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Ambience Speaker Systems was founded
by audio "lifer" Tony Moore as the creative consummation
of a career steeped in both music and electronics. Tony, like
most of audio designers, was obsessed with electronics from childhood,
building radios and speakers at the age of nine. Back in the
days before FM, Tony's best music source was the family's old
Kriesler Multisonic TV. "It had a superb sound and we used
to sit and listen to the ABC test pattern music every Sunday,
a great mixture of classical and popular and in good-sounding
FM.
My tastes were quite broad, even then."
MATHS, PHYSICS
& WOODWORK
Tony's family migrated from the UK in the 1960s when Tony was
five years old. Technically oriented, he attended Melbourne's
Aspendale Technical School, but returned to UK with his homesick
parents in 1971, where he matriculated, majoring (prophetically?)
in maths, physics, chemistry and woodwork. Disappointed with
England, Tony's parents spent two years saving the fare and re-emigrated.
Said Tony, "I was very glad to be back. I had a hell of
a time, especially once I was old enough to get my motorcycle
licence!"
TONY THE TECH
Back in Australia, Tony completed a Radio Trades course at RMIT.
Finishing his course while working for Natsound in Melbourne
city, he went on to work for Channel Nine as a technician in
charge of professional broadcast equipment, and then for AWA
Professional, working with Hitachi cameras and installations
for big companies. "We did some pretty major installations,
including the security cameras for CHOGM meetings," Tony
recalls, "and we fitted out the test cell for TAA's new
wide-bodied plane."
After years of working for others, Tony decided, in 1981, to
launch out on his own as a TV, radio and amplifier service technician.
He soon found himself worked off his feet. "That's what
finally drove me to the bush," he told Australian Hi Fi.
"I got peeved off that people just wouldn't allow me any
free time. They'd found out where I lived, and I'd have to move
TVs and videos out of my driveway just to get the car in. So,
in 1989, we sold up and moved out here to Newmerella, with plans
to do something different." 'Here', is five acres near the
small seaside town of Newmerella in Gippsland, Victoria.
BOUND FOR THE
BUSH
Tony didn't just move himself to Newmerella. The whole Moore
family went along, including Tony's wife, Barbara, and their
first son, Darren, then two years old. "There was not much
in the way of employment up here," said Tony," and
I'm not a person who can stand to be doing nothing. I certainly
didn't want to go fishing every day of the week. So I decided
to take what had always been my hobby-building loudspeakers-
and turn it into a business. I'd been building speakers since
I was nine or ten, from drivers I'd scavenged from old radios
at the tip. By the '70s, I was making transmission line speakers,
and selling them to friends and friends of friends. They were
quarter-wave designs the size of a small fridge. They sounded
great, and were very successful. But what I didn't like was their
1imitations in the midrange and the treble. When I started designing
speakers, there were only normal cone drivers available. Then
they developed soft-dome tweeters and dome midrange drivers,
which were a great improvement. But even after making about 10
or 12 pairs over a dozen or so years, I still felt that they
could be better."
DRAWN TO RIBBONS
To overcome the limitations of cone drivers, Tony decided to
investigate ribbon technology "Ribbon speakers have been
around since the 1920s, but it was the American Apogee Scintilla
ribbon speaker that inspired me. I found, however, that the bass
was some what limited in extension and power handling. And the
bass speaker being set off to one side made the sound seem to
come from two separate sources"
Tony was aware that
ribbons, like electrostatics, don't go down very low "Some
will only go down to 80 Hz, depending on the width of the panel,"
he says.
Like others before him, he decided to overcome the ribbon's frequency
limitations by combining it with a conventional bass driver,
initially using his favourite transmission line design for the
bass section. Tony also felt that the Apogees presented problems
of amplifier compatibility "Their impedance can go down
to half an ohm, so you need virtually a $50,000 amplifier to
run them. The 1920s idea was also very low impedance, with matching
transformers that tended to interfere with the frequency response
and add to manufacturing costs and problems. As an engineer,
I was aware of the need to make a speaker that could be driven
by normal domestic equipment. Our ribbon speakers will run on
a $400 Pioneer amp; in fact, we're running a home theatre system
with little $30 Silicon Chip amplifiers from Jaycar and they
sound very nice. Not as nice as my big room with the Macintosh
tube amplifiers and Electra power amplifiers, of course, but
for home theatre…."
