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Introducing Illusio Audio and its first product, the Alana loudspeaker

Duke

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Illusio Audio is a new high-end loudspeaker company that takes an innovative approach to loudspeaker/room interaction. In effect, we take the wide, uniform type of radiation pattern which consistently does well in controlled blind testing and divide it up into two narrow segments. We aim one segment towards the listening area, and then deliberately fire the other segment in a very different direction which results in a fairly long reflection path length before arriving at the listening position. The result emulates the conditions in a well-treated (but NOT overdamped!) dedicated room: Clean first-arrival sound; followed in time by minimal early reflections; followed by a fairly strong late-onset, spectrally-correct reflection field. The dedicated late-onset reflections are user-adjustable in volume and spectral balance, to accommodate a wide range of room acoustic situations.

The Alana is a two-way 10" stand-mount speaker which is optimized for the range above about 75 Hz, as we have found that a good distributed multi-sub system outperforms in-room anything we could put into a pair of loudspeakers. We will be showing with a subwoofer system based on the four-piece AudioKinesis Swarm.

The "secret weapon" of the Alana is the matching LORAstand, which incorporates a very smooth-sounding horn aimed up-and-back at a 45 degree angle. "LORA" stands for Late Onset Reflection Assist, and the role of its horn is to increase the amount of late-onset, spectrally-correct in-room reflections. The output from the LORA's horn fills in the upper-range energy which is missing from the midwoofer's far-off-axis output below the crossover region. Combined with the output from the front-firing waveguide, the net result is approximately the same in-room direct-to-reflective sound ratio as a good wide-pattern speaker, with the ability to tailor the loudness and spectral balance of the reflection field independent of the direct sound.

(The LORAstand can be used with other stand-mount speakers, and includes switchable circuitry designed to complement the off-axis response characteristic of many stand-mount speakers.)

The critical difference between the Alana/LORA and a conventional wide-pattern speaker is that the "center of gravity" of the reflections is pushed back in time relative to what would normally be the case. This results in a weaker "small room signature" from the playback room's acoustics, while effectively presenting the reveberation which is on the recording. This combination of characteristics tends to shift the perceived spatial quality from "they are here" to "you are there", the latter being arguably the holy grail for spatial quality for a stereo system. And from this heightened ability to create a convincing "you are there" illusion we derive our company name, "Illusio".

My personal contribution to Illusio Audio is in waveguide design and crossover design. The front waveguide is an Oblate Spheroid based on Earl Geddes' equations with the throat entry angle matched to the compression driver's exit angle. Others more skilled than me in their respective areas contributed the overall system concept, selection of the actual parts used in the crossover and elsewhere, and industrial design.

The Alana and LORAstand will be making their debut at the upcoming Capital Audio Fest, which begins on November 11, 2022. We will be in Room 623, paired with Infigo Audio electronics.

(For the record I retain my company, AudioKinesis, but my own products will be aimed at a lower price point and will not include the specific refinements contributed to Illusio by its other team members.)

At the moment all we have is a rendering; the LORAstands we'll be showing at Capital Audio Fest will have a black base instead of the metal outrigger feet, which will be available but not in time for the show:

gold Alana black LORAstand3-001.jpg
 
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Curvature

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A very interesting and well considered polydirectional. Are you planning to provide measurements?

And can you please post pics from the show and the price?
 
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Duke

Duke

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A very interesting and well considered polydirectional.

Thank you very much! That's not a word you see everyday... do you or did you at one time own Shahinians? Richard Shaninian being the first to use the term "polydirectional" to describe a loudspeaker's radiation pattern, to the best of my knowledge.

Are you planning to provide measurements?

You mean like the Klippel Spin-o-rama? Not at the moment. Klippel spin-o-ramas are much more likely to show up at some point for something under my own brand, "AudioKinesis". Such would be fairly indicative of what's going on in the Illusio line, as the same crossover designer used in-house spin-o-ramas for both.

