Isophon Arabba Loudspeaker

Isophon – Western Electric – Venetian Rm – Floor 30 Room 319 – Isophon Arabba Loudspeaker – Shown with Marcassa Ebony and Ceramic Accuton Drivers, but is also available with the Diamond Accuton Tweeter as well. At the booth was a German Professor of Physics named Roland Galdo who spent an hour explaining to me the process of design that went into the Arabba. Having access to a Cray Supercomputer at Stuttgart University in Germany where he is a professor, Roland modeled the drivers measured data, the enclosure and the crossover network. According to him this required 32 simultaneous mathematical equations to solve with 800 unknown variables. Fortunately he has access to a Cray Supercomputer at the University and spent 6 months crunching numbers to create the best possible loudspeaker system. (Roland explained a PC would be simply too slow for this....) When asked the distortion of the midrange and tweeter, the answer was zero. This too may have been a mathematical estimation, the real number being some infinitesimally small fraction of one, but at that point, who is counting? (Besides Roland and his Cray I mean).

The sound was impressive, indeed perhaps flawless and the cabinet as beautifully crafted as it was meticulously designed. The crossover was rather unusual, perhaps completely unique and uses a technique where the response of a notch filter is simulated, and somehow divided into two, to passively achieve a slope of more than 70db/Octave, without the need for 12 components per section (for a three way speaker that would require 48 parts at a minimum.) Roland, it seems got away with only 32 parts, oddly enough the same number as the number of equations he let the supercomputer crunch. An impressive accomplishment even for those of us who never use all the buttons on our calculators! Turns out, after 6 months of computation the best cabinet shape (As far as practicality is concerned) is a flat front, a flat rear and two sides of equal and constant radii. MSRP of the Isophon Arabba starts from $37,000 per pair.

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