oneZ concept

A series of concepts underpinned the development of the oneZ point source loudspeaker. Some are engineering tenets, others are based on the collective experiences of audiophiles actively engaged in advancing the art, and a few are probably just wishful thinking! Taken together they shaped the oneZ as it evolved from pipe dream into an actual object in the real space.

The magic is in the midrange. Not forgetting that bass and treble is also fun!
The point source is a long held idealized form for a hi-fi loudspeaker.
Linear phase loudspeakers tend to sound better than designs suffering phase shift through their pass bands.
High efficiency speakers sound more lively and dynamically engaging.
Speaker drivers work and sound better when directly connected to power amplifiers.
When properly executed relatively inexpensive small, simple speakers often sound very good when partnered with excellent amplifiers. The inverse paring, that is big expensive speakers driven by modest amps, rarely breaks out of mediocrity.
Designs such as electrostatics demonstrate that drivers do not necessarily have to behave as pistons to sound good. Sometimes very good indeed.
Loudspeaker drivers which actually behave as purely pistonic devices over significant bandwidths are extraordinary rare, if they do actually exist. Therefore as a corollary real world speakers must deal with drivers operating in breakup modes.
Real world crossover filters attenuate out of band energies, they do not magically make all energy outside their pass band disappear.
Thanks to the enthusiast's markets in Asia and Europe a large selection of highly advanced full range speaker drivers are currently on the market.
Materials matter and there is life beyond MDF.
No matter how dense and heavy an object is made it can still vibrate.
The First Law of Thermodynamics (energy can not be created nor destroyed) applies to loudspeakers just like the rest of the universe. Therefore the best way to deal with unwanted vibrations is to convert it to heat.
Simpler systems are more likely to be understood and then optimized compared to complex systems.
If the choice is loud vs. lovely, unless you are 18 years old and it's Saturday night, go with lovely.

This series of concepts, and many others picked up over thirty years as a audio-maniac, distilled over the past couple of years. During this time I had finished and was enjoying the B³9 speaker project and partnering 2A3 SET amp. The B^₃9 was a source of both satisfaction and frustration. Satisfaction that such an extreme project is a roaring success. Satisfaction that concepts such as high efficiency and paper cones could provide such intense musical enjoyment. Frustration that the B^₃9 design is based on the unobtainable JBL 2150 driver and their 14 (!) cubic foot enclosures made them out of the question for most applications. Could a large measure of the lessons learned and resulting musical joy be had in a more reasonable design based on current production drivers?

Living as a card carrying audio-maniac a large part of one's subconscious is given over to continually correlating and re-correlating all the arcane audio lore one has acquired. Like a CIA super computer looking for patterns in terabytes of electronic intercepts the data is churned over and over. From time to time something worth further investigation bubbles to the surface. Thus emerged from the concepts above the idea of a mini-monitor speaker using a single wide range driver in an over achieving enclosure. While not the last word in ultimate ultra-fi such a speaker maps the concepts above into an object featuring the following characteristics:

Possessing a simple elegance.
Behaves as linear phase point source across a wide range of listening angles.
The driver is connected directly to the amplifier.
The compact enclosure can be made stiff presenting the driver with a stable reference surface upon which to work. Compact enclosures are known to yield excellent imaging. Compact enclosures use less material allowing it to be upgraded without completely destroying the budget.
Size and cost can be kept in reasonable bounds allowing the speaker to be used in a variety settings and applications. Examples include:

anchoring a triode system in smaller rooms,
as an experiment in full range single driver speakers,
matched speaker sets for high quality multi-channel systems, and
secondary systems of the first quality.

Gizmo would approve.

Years of collective experience among audiophiles has shown the mini-monitor speaker to be a very useful compromise. All design is artful compromise, in this case by forgoing (ultimately futile in this context) attempts at deep bass the system architecture along with mid-bass through treble tone is enhanced. In systems needing bottom octave bass a sub woofer can be added retaining the benefit of a single direct driven driver reproducing nine octaves while adding the known benefits of bi-amplification.

Having correlated a wide range of general concepts into the specifics of a mini-monintor built around a single wide range driver in a very high quality enclosure the next step was system architecture. Follow the link below for that chapter of the oneZ story.