Unison Research Malibran User Manual

Malibran

Maria Malibran or Maria Felicia García was born in Paris on march the 24th, 1808 and died in
Manchester on September the 23th, 1836. Her father was the great tenor Manuel Garcia, her sister
Pauline Viardot-Garcia was a singer too. Maria Malibran‘s voice was exceptional for range, power
and flexibility and she could sing as contralto and soprano. She was a great interpreter, actress
and also a composer. Maria Malibran fell off her horse and died. She was only 28 years old and
immediately become a leggend.

The goal of the Malibran is to reproduce quality of our top models in smaller cabinet while
increasing the bass dinamic and making easier the room placement.

The Malibran model is the first loudspeaker system designed by Opera and produced by Unison
research. The Malibran model implement all the technical solutions developed by Opera including
the bass section developed for the Grand Callas model: the “progressive” low pass filter, the CLD
(Crossed Linked Dipole) and the TEB (sealed enclosure) for the three woofers.

Malibran model is a 146 litres, over 120 Kg., floor standing loudspeaker. We have reduced the size
while increasing the low frequency response. The Malibran as a two-way system with a powerful
passive sub-woofer and the CLD in the same cabinet. On the Malibran' s front panel there are four
mid-woofer and the tweeter which are responsible for the direct sound (and a lot of the reflected
sound as well). The front system consist of four “state of the art” mid-woofers and tweeter. Three
10" woofers are placed on one side of the cabinet. On the rear side of the Malibran cabinet there is
the CLS rear radiating system with 4 tweeters high-pass filtered at 2 kHz. For more information
about CLD and progressive filter see the attached documentation. Many efforts have been spent to
make the Malibran easy to be placed in the room.

Cabinet

The cabinet of the Malibran model is made in finely-shaped multiplayer and thick MDF veneered in
real wood finely polished. Front pannel is lined in leather that act as a washer for loudspeaker. The
MDF front panel is 4 centimeter thick and milled on both side to avoid cavitation of the air flow. The
curved multilayer sides are 3 cm thick while the rear MDF panel is six cm thick. The cabinet is
really heavy and rigid.
The internal volume of the cabinet is divided so that each woofer has its own volume separated
from midrange volume. Also the midrange chamber is divided into two separated volumes to avoid
standing waves. All this reinforces the structure and raises the frequency of the normal standing
waves so that they are easily pulled down by the absorbing material. The inside of the cabinet is
filled with a good quantity of acrylic wadding which eliminate internal reflections and aids bass
frequency damping.

Drivers

The 10" woofer is a new device developed by Seas that exhibit a very long linear excursion (28
mm pk-pk), an aluminium diaphragm and all the technical solution one need to reduce distortion
like copper rings and rear holes for de-compression. Though you may use a single woofer in a
reflex cabinet we choose to use three woofers in three separated sealed enclosures. In this way a
couple of Malibran is able to move 3 litres of air. During normal use the displacement of each driver
is so small that distortion and compression are reduced to negligible values. The woofer has a very
stiff aluminium cone, natural rubber surround and aluminium voice coil former. This woofer has
an excellent response up to 1000 Hz with very low distortion as requested for this design.

The Malibran model uses four mid-woofer drivers with the progressive low-pass cross-over. The
Mid-wooder is a 5" cone driver developed for use as a high fidelity Woofer/Midrange unit. The
extremely stiff, yet light cone and the acoustically transparent basket give tremendous bass
precision and midrange detail. Precision cast and surface treated magnesium cone coupled to a
natural rubber surround showing no sign of midrange (edge) resonances. Heavy copper rings
mounted above and below the T-shaped pole piece, to reduce non linear and modulation distortion
and to increase overload margin. Gold plated terminals mounted on a stiff glass fibre reinforced
plate to reduce contact resistance and improve reliability. Extremely stiff and stable injection
moulded metal basket to keep the critical components in perfect alignment. Large windows in the
basket both above and below the spider to reduce sound reflection, air flow noise and cavity
resonance to a minimum. That means, also thanks to the wide linear excursion of the moving coil,
little distortion and negligible compression.

Thanks to the high radiating surface and to the top quality of the drivers the Malibran model exhibit
a very low harmonic and intermodulation distortion. The tweeter is the well known and valued
Scanspeak 9700 model. You find one tweeter on the front panel, for direct sound, and four of them
on the rear side to form the CLD unit that feeds the reverberant field in the room. The 9700 tweeter
has a very low distortion (substantially of the second order) and can support a great amount of
power thanks to the wide linear displacement allowed. The very low resonance frequency allowa a
simple filtering with a 2KHz/12dB high pass filter with a minimum number of components.