Not neutral.

Most of hi-fi argues about frequency response. Flat is treated as the goal, and a system’s character as an error to be designed out.

But a response curve is a steady-state measurement. It describes what a system does with a tone held long enough to settle. It says almost nothing about the first few milliseconds — how quickly the system starts, how cleanly it stops, how hard it has to work to get there.

That is what I build for. Time, not flatness. Speed.

Efficiency is the lever

A high-efficiency system reaches a given level barely working. Less power going in, less excursion, less heat in the voice coil, less compression — less of everything that smears a transient. The same level out of an inefficient system means a driver working hard and an amplifier working harder, and that difference is audible even between two systems that measure alike.

This is why the amplifier is 2.7 watts. It is not a constraint I am designing around; it is the point. A loudspeaker that needs a lot of power before it comes alive has already given up the thing I am after.

Speakers with impact are the ones that deliver impact effortlessly.

Everything else follows from that. The horn, the single high-efficiency driver, the few honest watts — none of it is nostalgia. It is what the time domain asks for.

The listening experience begins long before the music starts. A loudspeaker is furniture before it is an instrument: it sits in the room every hour you are not listening, and it has to earn that time too.

Where this comes from

Devon Turnbull’s OJAS Art Bookshelf is where I started looking. The fastest way to understand what creates presence is to build something that has it, so the first cabinets took their cues from that work — the horn on top, the single driver, the honesty of leaving everything visible.

What I have been chasing since is my own answer to the same question. The cabinets, the finishes, the amplifier have all moved, and they will keep moving. The debt is to an approach, not to a drawing.