And can you please post pics from the show

Will do! We're also expecting Alana to catch the eye of one or two audio press photographers. Not that I'm biased or anything...

and the price?

Pricing is not my department, but I can tell you that virtually all of the major components are considerably more expensive than what I use in my AudioKinesis models.
 
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AudioJester

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Thank you very much! That's not a word you see everyday... do you or did you at one time own Shahinians? Richard Shaninian being the first to use the term "polydirectional" to describe a loudspeaker's radiation pattern, to the best of my knowledge.



You mean like the Klippel Spin-o-rama? Not at the moment. Klippel spin-o-ramas are much more likely to show up at some point for something under my own brand, "AudioKinesis". Such would be fairly indicative of what's going on in the Illusio line, as the same crossover designer used in-house spin-o-ramas for both.



Will do! We're also expecting Alana to catch the eye of one or two audio press photographers. Not that I'm biased or anything...



Pricing is not my department, but I can tell you that virtually all of the major components are considerably more expensive than what I use in my AudioKinesis models.

Any ballpark figures for your Audiokinesis models? Asking for @Pearljam5000
 

restorer-john

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Very interesting and very good looking speaker. Something about it reminds me of a minion. :)

1666572587700.png


Seriously, would love to hear a pair. 10" two ways with compression drivers in throats/waveguides can sound wonderful- letalone one with this level of care in design.
 
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Duke

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Any ballpark figures for your Audiokinesis models? Asking for @Pearljam5000

On my list of things to do is updating pricing, as just about all of my costs have gone up significantly in recent months. My four-piece Swarm subwoofer system has been updated to $4100 for the set, but my other prices have not been adjusted yet.

For instance the Azel Tower was $6k to $7k/pair depending on the compression driver, and those prices will be going up by somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand to fifteen hundred dollars, depending on how much my enclosure cost has gone up.

Very interesting and very good looking speaker. Something about it reminds me of a minion. :)

View attachment 239069

Seriously, would love to hear a pair. 10" two ways with compression drivers in throats/waveguides can sound wonderful- letalone one with this level of care in design.

I LOVE it!!

The color is actually an automotive gold, but in the rendering it looks more like a mustard yellow.
 
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pedrob

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I'd love to hear them, but I'm not sure what they'd sound like behind a screen so I couldn't be influenced by their flashy design. That'd be in a negative way since ostentatious has a negative impact.
 

Curvature

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Thank you very much! That's not a word you see everyday... do you or did you at one time own Shahinians? Richard Shaninian being the first to use the term "polydirectional" to describe a loudspeaker's radiation pattern, to the best of my knowledge.
I was unaware it was his term—polydirectional is very apt in describing the deliberate approach to radiation patterns. I've never heard the Shahinian speakers sadly.

I think these kinds of speakers (Bose 901, DCM Time Window) received a mixed reputation over the years because the fundamentals about correct spectral distribution were loosely known for a lot of years, especially with little access and less understanding of measurement gear.

Polydirectionals are fundamentally precarious IMO in that they are more room dependent and position sensitive than other designs. If room/speakers/listener are one system, then polydirectionals pull more of the burden onto themselves. I would guess you've already considered that with the 45 degree tilted backfiring "energizer". The late arriving energy must splash multiple surfaces and arrive at the listener position from multiple directions,. That would make it more diffuse than the strong specular reflections from the back/sidewalls produced by bipoles. Likely, and especially due to the frontfiring constant directivity design, the imaging is kept intact but isn't necessarily anchored to the phantom line connecting left and right channels. All guesswork on my end, of course.

I'll keep an eye out for measurements. There's a lot in the design that's asking for investigation.

All hurried words aside, I'd really like to hear them.
 
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Duke

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I'd love to hear them, but I'm not sure what they'd sound like behind a screen so I couldn't be influenced by their flashy design. That'd be in a negative way since ostentatious has a negative impact.

