Phase Technology DCB-112-SUB, dARTS Brochure

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ARTS

HITS THE BULLS-EYE

arrive in Jacksonville, Florida, only to be
surprised on two counts: the first being
that what I took to be a small village

I

turned out to be a sprawling city bustling
with life; the other being that if I don’t find the
United Speaker Systems building soon, the hu­midity is going to do me in. Fortunately, Ken
Hecht, president of the company, is there to
usher me into the building and the blessed
A/C. What’s interesting is that I’m in a working
factory for speakers – it’s not just a place where
engineers toss ideas around and then call some­one overseas to take care of. United Speaker
Systems has been producing speakers for well­known manufacturers for more than 50 years.

Ken conducts a tour of the facilities, noting
that they produce the entire product from be­ginning to end. And through a rapid turn­around and a number of innovations, they can
turn on a dime (as it were) and change the
procedures to handle just about anything those
having speakers made can ask for.

Normally we’d have a lot of questions, but
since we’re interviewing Ken later (Industry
Giants, p. 68), we can dive right in.

The process of making a speaker distilled
down to its basics – and ignoring the obvious
fact that it has to be designed in the first place
– is simple enough: you build a box, take
speaker drivers and put them into that box, wire
the speaker drivers up, close and finish the box,
stick it in a package and wave goodbye. But
as Ken takes us through the 60,000-square­foot plant, we can see there’s a lot more to each
of these steps. For instance, in a corner is a thin
wire (that will be used for voice coils) being
stretched from one end of the plant to the other
and coated with a thermosetting adhesive. After
the wire is wound on the voice coils, it is baked
at 500 degrees to thermoset it. This insures it
will not soften due to heat from the electric cur­rent flowing through it when in operation. In
passing by some of the testing cubicles, we’re
told that they match each speaker to +-1 1/2dB
of the reference speakers for an exacting sound.

In the room where the speaker boxes are
being cut to size – by people actually using ma­chines, not machines being watched by peo­ple – a vacuum system keeps all the wood chips
and sawdust moving away so it doesn’t settle
down on the speaker enclosures, which are be­ing cut with a near-fanatical precision (the CNC
router weighs around 1,700 pounds!). In the
paint room, slightly more air is being pumped
into it than being evacuated out, so as to keep
the paint from being sucked out before it has
time to evenly spread on the cabinet. And of
course, computer workstations are used in con­junction with human testers to make sure the
various speaker drivers are tested for frequency
response and accurate motion, in order to ac­curately reproduce and handle the type of mu­sical power for which they are intended (i.e.,

 There are three versions of the dARTS speaker system:

free-standing, wall-mountable (on or flush) and in-wall.

at one station, a worker delivers a spike of 100W
to a tweeter driver, then analyzes the response
to verify the driver hasn’t given up the ghost
and can handle such demands in the future).

Ken also points out that the word “tolerance”
is treated like unto a god here: voice coils (ba­sically wire wrapped around a metal core that
is then magnetized) are of such a tight toler­ance that it seems a wonder that they can fit so
perfectly snugly into their intended speaker
drivers’ magnets. This, by the way, is just one
of the reasons that work done here is so ex­acting. While overseas expertise is quite good,
tolerance factors such as this are not followed,
as a wider tolerance is considered good enough.
Maybe for others, but not for Ken, which is also
why every speaker is checked twice on the as­sembly line before being boxed. Additionally,
samples of each group of boxes are pulled out
to be rechecked once again before a produc­tion run is released for shipment.

The result is a near 0.1% failure rate, which
not only makes United Speaker Systems’ clients
(you’d know their names because you proba­bly have one of these speakers) and the con­sumers happy, but also ties into the Phase
Technology line, giving it excellent quality right
out of the starting gate.

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 The dARTS speaker system is designed to remove your

listening room’s anomalies from the sound equation.

But there’s more to that – which is one of
the reasons we came over. While Phase
Technology was created originally as a “show­case,” Ken says that they expect to strengthen
the line and give it more prominence in the fu­ture. The dARTS system is one heck of a way
to get it going through an evolutionary leap into
their second half-century.

dARTS stands for Digital Audio Reference
System and basically consists of four distinct
parts. First, you have the speakers themselves,
the best dynamic products Phase Technology
makes, consisting of free-standing speakers that
are aesthetically pleasing and deliver superior
sound, a complete set of speakers that can be
either mounted on or flush in the wall, and a
series of in-wall speakers that include their own
dedicated, damped, in-wall enclosure, utilizing
a patented Positive Clamping System to assure
optimal performance regardless of the wall’s
construction. In the factory’s demo room in
which the system is set up, we have a pair of
left/rights, each featuring a one-inch variable
axis soft-dome tweeter (United Speaker Systems
invented the soft-dome tweeter in 1962!) and

two six-inch glass/honeycomb woofers that are
able to synch together so as to form one sound
output. Each of these is sitting upon a pow­ered 500-watt subwoofer. For the center chan­nel there’s a one-inch variable axis soft-dome
tweeter and two six-inch glass/honeycomb
woofers. The side surrounds consist of two

5.25-inch glass/honeycomb woofers and two
one-inch variable axis soft-dome tweeters,
which are bipole/dipole switchable. All the
woofers and tweets are powered by their own
250-watt digital amplifier channel. The digital
electronics in the amplifier control all aspects
of the speakers, including crossovers, phase
and frequency response. Because this is done
in the digital domain, they are able to keep the
speakers’ tolerance to an incredible +-1/2dB to
their reference standard.

Of course, there is a matching powered sub­woofer featuring two of Phase Technology’s 10­inch long-throw drivers, coupled to one
250-watt amplifier each, for a total of 500 watts
per cabinet. The subwoofer’s cabinet is the
same width as the front speaker, so it can be
used as a stand for a speaker.

All models are designed using the same driv­ers, and voiced identically so they can be used
interchangeably in any position in the system,

no matter if that system is stereo, 5.1-, 6.1-, 7.1­channel or any other future format. If more
bass impact is needed, multiple subwoofers can
be used. Systems can be stacked to provide
adequate volume levels in even very large
spaces. Phase Technology will even work with
clients and their A/V installer to design custom
systems with larger speakers and custom de­signed software to match. Add to that the magic
of the digital processing power of the ampli­fier’s setup modes and the optional Audyssey
MultEQ XT room calibration package, and stun­ning realism, involving effects and dynamic
power are assured in any listening environment.

Rooted to them all is a 4,000-watt digital am­plifier able to put out 250 watts per each of its
sixteen channels. Barely over 20 pounds in
all, the digital amp runs extremely cool and
the fan inside barely purrs. The amplifier also
contains powerful DSP configuration tools for
each channel, allowing Phase Tech to individ­ually tweak each speaker (and the entire sys­tem) to match each other and the target
response curves, within +/-1/2dB. By setting
the crossover point, frequency response and
time alignment, a perfectly-matched system can
be provided to each consumer.

The amp also has a front-mounted USB con-

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