Journey to Jupiter Measures of success: welcome to Jupiter We built a huge acoustic-analysis robot that only tells the truth – whether our engineers like it or not… measurement centres in Europe. And it’s at the heart of Dynaudio Labs in Skanderborg. It’s here that our development team work with a giant robot to reveal the secrets behind the speakers they create. They’re not just looking for perfect sound; they’re looking for truth. Because that’s what music is all about. Jupiter is big. Very big. It’s is a huge, hollow cube with an edge-length of 13m, deep in the bowels of the Dynaudio Labs building. It’s equipped with technologies that allow it to measure even the smallest details of the Dynaudio products examined there. Every speaker we make takes a trip to Jupiter. The way the room works is fascinating. A speaker can be measured individually or, given the room’s size, engineers can install several at once to simulate a typical home audio setup. Then, the robot arm – with its 31 mics – takes a 360-degree measurement. So we end up knowing how a speaker sounds not only in the sweet-spot, but from everywhere else too. The old-school way of doing that would’ve been to use an anechoic chamber – a room full of sound-dampening material that almost completely eliminates echoes and reverberations. Clap your hands right now; unless you’re actually in an anechoic chamber this very second (and if you are, then why?), you’ll hear the sound tail off. Anechoic chambers get rid of that by absorbing that extra energy and remaining almost totally silent. The problem is, they don’t tend to work so well when you delve down really deep into the frequency range. Their weird wedges and foamy bits only really work well in the midrange and treble. The only way to get around that is to make the room bigger – which means more acoustic treatment, much more cost, and not that much gain. Jupiter can simulate an anechoic chamber’s benefits without the undesirable bits. We shut off the microphones between their measuring the impulse sound (an instantaneous ‘click’ that contains all frequencies) and the reflection coming back off the walls. It takes the room out of the equation. Seems like a lot of work, doesn’t it, creating a huge room that ends up being be acoustically invisible? But it works amazingly well. In our engineers’ ears, nothing is ever perfect – but Jupiter lets us get breathtakingly close. Magazine 04 75
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