Not wanting to breach,
or even be thought to have breached, anybody's copyright, Tony
went right back to the 1920's textbook on ribbon technology which
was not subject to copyright "The essence of the approach
was a thin ribbon of foil in the middle of the magnets. The load
was extremely low, but back in the '20s, using tube amplifiers,
you could match the transformer to the load. Certainly no transistor
amplifier could run it. Our solution was to use a ribbon made
up of 15 segments hooked up in series. This gave us the phenomenal
impedance of around four ohms, which 99 per cent of amplifiers
will be able to handle"
NIGHTMARE MAGNETS
Tony's investigations also included magnetic formulations. "We
decided, in the end, to use ferrite magnets. We did make up a
prototype with neodymium magnets, which gave us another 3dB sensitivity.
But neodymium makes the manufacturing process an absolute nightmare.
They're ten times stronger than ferrite and they almost ripped
our fingers off while we were handling them. The magnets are
very small, and so is their charger, so we couldn't assemble
all 15 in their uncharged state and then put them in the charger.
We made prototypes, but it was too much of a problem for a 3dB
sensitivity gain.
For the ribbons, Tony looked at a range of non-ferrous metals
and settled on good quality aluminium foil supplied to a special
thickness. Luckily, there were several suppliers who could supply
to his fine-tolerance specifications. In exploring ribbon performance,
Tony found that, though the ribbon section could go down to around
40Hz, a 200Hz crossover point to the dynamic woofer made for
even better power handling.
THE FOUR-PIECE
SUITE
The first Ambience prototype was a ribbon with transmission line
box, in a four-piece configuration with the ribbon and woofer
sections separate. "It was awesome," Tony recalls,
"but it was pretty big and cumbersome, and not an easy product
to market. When we took the prototype around various stores and
colleagues within the industry, they agreed that they sounded
superb, but feared that, as a large, wide, four-piece, they would
be hard to sell. We then looked at putting them in the one package,
and abandoning the large transmission line enclosure for a smaller
bass-reflex environment." Here began Tony's search for bass
drivers to match up to the ribbon section. "This was another
nightmare," said Tony, "the hardest part of the exercise.
We looked at good quality manufacturers such as Dynaudio, Peerless
and Vifa, and found some off-the-shelf models that came pretty
close, but we still weren't entirely happy."Eventually,
I had a chat with Ralph Waters, then with Richter, who suggested
that I give the Norwegian company SEAS a call. I did, and within
a month they'd flown a guy out from Norway to see us. We've been
with them ever since; they're a totally magic company.
They developed a driver for us around the specs that we wanted,
and within about three months they'd air-freighted us this little
woofer that was better than anything else we'd looked at. They
weren't concerned with our scale of manufacture; even now, we
only buy in small quantities - small by their standards anyway.
They became quite enthusiastic about our project and now, after
exhibiting in the Vegas and UK shows, I have now met all their
technical people. It's a top company. Their very first sample
was very close to what we were looking for, so we knew they understood
what we were aiming for. And with each generation, they have
gradually improved the drivers' mechanical power handling."The
version driver we now use is virtually indestructible, and it's
only a seven-incher. We took the sample of the latest modification
they flew out to us, hung it from the ceiling on little chains
and hooked it to the most powerful amplifier we had lying around
at the time, a 300-watter from Redgum. We then chose the lowest
frequency I could generate with my signal generator,12Hz -300watts
of power at 12Hz, with no enclosure! Watching the little white
dots we'd painted on the cone, we could see we were getting around
one inch of travel. We came back half an hour later and they
were still going. Those two original sample drivers are still
in my own personal pair, which I also use for hi-fi shows. After
eighteen months of shows, where they've been subjected with up
to 600 watts of power, they've really taken a pounding, yet are
still going strong.
