Hey guys, thanks for your interest!
Well, it's still going forward, the only reason it isn't out yet is due to how busy things have been, and also how difficult things have been in the last year and half.
It's mostly good news, I've been super busy making cables. I tried to hire help but training people is more difficult than I thought. The cables I make generally don't use conventional wire or very simple geometries and thus are very time consuming and difficult to assemble vs a "normal" cable. It's like if you're a carpenter and need to hire an apprentice, yet you're the only carpenter in town and you can't find anyone with any experience whatsoever. Also, due to seasonal variation in orders it's not possible to hire someone as a permanent full-timer quite yet, so I'm in that spot where I have to do more work than I'd really like to in order to get past this hump and be able to hire full time help.
On the bad news, it's probably similar to everyone else, I got covid (twice), my parents got it, my mom fell and broke her pelvis, my dad had both a shoulder and a hip full replacement in the last year. I had major shoulder surgery for a broken glenoid almost exactly 1 year ago, which makes building cables much more difficult! After trying to train help I suffered from intense burn-out. I love what I do and wouldn't trade it for anything but that doesn't mean things are always easy and the workload + isolation + sickness and injury have simply crushed me. I fell behind in both lead times as well as answering emails and everything else.
Ok, that out of the way I have some updates on a few things:
I have made a composite mold for the horn with 180 degree roll-back and it's AWESOME. This is going to be a big advantage over the horns that only have a 90 degree rollback, the 180 roll reduces diffraction and removes one more issue that makes the speaker identifiable as a horn. Now, I think if you couldn't see the speaker you'd have absolutely no clue what it is. It doesn't sound like a horn, or a box, or a dipole... IMO it has the least amount of distortion and diffraction vs most any other speaker type. The horn will also be made out of a CLD (Constrained Layer Damping) sandwich using basalt fiber and the damping layer will be foam used in aerospace applications for exactly this purpose, which will further reduce the contribution of the horn to the sound. Pic of the composites mold below.
On cables, I have a new prototype UPOCC silver IC cable. I've finally managed to completely do away with a plastic or enamel dielectric! In the past I've tried to do this by filling teflon tubes with inert gas, but sealing such a tube is impossible long-term given it's used as an actual cable than needs to flex, etc. My current solution is to plate the wire with graphene. REAL graphene that's very strongly bonded to the surface of the wire, not just graphite dust like most folks who claim to use graphene use. The prototype uses cotton insulation but the final may use silk. The graphene prevents corrosion and seems so far to have no effect on the sound, so the result is a wire that will not corrode and has HALF the dielectric absorption as a converntional teflon wire. This is a game changer and will make for a cable that is, AFAIK, the most technically advanced and ideal IC cable on the market in terms of technical specifications. Add to this a BRAND NEW GEOMETRY that has the noise rejection of star-quad with the capacitance of a litz braid.
I can make this same cable using silver/gold wire as well. So in the near future I'll announce the pure silver cable, then I'll follow up with two silver/gold version for those who want to add some warmth.
Here's the composite mold for the LeCleach 320 Hz horn:
