How a road trip, a napkin, and a music lover's quest to build the Ultimate Loudspeaker became an idea that changed High Performance Audio forever.

In the mid-90’s, members of the Neosonik team made their yearly pilgrimage to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas to examine the latest advances in audio technology at the High-End Audio exhibit. That year proved to be a turning point for the industry, as we noticed that nearly all of the exhibitors had begun using CD playback for their demonstration systems. Previously, the top high-end brands had stayed with Records as their preferred medium for achieving the best sonic performance. Yet, by that time, it was clear that Digital had trumped Analog. The war between the formats was clearly over since even the most esoteric, high-end brands had stopped using turntables to show off their gear and replaced them with CD transports and exotic Digital-to-Analog Converters.

At the time, we were still immersed in loudspeaker technology. But it was clear that this fundamental shift in music formats would have an impact on the way audio systems are designed. So much energy and expense is spent by high-end audio designers trying to overcome signal degradation caused by transmitting the audio signal down a chain of analog components: preamplifier, amplifier, interconnect cables, speaker wires, and an analog loudspeaker with a crossover made up of resistors, capacitors and coils. In the world of High-End Audio, ten cent sand-cast resistors are replaced by expensive non-inductive, wire-wound or film resistors that can cost as much as $20 each. Cheap, fifty cent electrolytic or mylar capacitors are replaced by $25 polypropylene or film and foil capacitors. These expensive parts really do make a difference that can definitely be heard on a high-resolution analog system. However, they are also very expensive and often push the price of the component into the stratosphere.

Sitting at a restaurant a few weeks later, the pivotal question emerged: “if all sources in the future are going to be digital, then why are we converting everything to analog at the CD player? Why not keep that signal digital all the way through the system and only convert it to analog at the final moment when the loudspeaker cone pulses and produces sound. If we did that, then we could avoid all of the losses that occur in the analog domain. Some sort of wireless technology could be used to connect the system source with the loudspeakers. And the loudspeakers could benefit by being completely digital and employing DSP (Digital Signal Processing) to control all key parameters with digital amplification for power.”

Grabbing the nearest napkin, we sketched out the idea of a discrete, full-bandwidth digital path from the music source right up to each individual woofer and tweeter in the system. And we used wireless technology to create a digital bridge from the source right to the loudspeaker.

Unfortunately, at the time, the frequency spectrum required to wirelessly transmit that much data had yet to be opened by the FCC. And digital amplifier silicon was still a pipe dream. But we knew that, at least on paper, this concept could yield sonic results that surpass the state-of-the-art in analog. Armed with this belief, we embarked on a quest to study, develop and produce the world’s first Digital Wireless Home Theater and Hi-Fi System.