The enclosures were designed with automotive finishes in mind, and the colors were chosen to draw attention. I guess it's not necessarily always positive attention! Which is fine, at least it's attention!!

If you don't mind, what looks good to you, in a loudspeaker shape and/or finish?

You do some pretty complicated shit, Duke. Would love to hear it sometime.

Thanks! The way I see it, what's the point in us doing what others are already doing, and doing well? If we're doing what's basically a "me too" speaker, well that's just not very interesting for anybody, is it? Should we mimic Revel or KEF or Genelec or JBL? Instead, we're trying to give some unorthodox ideas the best chance we reasonably can.

(There's actually a bit more shit going on than what I have described, but I don't want to give everything away.)

I think these kinds of speakers (Bose 901, DCM Time Window) received a mixed reputation over the years because the fundamentals about correct spectral distribution were loosely known for a lot of years, especially with little access and less understanding of measurement gear.

I had been building polydirectional speakers for several years when my friend and colleague Jim Romeyn used the vertical in one of his experiments. This was a breakthrough, because it gave us a way to achieve adequate time delay for the additional energy without needing the speakers to be five feet out into the room, so suddenly we had a passive, small-room-friendly way to do things that heretofore would have required a big room.

Through in-house experiments we found that the loudness of the additional energy at the listening position was another critical factor. Multiple listeners independently (and blind, manipulating a remote without looking at the numbers) arrived at the same SPL as the optimum; too loud and clarity just barely started to degrade. Dialing in the SPL of the additional energy at the listening position is not something you can readily do with most polydirectional speakers.

Polydirectionals are fundamentally precarious IMO in that they are more room dependent and position sensitive than other designs.

Our experience thus far is that we need little to nothing in the way of room treatment most of the time. The Alana prototypes seem to do a pretty good job with the direct sound and the reflected sound, and the up-and-back orientation of the rear-firing horn allows them to be placed very close to the wall(s) if necessary, so aside from fine-tuning the controls on the LORAstand, they seem to be fairly room-agnostic. In the event the Alanas get too much boundary reinforcement, their rear-firing port can be plugged, resulting in a fairly low-Q sealed box. In some rooms, that's how the prototype sounded best.

I would guess you've already considered that with the 45 degree tilted backfiring "energizer". The late arriving energy must splash multiple surfaces and arrive at the listener position from multiple directions,. That would make it more diffuse than the strong specular reflections from the back/sidewalls produced by bipoles. Likely, and especially due to the frontfiring constant directivity design, the imaging is kept intact but isn't necessarily anchored to the phantom line connecting left and right channels.

Exactly!!

What happens in most of the rooms we tried the prototype in is this: The spatial impression varies greatly from one recording to the next, and sometimes even from one track to the next on the same album, and seems to be dominated by the recording itself rather than by the playback room's dimensions, particularly regarding the sense of envelopment and the sense of distance or depth. I think the relatively long time-gap before the strong onset of (spectrally-correct) reflections helps to minimize the "small room signature" of the playback room while facilitating the presentation of the "venue acoustic signature" on the recording.

Ironically the WORST room for the prototype was a dedicated listening room with something like eighty thousand dollars worth of acoustic treatment. The room had been treated for a similarly-priced pair of wide-and-exceptionally-uniform-pattern conventional speakers. The Alana prototypes sounded lifeless in there, presumably because the room treatment was degrading the spectral balance of the reflections by absorbing too much short-wavelength energy. So the ONE type of room I'm leery of is "extensively treated", at least until I have an idea of the specifics of that extensive treatment.

An absorptive wall behind the speakers, and/or an absorptive ceiling, would be counter-productive for what we're doing. On the other hand normal, untreated rooms work very well as long as they don't have some obvious problem like slap-echo.

I'll keep an eye out for measurements. There's a lot in the design that's asking for investigation.

