New Products

Treble Clef Audio (TCA), a new high-performance audio brand from Denmark, has produced a beautiful work of art, which also happens to be a speaker.

The striking TCA-M speaker is the brainchild of Ole Siig, an innovator and entrepreneur from Copenhagen with a diverse background that includes extensive experience in audio science and engineering along with a passion for music and what he calls sound by design. “Our goal is unparalleled appeal to the auditory, visceral, and visual senses.”

Siig has the visual aspect covered in spades with an imaginative treble clef structure that elegantly symbolizes the point of the exercise: the enjoyment of music. Explaining what may well be the ultimate expression of form following function, Siig says: “To deliver highly accurate and reliably authentic sound experiences, we must fundamentally break the conventions of passive and box loudspeaker design.” In breaking the rules, the company is using “acoustic science, patented innovation, design, and precise engineering” to turn traditional box speaker design on its ear.

The outcome is a statuesque and thoroughly unique three-way speaker devoid of the flat surfaces and edges that interfere with sound dispersion. The system combines a patented Air Velocity Transducer Bass System with state-of-the-art digital signal processing (DSP) and amplifier technologies, the latter in the form of Class D power amplifiers from another Danish company, Pascal Audio.

The amplifiers are built into the base of the speaker and supply 1,500 watts each to a separately enclosed “floating” tweeter and midrange driver at the top of the treble clef and a pair of woofers in the ball of the clef, which is physically divided with a space in-between. The woofers are joined face-to-face in a patented force-cancelling configuration, each firing into the void — an arrangement TCA says is capable of reproducing “even the deepest organ pipe or piano note with undistorted clarity, authenticity, and authority.”

TCA calls the bass section an “innovative design that embraces the folded dipole concept, ensuring exceptionally low and clean bass extension without the interference of box vibrations or resonances.” A 51-page white paper covering room acoustics, psychoacoustics, and the design concepts behind the TCA-M speaker, elaborates: “We want an asymmetric sound dispersion pattern that limits room interaction by reducing sidewall reflections and quelling standing waves through the front and rear sound waves being of opposite phase, as it would be when the woofer back pressure is not contained within an enclosure.” (For those who want to delve deeper into the speaker’s technical design, the paper is available for download from the About page on trebleclefaudioa.com.)

The aural landscape is made whole by a tweeter and midrange driver designed to achieve uniform sound distribution in all directions. Again, quoting the white paper: “We want the midrange system to exhibit an omnidirectional dispersion pattern matching the bass system at their cross over frequency. The treble system should match the directivity index of the midrange system at their ideal crossover frequency.” All of which translates into an immersive listening experience capable of, as TCA puts it, “authentically reproducing music and ambience experiences.”

TCA summarizes the key features and benefits of the TCA-M speaker as follows:

• Active powered speaker that connects to analog and digital sources
  
• Detailed, resonance-free bass down to 16 Hz
  
• No enclosure-induced sound coloration
  
• Physical design significantly reduces unwanted room interaction
  
• Vivid soundstage retains timbre throughout the listening space
  
• Acoustically time coherent with linear phase
  
• User preference sound presets accessible via a touch display
  
• Advanced limiters protect the speaker from overload

Standing 53 inches tall and weighing 187 pounds, the TCA-M speaker provides an analog balanced XLR input and a digital SPDIF connection that supports high-resolution audio up to 24 bits/192 kHz. The system also sports an RJ45 connection for transmitting Dante lossless audio over an Ethernet network and includes a 16-foot cable that runs between the left and right speakers.

The TCA-M is the first in a series of speakers built around the company’s patented acoustic platform and is being formally unveiled to the U.S. market in New York City next week. Built to order and hand-crafted in Denmark, the speaker features hardwood driver enclosures on an aluminum frame, available in brushed or anodized form. The system can be fully customized by choosing from a range of colors, materials, and design features, including a suede-like Nextel coating.

North American pricing has yet to be established but the recommended price in Denmark is DKK 626,000kr/pair, which translates to around $91,145. You didn’t think the Treble Clef Audio TCA-M speaker would come cheap, did you? For more information, visit trebleclefaudio.com.