I haven't had time to design any web pages yet, so this will be an owner's forum exclusive.
I will start by posting three messages in this thread. This, the first, will explore the story of how the V3 came about. The second will be more technical and the third will include some pictures of the first production cabinets and preliminary pricing information.
the storyWhen we originally introduced the Veracity HT3's, the price was set at $3495. After building a few pairs, it quickly became apparent that the labor involved was far greater than anticipated. So the price increased accordingly.
The HT3's quickly became our largest selling speaker by far. And we soon outgrew our space. We needed a facility and help to fill all the orders that were coming in. With the new space came new overhead - more help, more tools, etc. So the price increased again.
The HT3's are VERY labor intensive and not as profitable as they should be. The cost of parts has increased with higher copper prices, better finishing materials and the falling value of the US dollar. So further increases may be inevitable (although we will resist as long as we can).
As the price of the HT3's increased, we noticed more and more people vowing to eventually have us build a pair for them - as soon as they could afford it. All the necessary price adjustments had put the HT3's out-of-reach for some people. So we started exploring how we might produce a speaker that was very comparable to the HT3 in terms of performance, but at a target price of the original HT3's - roughly $3500.00.
There are basically two parts of the cost equation - parts and cabinets. On the parts end of the equation, we knew that even if we were able to find alternative drivers, the quality requirements would be such that not a great deal of savings would be available here. But we started looking anyway.
On the cabinet side, the key would be to build a simple cabinet that was easy to construct. And anything we could do to eliminate labor would help the cause.
A few months ago, Dennis Murphy asked if I was interested in evaulating a driver he had heard some great things about. It was a 4" midrange from the German manufacturer Visaton. It was reputed to feature a very flat frequency response and capable of resolving high levels of detail. It certainly looked promising.
Looking at the entire Visaton line, I saw they also had a couple of 8" woofers that looked promising. So we ordered one of each for testing.
When Dennis measured them, they looked very good indeed. And we thought that perhaps they would pair nicely with the LCY pure ribbon tweeter that had been performing very well in the Veracity HT2's.
Now that we had the drivers selected, it was time to work on the cabinet.
In order to keep costs down, it was decided that we would need to work with a standard rectangular cabinet. No fancy, labor-intensive tapers, curves or other design elements.
Since the 8" driver would allow a slightly narrower cabinet than the HT3, we opted for a 10 1/2" wide format. But the woofer needed slightly more volume than the HT3. That was OK, though, since a lower cost cabinet would not include plinths (which we would still make available as an option).
We ended up with a design that was 43" tall, 10 1/2" wide and 16" deep. The midragne/tweeter section of the cabinet is sealed while the woofer section is ported. Once that was decided we built a test cabinet and sent it on to Dennis for crossover development.
While Dennis was working on the crossover, we started building the first production pair of cabinets. We made a few modifications to the internal bracing based on Dennis' feedback.
As soon as Dennis finished his work on the crossover design (another stellar job, by the way), we ordered crossover parts and began preparing them for the new cabinets.
Last week it all came together and from the instant we fired up the first pair, it was evident all of our work had paid off.
...to be continued
