Introducing the Sierra-LX!!!

[davef]

The first step in starting over was to redefine and further clarify the performance goals for this new speaker.

I officially started in this industry back around 1983 or 1984 as an audio salesman at an “insanely” popular audio chain (curious if anyone will get my reference.) My interest in engineering soon led me into the tech department where I would troubleshoot / diagnose / repair defective speakers and electronics. Somedays I would be on the floor selling, other days in the service area. Regardless of my duties for that day, when it came time to close or when there was nothing to do, I would lock myself into the dedicated sound room and have at it with a huge selection of electronics and speakers. To this very day, I can easily recall the emotional involvement, my physical reactions and the near instant mood change that turning the volume up, WAY UP would bring.

These were the days before there were subwoofers, and CDs were just starting to hit the shelves. Back then it wasn’t about ultimate detail, accuracy, measurements, it was about volume levels while staying clean, slam and lots of it, midbass punch, a big room filling sound and of course, deep bass that you could feel. ZZ Top was incredibly popular back then, and I would pop in my cassette tape, switch over to a powerful SAE amplifier and run it through some EPI 100’s, some massive Fisher D-15’s or my personal favorites for capturing that energy, some Cerwin Vega DJ speakers. We also carried ESS speakers (the first implementations of AMT tweeters) but while these sounded clear and detailed to me, they lacked that fun factor.

I always left those sessions energized and happy, - always.

I will never forget those times and few speakers these days generate that type of reaction. Much like being at a live concert event where no one is even thinking about measurements, resolution or accuracy. It’s all about energy, emotion, and that elusive “fun factor.”

This industry is changing fast and possibly not for the better. Are listeners becoming too focused on measurements? Too focused on achieving the perfect in-room frequency response or hearing every possible detail or nuance such that the listener can’t just sit back and enjoy the music or movie soundtrack? Does the listener become energized, emotional – does he or she leave the room feeling happy?

With that in mind, and with the assistance of our many partners throughout the world - it became my obsession to offer something a bit different than the typical Ascend product, and possibly any other speaker out there right now. The #1 performance characteristic being capturing that fun factor.

Based on my near 40-years of experience with loudspeakers, I characterize a fun speaker no differently than designers did back then, when most speakers were voiced by ear.

• Power handling, the ability of the speaker to handle huge amounts of power, thus producing high SPL’s while remaining clean without dynamic or thermal compression.
  
  
• Slam, the ability to physically feel the pressure waves produced. In more modern terminology – massive midbass punch.
  
  
• Deep bass, no additional description needed
  
  
• A big room filling sound. This requires wide dispersion, both horizontally and vertically.

In addition to that fun factor, this new speaker must also have the following characteristics in order to bear the name Ascend Acoustics (not necessarily in the below order)

• Smooth detailed highs, no harshness or listener fatigue.
  
  
• Accurate transient reproduction, little stored energy.
  
  
• Transparency, reductions in resonances for not only the cabinet itself, but also for the transducers. The speaker is producing what it is being tasked with, being sure no extraneous and distracting additional sounds are manifested.
  
  
• Compact size, like all Ascend speakers – as space becomes a premium few consumers have the room these days for large speakers.
  
  
• Good on and off-axis measurements.

With our goals now firmly in place, it was at that point that this project became incredibly challenging. Achieving a few of these performance goals was no problem but reaching all of them began to seem like an impossibility. How could we possibly reach all of them? I had already made up my mind that this was going to be all or nothing.

Sampling process began for woofers and tweeters and the more I sampled, the more convinced I became that this project was going to end up in my speaker museum, with dozens of other cancelled projects.

It was no problem finding a dome tweeter with high power handling, but very few had high power combined with the dispersion I was after and most had high resonant frequencies (a low resonant frequency would be needed so the woofer can be crossed to the tweeter at a lower frequency to improve overall directivity). Even more difficult was finding a suitable woofer; deep bass, excellent midbass, high power handling but for use in a small cabinet?

I was about to give up...

And then things took another dramatic turn….