this process began in 1995 as a German research project at the Fraunhofer Institute. This new technology was first commercialized in 2000.
Since the components are built layer by layer, it is possible to design organic geometries, internal features and challenging passages that could not be cast or otherwise machined.
Below are actual objects made by our production partners using this innovative, state-of-the-art DMLS process. What's fascinating about the design freedom enabled by this advanced technology is that you can make objects nested into objects, with surfaces and internal voids which would otherwise be absolutely
impossible to make.
In fact, you could, if you wanted, make all of the above objects placed, quite literally, inside one another. Meshed with one another. Even turned Inside out. This was not possible before.
Hey, we can use this!
That's where LessLoss comes in. Our solutions are so uncommon, that even the 3D laser production guys had to produce at least 80 prototypes before they mastered nuances such as repeatability, precision, scale and visible and non-visible surface demands. They use the most advanced software available such as Solidworks, so going back and forth from accountably accurate changes was only a matter of fortitude.
The computer process slices the 3D CAD file data into many ~20 micrometer thick layers. The thin layers are, one by one, selectively smelted by the laser which is located in a tightly controlled atmosphere of argon gas. Believe me, this is no desktop operation. Oxygen levels must be kept lower than 500PPM to prevent explosion. The high-power ytterbium fiber laser beam is literally hundreds of watts strong. The laser energy is intense enough to permit full welding of the particles to form solid metal, without creating a porous internal structure.
The brains, heart and soul of the new Firewall for Loudspeakers
The new
Firewall for Loudspeakers is so effective because in designing it we did not ask the typical questions. We asked fundamentally different questions and came up with fundamentally different answers.
This product is not about what the amp sees in terms of impedance or load. This is no Zobel network or other invasive technology. What the speaker does in conjunction with the amp remains absolutely the same as before.
In terms of electrical performance, what the amp will "see" per polarity when sending its signal through the
Firewall for Loudspeakers is a 16mm^2 cross section of pure copper, which is incredibly high conductivity, much higher than most any loudspeaker cable, and certainly more than any internal wiring of any loudspeaker. So, in no way does the
Firewall for Loudspeakers impede dynamic signal flow, nor does it influence the impedance of the speaker that the amp sees. In flowing through the Firewall unit, the signal is conditioned without ever influencing its resistance at all, at any audio frequency. This has a profound effect because only the most natural results follow, without any adverse effects to micro-dynamics. The amp (any amp in fact) will continue to perform in conjunction with the speaker exactly as it did before. The resulting sound quality, however, is greatly improved.
Our approach can be split up into three basic terms.
(1) The
brains (unique in-house controlled copper processing),
(2) the
heart (proprietary
Firewall noise reduction solution)
(3) and the
soul (special assembly approach).
A perfect balance of the three, all three being exemplary and far beyond the typical scale for audio solutions, results in a magnificent boost in sonic performance. Let's take these three and unpack them.
(1) The Brains
In standard extrusion processes, the copper undergoes many forces until the desired size is achieved. Pictured at the top of the image below, you can see a standard copper wire as extruded using industrial methods. Next to this standard copper wire, you can see our copper that we use in the
Firewall for Loudspeakers. It is a completely different beast. This is created in house through proprietary means.
LessLoss proprietary copper sourcing and in-house processing creates absolutely purpose-specific raw material which undergoes absolutely no tension or forces other than those which are specific to each polarity of our design. Thus, the positive and negative
Firewall for Loudspeakers units are completely different from the very inception of the individual conductor material used. This is no typical exercise in choosing different off-the-shelf metals for positive and negative polarities to get a 'house sound' deemed 'nice.' It goes much more fundamentally into the nature of the material itself. We come intriguingly close to dancing with the concept of brownian noise itself.
This time-consuming and fundamental level of detail adhered to in production creates a material (seen here next to standard copper) which bears a physical malleability closer to that of lead (or even butter), than industry sourced copper. Thus, even its acoustic properties are fundamentally different than those of standard copper. Industrially annealed copper, known as 'soft,' does not even come close.
In slightly different lighting, this image shows in direct comparison how different our in-house made raw material is from standard copper. Standard copper, even soft annealed type, withstands considerable pressure. Our special material does not at all and must be handled with the most extreme care.
99.99999999999999999%... ad absurdum
We have painstakingly investigated the tie between copper purity and resulting audio performance. You will see much talk in the audio world about the so-called 'nines race.' Through direct consultation with several metallurgy labs which determine metal purity with governmentally recognized certification processes, these bearing legal status, we have no doubt that this type of claim is complete bogus. In fact, there is no certification laboratory on earth which will certify any purity higher than the industry standard 'four nines,' which means 99.99%. Anything you see over and above this in terms of purity is pure fiction. And even the four nines purity cannot be guaranteed for an entire spool. Buyer beware.
