Still on the back burner?
There have been some general change of plans with the speaker kits. I have an MMT design done with the Peerless Tweeter that I'd release as a free design. It was the basis for the original Tycho. I'll continue to sell & support the Kepler but all the future Exodus speaker lineup will be sold as finished product only.
The future lineup includes a new 1" ceramic dome tweeter we have under development that sits in a 5.25" form-factor horn. The speakers will utilize the EX-6.5 along with our new tweeter. They also will be ALL active designs, utilizing a 1U form-factor active amplifier platform. The amplification is Hypex based UcD technology & their Bruno Putzeys designed SMPS power supply. The active signal processing is something I've designed on a custom 4-layer board, integrated with the Hypex amps.
The amplifier platform is flexible enough, that the same unit is used with all the speaker designs. There are some changes to the signal processing based upon the speaker ordered but the same 1U chassis supports all the designs. This is somewhat different than most active speakers in that the amplifier is NOT built into the speaker. The 1U chassis holds both the signal processing & four channels of Hypex amplification for the speakers. The reason for this is two-fold. For one, active designs with the amplifier in the speaker suffer from the vibration, heat and other such difficulties of their environment inside the speaker. They typically don't have the advantage of chassis shielding. That leads to the second reason, cable problems. In the pro-world most sources have extremely robust output stages, capable of driving long, high capacitance cable runs. That isn't necessarily true in the home environment. Long line-level runs increase the chance of amplifying the noised picked up in the cable runs. In addition, amplifiers built into the speaker require power cords be run to each speaker.
Our approach was to keep the amplification in a standard chassis, have simple normal length interconnects from either a 2-channel preamp, or a home theater processor enter the active module just like they would any other amplifier. They can also be controlled via a 12V trigger just like any other HT amplifier. The only difference being, that the amplifier has twice the speaker outputs as does a normal amplifier. This approach also allows the use of standard bi-wire speaker cables and interfaces to get the signal to the speaker. A standard Canare 4S11, Cardas Crosslink or any number of standard 4-wire speaker cables can be used in the same way a normal speaker cable would be used to get signal to the loudspeaker.
The reason for active is fairly simple. The full active designs allow us to do things that just are not possible with passive designs. I can equalize the bottom, use subsonic filters and HIGHLY configurable crossovers with much tighter accuracy than the passive versions and the design in general, has all the benefits of having individual amplifiers for each transducer.
The other benefit is efficiency, the active design utilizes amplifier power MUCH more efficiently than a passive design. I figure there is a good 1.5-1.8 multiplier for amplifier power (100W active = at LEAST 150-180W passive). This design is going to roughly deliver 140WRMS PER driver into the design. That would be equivalent to >400W per speaker using our most conservative multiplier. That is RMS power too, the peak power levels available will be much higher giving us MUCH more effective amplifier power levels. In a nutshell, we have WAY more peak power for each driver than will ever be needed and you have MUCH more effective coupling between the amplifier & the transducers since there is no passive crossover.
Also, this is a GREEN design whereby the amplification for a pair of speakers and all the signal processing consume <9W (pair of speakers) at idle. The power supply is >90% efficient and the modules >92% so this is as efficient as we are likely to ever get in terms of power amplifier design. The power supply uses Power Factor Correction to achieve much more efficient use of line voltage, in addition to some "Bruno tricks" to optimize transient energy demands in a single-stage SMPS design with unmatched efficiency, EMI emissions and low emitted noise. In standby mode, the device will consume around 5mA so once again, very green in design in both use and standby. Due to the efficiency, there is zero need for either active cooling or heatsinks, the chassis provides more than enough heat dissipation and it should never get more than a couple degrees above room temp, even under full-bore use. The chassis will likely be all aluminum, the PCB lead-free and the entire device not only designed for decades of use, but fully recyclable at the end of its substantial life-cycle. We have limited resources on this planet so designing SMART, rather than cheap is just wise use of the resources we have.
Of course since we are using Hypex design, we give up nothing in terms of sound quality. I've engaged in true overkill design for both the active circuit design, the input buffer for the UcD stage and the Hypex units themselves. The inputs are TRUE balanced inputs, using the THAT 1200 balanced line receivers, giving the input transformer-like noise rejection without the transformer distortion, size & cost. There will be options for Hypex based HxR voltage regulators to power the active circuits, and options for LM4562 opamps (early prototypes have used OPA2134s & NE5534s).
I have no idea of what the final retail price will be but I'm estimating around $1200 per speaker. For some this may seem like a big price jump but you have to compare both the cost of the amplification & the cost of the loudspeaker. I looked at some of the best low-priced options available for home theater and 2-channel. For a comparison I started with the Outlaw monoblocks and speakers. I don't have any experience with their speakers but I think they are representative of what a good quality direct to consumer business model can deliver in terms of both the loudspeakers, and the amplification. Their bookshelf is $500-$550 each so the combined price is $850-$900 per speaker. We are a going to be a couple hundred dollars more expensive per channel but deliver significantly better performance, and efficiency. The loudspeaker transducers will have MUCH better distortion & output capabilities, yet occupy about the same space. We should also easily have them beat on bandwidth on both sides, the midwoofer to 35Hz, the tweeter to 30K. The comparison in headroom won't even be close, the EX-6.5 is a MUCH more capable transducer, equal to most 8" form-factor drivers rather than a 5.25" driver (which is probably a good unit from Seas). Overall, we should offer a substantial improvement in performance for a very small delta in price and offer something that is responsibly built and designed for maximum energy efficiency.