Tony sees SEAS as a partner in his project. "These drivers
are not catalogue speakers-nobody else can get them. A designer
in the UK has asked to use them, but SEAS asked our permission
first."
LOSING WEIGHT
It took almost five years to develop the first commercial Ambience
models and to establish reliable suppliers for a whole range
of high-quality components but eventually, the first two-piece
Ambience ribbon/bass-reflex loudspeaker speaker was released
in early 1994. "It was still very big," Tony admits.
"They were 1.6 metres tall and 490 millimetres wide. And
it was this sheer size that tended to lose us the female acceptance
factor. So we trimmed them back to around 450mm wide, tidied
up the look a bit and sold quite a few. We acted as our own distributor,
but we didn't retail them. Our main Sydney dealer in the early
days was Len Wallis, and in Melbourne, Carlton Audio Visual was
our biggest player."
Next came the Ambience
Slimline model. "It was the same width as the original but
a bit tidier looking, " Tony explained."
When we got them down to a third of that width, in August 1996,
we called them the Superslim series. We achieved this by putting
the ribbon speaker in-line on top of the bass speaker instead
of having them side by side.
Now we get full female acceptance; in fact they actually like
the look of them. The old 1800's were taller but one-third the
width, and we found that the height just didn't create an acceptance
problem. And a sense of height does wonderful things to a sound
stage.
The new model is even narrower again, but the 1800 is still one
of our best sellers and is the one reaping high praise from overseas
reviewers."
QUOTABLE QUOTES
Ambience speakers are receiving very favourable comments in the
US audio press. "We've had a review in Secrets of Home Theatre,"
Tony told us," and we've had snippets in a magazine called
Bound for Sound. I have just received an e-mail from Bound for
Sound reviewer Rick Weiner, who has the product and is about
to do a full review. He has e-mailed me his extremely flattering
initial impressions. [The writer has sighted the e-mail and it
includes the unambiguous statement, 'The sense of space, and
the liveliness of the speaker is better than anything I've heard
with the exception of the Quads.... I'm convinced you've assembled
one of the best speakers available today.') "Audio magazine
also wants to do a review," Tony enthused," and since
these early notices, our US representative has been flooded with
enquiries, mainly from dealers. There's a Catch 22 operating
here; you can't get a review in Stereophile unless you have five
or ten US dealers, but the dealers won't touch you unless you
get the reviews! We have plenty of stock available for consumers
in the US and now we've had comments from Absolute Sound."
As for the rest of
the world, Tony is cautious about revealing his plan (if any)
for world domination. "We have no UK or European agents
yet, and think it will be quite hard to compete with the cheap
freight and free movement between EC countries. Because of this,
we think we'd do better to set up America first"
Although Tony has, staff building the speakers, he insists on
inspecting and listening to every pair made, so he is personally
responsible for all production "If I think it's wrong, it
goes back. We test everything and there are so many checking
stages to pass through as the speakers are being assembled that
if anything has not been connected properly, it'll be found out.
We try to run them in for as long as we can. We try for seven
days, but this is not always possible
We just leave them playing music all day, every day. We tried
using a sine wave, but I can't see the point. During the running-in
period, the bass drivers cone suspension softens up to where
the specification says they should be for the rest of their lives.
This takes about seven days for the cones, but for the ribbons
it's a longer process. Initally, the ribbons sound a little bit
sharp…a little bit grainy…a little bit metallic, but
after about 150 hours, they sweeten up and sound magic, so that
'metallic' is the last thing you think of when you hear them"
LOCAL HERO
"On the Australian side of things, we have a great team
of dealers, with only Darwin yet to be covered. We have three
dealers in Sydney; two in Melbourne, and we're looking at a third,
but we don't want one on every street corner. And we don't want
to end up with a mass-produced product either. We have already
automated what we can; the timber frame is partly mass-produced,
but the trims depend on which plantation timber is available-there
are no significant acoustic differences between Grey Gum, Blue
Gum, Mahogany or Rosewood: they're all solid, dense hardwoods.
