Audio Note AZ-TWO Owner's Information

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AZ-TWO

LOUDSPEAKERS

OWNERʼS INFORMATION

1) CE DECLARATION OF CONFORMITY
DISPOSAL

2) INTRODUCTION

3) OVERVIEW

5) UNPACKING AND INSTALLATION

7) CONNECTION

8) CONNECTION TO AMPLIFIER

9) OPERATION
BEDDING IN
CLEANING

10) TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

11) WARRANTY INFORMATION

12) CONTACT INFORMATION

CONTENTS

CE DECLARATION OF CONFORMITY

DISPOSAL

This product must not be disposed of as normal household waste. To
prevent possible harm to the environment please separate the product
from other waste to ensure that it can be recycled in an environmentally
safe manner. Please contact your retailer or the appropriate local
government office for collection facilities.

We declare under our sole responsibility that this product is in conformity
with the following standards or standardized documents:

BS EN 60065 in accordance with the regulations 73/23/EEC, 89/336/EEC
(from 1 January 1997)

CE 94

Peter Qvortrup,
Director
Audio Note (UK) Limited
25 Montefiore Road
Hove
East Sussex
BN3 1RD
United Kingdom

Tel: [phone]
Fax: [phone]

Thank you for purchasing this Audio Note (UK) product. With the correct care it
should give you many years of pleasure and enjoyment.

Please take the time to read all of the information in this manual before connecting
your new component to an electrical supply or your system, to ensure both your
safety and satisfaction.

Please note that due to our desire to continually improve products, specifications are
subject to change without notice. Therefore it is important to refer to the manual that
is supplied with your product for the most accurate information; manuals downloaded
from our website or obtained from other sources may no longer fully apply to your
product.

If you have any questions regarding the information contained within this document
or your new component, please feel free to contact us: -

Audio Note (UK) Limited

25 Montefiore Road

Hove

East Sussex

BN3 1RD

United Kingdom

Tel: [phone]
Fax: [phone]

e-mail: [e-mail]

INTRODUCTION

The AZ-TWO is a floor standing, rear loaded, folded quasi parabolic horn design with
a rear facing mouth, and uses two drive units per cabinet. It is very efficient and
offers the amplifier an easy ʻloadʼ, making it highly suitable for our range of superior
quality, low powered valve amplifiers.

As a company, our main aim is to design and manufacture equipment that provides
the maximum sonic performance for the price, and to achieve this we use many
unconventional solutions. In our quest to deliver an affordable, compact, high
sensitivity, wide frequency response loudspeaker to suit ʻreal worldʼ rooms, we
reinvestigated and re-evaluated the main principles of rear loaded horn cabinet
design. This research, coupled with our expertise in driver, cabinet and crossover
development, has resulted in a loudspeaker that not only redefines the quality / price
relationship, but more importantly offers an emotionally engaging performance that is
quite in a class of its own.

If you examine the vast majority of conventional loudspeaker designs, you will
discover that they have very poor acoustic impedance characteristics, resulting in low
efficiency. In contrast, a correctly designed horn loaded system allows the acoustic
impedance to be optimized for the driver across several octaves, resulting in higher
efficiency and better dynamic power transfer from the amplifier.

However, horn designs are not without their challenges, and one of the greatest
problems is physical size. For a simple horn the lower cut-off frequency is directly
proportional to the effective diameter of the mouth; a cut-off frequency at - 3dB of
50Hz, would require a horn with a mouth area of 3.8 square meters.

Clearly unsuitable for most domestic purposes!

So, we had to find a method of reducing the size requirement whilst maintaining the
low frequency response. By re-configuring the size and shape of the rear horn flare,
the (increasingly capacitive) throat impedance is off-set to a point below the cut-off
frequency. This, combined with positioning the loudspeaker in close proximity to a
corner further reduces the radiation impedance, and effectively increases the bass
horn moth area by a factor of around x16 (x8 when placed against a rear wall), which
provides a substantial boost at low frequencies.

As with all Audio Note (UK) loudspeakers, no corners have been cut in terms of
component and driver quality despite the modest price of the AZ-TWO. The woofer is
the high quality unit found in the AN-E, and is combined with an upgraded version of
the AN-K's 3/4" tweeter, a heavy-duty crossover featuring air core inductors, Audio
Note (UK) silver plated speaker terminals and Audio Note (UK) AN-D internal wiring.

AZ-TWO LOUDSPEAKERS