Without me right there to do my song-and-dance, I don't think the measurements would look all that impressive. The designed-for listening axis is 15 degrees off-axis, and definitely NOT directly on-axis (the round waveguide results in an on-axis dip whose location changes with listening/microphone distance). The front-firing waveguide's pattern is going to seem too narrow relative to the midwoofer's pattern. This mis-match is perceptually corrected by the additional off-axis energy contributed by the LORAstand's horn, but how is the measurement program supposed to know how to splice that in? My guess is that any calculated "preference score" would be pretty dismal, as we're firing energy off in odd directions which the preference score algorithm may not interpret the same way the ear/brain system does.

In fact this apprehension about how the measurements would look without a thorough accompanying explanation, not to mention how disastrous the preference score could easily be, are among the reasons why an AudioKinesis speaker is much more likely to be Klippel-tested first: I'm willing to risk MY product getting a bad result, but I DO NOT want to risk a product in which is invested a considerable amount of other people's time and money and hopes and dreams by pushing for it to be Klippel-tested. If an AudioKinesis product bombs the test, and I can't sing-and-dance my way out of it, at least I will not have directly crushed other people's efforts.

And I don't see how any data generated by a Klippel test, or any other measurement suite, is going to validate in the slightest our claims about the Alana's spatial quality. I don't think that's something we can yet capture and convey with test instruments.

All hurried words aside, I'd really like to hear them.

Shoot me a message with your location and maybe we can figure something out.
 
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thewas

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Without me right there to do my song-and-dance, I don't think the measurements would look all that impressive. The designed-for listening axis is 15 degrees off-axis, and definitely NOT directly on-axis (the round waveguide results in an on-axis dip whose location changes with listening/microphone distance). The front-firing waveguide's pattern is going to seem too narrow relative to the midwoofer's pattern. This mis-match is perceptually corrected by the additional off-axis energy contributed by the LORAstand's horn, but how is the measurement program supposed to know how to splice that in? My guess is that any calculated "preference score" would be pretty dismal, as we're firing energy off in odd directions which the preference score algorithm may not interpret the same way the ear/brain system does.

In fact this apprehension about how the measurements would look without a thorough accompanying explanation, not to mention how disastrous the preference score could easily be, are among the reasons why an AudioKinesis speaker is much more likely to be Klippel-tested first: I'm willing to risk MY product getting a bad result, but I DO NOT want to risk a product in which is invested a considerable amount of other people's time and money and hopes and dreams by pushing for it to be Klippel-tested. If an AudioKinesis product bombs the test, and I can't sing-and-dance my way out of it, at least I will not have directly crushed other people's efforts.

And I don't see how any data generated by a Klippel test, or any other measurement suite, is going to validate in the slightest our claims about the Alana's spatial quality. I don't think that's something we can yet capture and convey with test instruments.
I can understand that in this case you wouldn't want to publish a CEA-2034 spinorama, what would be interesting though would be responses at the LP in a typical room vs a well regarded traditional design like a Revel, for example total non-gated response and gated early and later responses.
 
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Duke

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I can understand that in this case you wouldn't want to publish a CEA-2034 spinorama, what would be interesting though would be responses at the LP in a typical room vs a well regarded traditional design like a Revel, for example total non-gated response and gated early and later responses.

That WOULD be interesting!

I would totally trust Amir or Erin's listening impressions, sighted or not. I recall Amir giving a positive review to a little round Canon(?) speaker that actually had a negative calculated preference score, so I'm confident that his ears are not beholden to what his eyes see.
 
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Colonel7

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Very interesting and very good looking speaker. Something about it reminds me of a minion. :)

View attachment 239069

Seriously, would love to hear a pair. 10" two ways with compression drivers in throats/waveguides can sound wonderful- letalone one with this level of care in design.
Did someone say “Minion speakers”? And sorry for the thread hijack Duke. Back to the Alana.
1666614306428.jpeg
 

sarumbear

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The Alana is a two-way 10" stand-mount speaker which is optimized for the range above about 75 Hz…

The "secret weapon" of the Alana is the matching LORAstand, which incorporates a very smooth-sounding horn aimed up-and-back at a 45 degree angle…The output from the LORA's horn fills in the upper-range energy which is missing from the midwoofer's far-off-axis output below the crossover region.
The speaker has a forward facing 10” driver. Then what is feeding the horn? You say the horn fills the “upper-energy” hence it’s not from a hidden port under the speaker, or is it?
 
