Phase Technology DCB-112-SUB Brochure

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> ARTS
HITS THE BULLS-EYE
I
arrive in Jacksonville, Florida, only to be
surprised on two counts: the first being
that what I took to be a small village
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 hu-
midity 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 some-
one overseas to take care of. United Speaker
Systems has been producing speakers for well-
known manufacturers for more than 50 years.
Ken conducts a tour of the facilities, noting
that they produce the entire product from be-
ginning to end. And through a rapid turn-
around 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.
52 HDTV ETC December/January 2006 www.hdtvetc.com
•
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-square-
foot 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 cur-
rent 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 ma-
chines, not machines being watched by peo-
ple – a vacuum system keeps all the wood chips
and sawdust moving away so it doesn't settle
down on the speaker enclosures, which are be-
ing 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 con-
junction with human testers to make sure the
various speaker drivers are tested for frequency
response and accurate motion, in order to ac-
curately reproduce and handle the type of mu-
sical 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 (ba-
sically wire wrapped around a metal core that
is then magnetized) are of such a tight toler-
ance 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 ex-
acting. 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 as-
sembly line before being boxed. Additionally,
samples of each group of boxes are pulled out
to be rechecked once again before a produc-
tion 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 proba-
bly have one of these speakers) and the con-
sumers happy, but also ties into the Phase
Technology line, giving it excellent quality right
out of the starting gate.