THE DIRECTOR

Description

The DIRECTOR

It is a well-known fact that LED Walls represent a significant challenge regarding placement of speakers that can deliver a commensurate level, most notably the critical center channel.

In reviewing what was offered by various companies, everything from reflecting some of the frequencies off the Wall, or use of combination line source and point source, or small speakers incapable of adequate performance and SPL, each of these approaches suffered from engineering problems – they were primarily marketing efforts.

The DIRECTOR represents a revolutionary and patent-pending approach to LED Wall loudspeaker design.

For two years ASCENDO worked on the development of this unique and scalable speaker design based on our beliefs that:

• Only point source speakers can deliver the desired seat-to-seat performance consistency in multi-seat home theater environments,
• Only a direct-radiating system will deliver the highest-performance results,
• The design should be as invisible as possible to keep the focus on the LED Wall

The revolutionary part is the AMT-driven waveguide with asymmetrical horizontal and vertical sound dispersion and HF dispersion lens. As a flush mount in-ceiling design, it disappears and integrates beautifully not only in a home theater, but also in multipurpose media or living room applications. TheDIRECTOR’s performance is scalable and can exceed 130dB SPL with ease when desired.

Furthermore, even in smaller rooms with relatively high ceilings, the sound must be perceived as coming from the vertical center of the Wall – without exception.

It became clear that in such extreme cases where steep listening angles to the speakers exist, we must use psychoacoustics through a time-aligned, EQ'd, and level-matched balancing speaker below the Wall to lower the perceived phantom sound source. The important details behind this idea were developed in conversation with Arnaud Laborie, Trinnov Audio’s CEO, who also conducted extensive research at a Micro-LED Wall manufacturers’ showrooms.

Our design approach, as always, is using a point source. In this case, we are using an asymmetrical, controlled-dispersion pattern waveguide to achieve our goals.

We believe we are the first company to do true, half-space Klippel Near Field scanning in the design process of such a speaker. The 3D measurement data is offered to any of our integrators capable of using this data. This way, the soundfield can be perfectly designed in any room to model coverage before the room is even built. We also provide the new CEDIA-recommended CEA2034 “Spinorama” information for complete transparency. We encourage each of these other speaker companies to be equally transparent in publishing the results of their solutions, measured by an independent lab.

Our Wall channel speaker comes with a mounting plate that allows the rotating and aiming of the speaker module in the ceiling for perfect alignment and coverage as L/Lc/C/Rc/R speaker (any of the five Wall channels often required for very large Walls).

The optional balancing speaker used below the Wall is very shallow at less than 4" deep, and only 7" wide, using a powerful, point source coaxial design.

The primary in-ceiling system is a two-way, active design with external amplification and DSP. When the balancing speaker is needed, each set of upper and lower speakers requires a three-channel amplifier and DSP (or a processor such as Trinnov or similar, which has these capabilities).

The speaker drivers were carefully chosen to achieve record low distortion levels and true high-end resolution. The tweeter is a powerful AMT design, and the woofer is a 10" quad voice-coil, dual gap, low inductance design like our famous 18” and 21" drivers. We designed, developed, and tested 3D-printed special waveguides for the tweeter and the woofer to find the best coupling between them without significant lobing or cancellations.

These patent-pending innovative Wall channel speakers are part of a home theater or theatrical 3D playback system usually paired with the class-leading Ascendo subwoofer systems including the exclusive infrasonic subwoofers capable of reproducing single-digit frequencies with authority and precision.