What we have established through our fundamental investigation is that, in fact, it is not the purity in terms of material analysis which yields the performance we are aiming for, but rather the purity of the process. For it is easy to take the purest copper, process it according to our advanced proprietary methods, assemble it specifically incorrectly, and the resulting sound quality will be far worse than using run-of-the-mill industrially sourced re-cycled copper which boasts no exotic purity at all. These types of tests prove without doubt that people have been asking the wrong questions and have been looking in the wrong place for sonic bliss.
We take pride in this proprietary knowledge which allows us to boost performance to unworldly levels far beyond what any fictitious 'nines race' leader can even dream of achieving.
(2) The Heart
The heart of our solution is the special Firewall technology we have been constantly working on and perfecting for over a decade now. Again, due to the proprietary nature of the solution, we cannot delve too deeply into its every intricacy. But we can explain how it is made.
It is made by laser. Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS), also known as Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF), is an Additive Manufacturing (AM) technique designed to use a high power-density laser to melt and fuse metallic powders together. This process has the ability to fully weld the metal powder material into a solid three-dimensional part of any conceivable shape or form.
We are using the most advanced AM system called Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS). Research on this process began in 1995 as a German research project at the Fraunhofer Institute. This new technology was first commercialized only in the year 2000.
Since the components are built layer by layer, it is possible to design organic geometries, internal features and challenging passages that could not be cast or otherwise machined.
A computer process slices the 3D CAD file data into many ~20 micrometer thick layers. The thin layers are, one by one, selectively smelted by the laser which is located in a tightly controlled atmosphere of argon gas. This is no simple desktop operation. Oxygen levels must be kept lower than 500PPM to prevent explosion. The high-power ytterbium fiber laser beam is literally hundreds of watts strong. The laser energy is intense enough to permit full welding of the particles to form solid metal, without creating a porous internal structure.
Any approach to the machinery must be made wearing protective gear, as seen below in an image of the very people working on our
Firewall production.
Magnified many times, below you can see the implementation of the latest Firewall technology in conjunction with our special in-house designed raw copper rods. Because the
Firewall is made by laser, extremely fine details of design can be taken advantage of, resulting in a very sensitive part. We could not deliver this product and provide reliable long-term results in the exposed form as pictured below. Through simple usage, it would quickly bend or break up and lose its physical integrity. The copper is rather like a soggy noodle which has been out in the sun for a few hours.
Careful assembly techniques need be established because any maladjusted move results in immediate compromise to this delicate solution. These techniques require special tooling custom manufactured for LessLoss to enable a rational assembly method and to keep costs down.
(3) The Soul
When the brains and heart come together, in strict fashion according to our best knowledge resulting from years of countless experiments and discoveries, the soul of the device shines through. The transparent housing refracts the ambient light creating optical illusions of a fantom third Firewall inside. Continue turning the cylinder and at times it can even appear that there is no wall thickness.
This approach takes care of two things. Firstly, structural integrity of all of the sensitive components is maintained, even if you throw this device around or drive on it with an industrial vacuum cleaner. It is rock solid to the user, and liquid soft to the signal. Secondly, the lack of any colored material surrounding the active portion of the Firewall guarantees the most natural sound quality possible.
As in any refined balancing act, too much of any one ingredient will inevitably color the outcome. The closest thing to a total absence of coloration is the least electro-magnetically filtering material, which means in this case absolutely pure transparency. This allows the perfect conditions for the new
Firewall for Loudspeakers solution to really shine. Magnificently so, as you will instantly hear.
Of course, with a solution so effective and mature, we need a flexible umbilical of the same uncompromising performance.
C-MARC™ cable is the only choice for this, of course. Nothing even comes close in terms of purity, naturalness, and silence of operation.
One listen, and you'll see why.
How about bi-wiring applications? How will the Firewall connect in such cases?
If you are using bi-wiring, such that you have two sets of loudspeaker cables between amp and each speaker, it is still advisable to use one Firewall for each terminal input. You can not use this
Firewall for Loudspeakers on the amp output between amp and cable. The direction of signal will in that case be wrong and it will not function as designed.
If your speakers have one pair of +/- terminals for 'High frequency' and one set of +/- for 'Low frequency,' you should be using a Firewall on each of these four terminals per speaker. In those instances, for a stereo setup involving two loudspeakers, the total needed is eight individual units. This means you will need two complete stereo pairs of the
Firewall for Loudspeakers product. One stereo pair is made up of four units, and two stereo pairs are made up of eight units.
The positive terminal units differ both internally and externally from the negative terminal units. These differences are clearly marked so you will never inadvertently make the mistake of mixing up positive with negative. Polarity makes a huge difference as it is fundamental to its operation.
Is it advantageous, as is the case with the Firewall 64X for power, to daisy chain two in series?
It is. Definitely.
Is the Firewall for Loudspeakers product merely an application of the existing Firewall 640x for power?
Absolutely not. We always strive our hardest to offer only the latest, most advanced art we are capable of. The
Firewall for Loudspeakers is a different beast altogether and these two should not be confused.