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Duke

Duke

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The speaker has a forward facing 10” driver. Then what is feeding the horn? You say the horn fills the “upper-energy” hence it’s not from a hidden port under the speaker, or is it?

The 10" midwoofer is in a rear-ported enclosure, so when I say "horn" in this context, I'm talking about horns that are fed by compression drivers. By "upper-range energy", I mean "the frequency region above the main crossover frequency".

Let me explain in a bit more detail what's going on:

The 10" waveguide-style horn above the woofer has a radiation pattern width of about 90 degrees. The 10" midwoofer's radiation pattern width is also about 90 degrees in the 1.4 kHz crossover region, but becomes progressively wider below that region. So there is in effect a "shortage" of off-axis energy above the crossover region, relative to how much off-axis energy we have below the crossover region.

The rear-firing horn (with its compression driver) is in the LORAstand, and is aimed up-and-back at a 45-degree angle. Its power response (the summed output across all angles; NOT the on-axis output) is smooth down to the 1.4 kHz crossover region, and then it rolls off gradually below that, to approximately complement the widening characteristic of the midwoofer's radiation pattern. Then about an octave below the crossover region the roll-off of the rear-firing horn becomes much steeper, as its contribution is no longer needed.

Does this answer you question?
 
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sarumbear

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The rear-firing horn (with its compression driver) is in the LORAstand, and is aimed up-and-back at a 45-degree angle. Its power response (the summed output across all angles; NOT the on-axis output) is smooth down to the 1.4 kHz crossover region, and then it rolls off gradually below that, to approximately complement the widening characteristic of the midwoofer's radiation pattern. Then about an octave below the crossover region the roll-off of the rear-firing horn becomes much steeper, as its contribution is no longer needed.

Does this answer you question?
Thank you for the reply. So the stand is in effect another speaker. It has a high frequency compression driver and a horn. Am I correct?
 
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Duke

Duke

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Thank you for the reply. So the stand is in effect another speaker. It has a high frequency compression driver and a horn. Am I correct?

Yes, that is correct. The stand has a horn which fires up-and-back at a 45-degree angle (see the third paragraph of my opening post).
 

sarumbear

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Yes, that is correct. The stand has a horn which fires up-and-back at a 45-degree angle (see the third paragraph of my opening post).
I was confused with your use of the word horn without mention of a driver. Thank you for clarifying.
 

Curvature

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The designed-for listening axis is 15 degrees off-axis, and definitely NOT directly on-axis (the round waveguide results in an on-axis dip whose location changes with listening/microphone distance).
As far as I know that's a result very similar to Geddes' Nathan/Abbey/Summa designs, when looking at the available published polars.

For your comments on room treatment: there is way too much of that focused on broadband absorption and I am mostly suspicious of dedicated listening rooms for that reason. The part of the acoustic treatment industry focused on consumer products doesn't help by marketing all sorts of things which have little effectiveness below 200Hz as bass traps. I'd also say that most acoustic textbooks focused on studio design, which as far as I know are used as the main references for dedicated listening room designs, as spending relatively little time on the perceptual role of reflections apart from dwelling on the negative aspects of uncontrolled environments (comb filtering, etc.).

When it comes to the measurements, I realize it's hard to take things on trust. Particularly given how much more information is available and the not even half educated comments and deductions posted here and there.

I know I'd like to see them because "spectrally correct" and "constant directivity" are testable claims. Whatever else appears on the polar plots or other presentations, be it a "flaw" or not, is useful. Just the front firing portion would do better than the majority of speakers on the market. Not that I know much about marketing.
 
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