With the panels that we manufacture, each pair is unique. We
cut the four sides from one plank, but the next pair is from
the next plank. We don't use veneer at all, just solid Australian
hardwoods."
The Ambience ribbon
is also manufactured on the premises; as is everything but the
woofer. Tony even looked at Australian companies for his woofer.
"They wouldn't (or couldn't) break their rules especially
to suit us. With our SEAS drivers, the only failures we've had
have been caused by amplifier failure, such as an amp burning
out and sending 45-volts of d.c. down the line. The poor old
voice coil doesn't like that. We're very flexible with our warranties.
The normal standard in the industry is five years, but we're
so confident in our product that we'll look at failures beyond
that. We get so few failures that it's worth our while to replace
a component, just so we can get the old one back to see what's
happened." After initially telling us there'd been had no
ribbon failures, Tony recalled two: one that was clawed by a
cat and one that was subjected to the output of an unstable amp.
Tony explained, "The guy had pulled an interconnect out
of his 400watt amp while it was playing, and the amp went into
radio frequency transmission, went up in smoke and curled the
ribbons up. We replaced them anyway." Feedback from dealers
and customers is deeply appreciated at Ambience, and regarded
as a valuable resource for future R&D. "We regularly
get lovely letters and e-mails from people who have bought our
speakers and are totally and utterly rapt."
Tony is excited about
the internet's capacity to spread the word. "On the internet,
you just type in 'Tony Moore', ' Anthony Moore', or just 'ribbons',
and you'll find us. If an inquiry comes in from somewhere we
have a distributor, we'll refer the customer to them. If we haven't
got representation there, we send the speakers direct, for full
Australian retail price. But it's not a big part of our market.
You can't compete with your dealers; it's cutting your own throat."
Ambience also has a policy that, if a customer has something
against dealing with one of Tony's local retailers, Ambience
will sell the speakers direct, at full retail, and divide the
commission among all Ambience dealers in that city. "We
want everything to be totally fair to everyone," explained
Tony. "It can be a really bitchy industry. People are still
slagging off each other's product. I think amplifiers would be
the bitchiest area. I'm lucky, because I am out on my own with
ribbon speakers. There are so few direct competitors."
THEATRICAL RIBBONS
Like many a hi-fi "lifer", Tony was initially less
than excited about home theatre and its implications for Ambience.
"I am still deeply into music and I didn't believe that
this kind of ribbon speaker required a home theatre set-up, because
they image so well in stereo. Being dipolar, too, they create
a sort of surround sound of their own. But we got so many requests
from customers and dealers for a matching centre speaker that
we've now built one. Unfortunately, it's very big and very long.
It's a panel lying down flat, shaped a bit like a three-sided
boomerang. It's really meant for a projection system as there's
no magnetic shielding. If we'd used magnetic shielding, we'd
have spoiled the dipolar effect of the open back. But the total
effect is magic, and it has changed my outlook, somewhat, towards
home theatre."
Ambience now fields
a range of seven speaker Ambience models: 1400, 1600 and 1700
versions of the Superslim Ultra; 1400, 1600 and 1800 versions
of the Superslim; and the Ribbon Centre, which comes in both
Dolby Digital and Pro-Logic/THX variants. There are also three
option packages: a 3rd-order crossover, bi-wiring terminals,
and solid timber edges.
"We've just
finished developing the Ultra series," said Tony. "We
call them Superslim Ultras, or Ultras, to avoid any confusion
with cigarettes or feminine hygiene products. Of our six stereo
models, the difference between them is that the bigger models
work best in big open rooms, whereas the smaller models work
well in big or small rooms. But you can't put the 1800s in a
tiny room. The sound stage is so massive, it swamps you. But
the 1400s were designed for people with tiny rooms - three metres
by three metres - and you can push them up to the wall, though
the depth dimension won't be so big."
Chris Green
Australian Hi Fi |
