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HDT206EM OWNERS MANUAL
DESIGN NOTES by Steve Deckert
HOW IT WAS DEVELOPED
This cabinet design was actually my first
serious endeavor into hi-end audio. It came
to pass during the 1980's when I was In-
spired and heavily inflicted with the hi-fi
fever after taking my first job in a hi-fi re-
tail shop. At the store I was surrounded
with decent loudspeakers and amplifiers. I
was in what could be called after-hours
heaven. After playing with everything for
some time, I got a pipe dream idea for a
loudspeaker and being "in the biz" it was
the perfect opportunity to try it. After all,
how many times in your life do you have a
whole store full of speakers to compare
your ideas against?
I built a prototype of the design, but only
single cabinet similar to the one pictured
with Bendi at the left. (No point building a
pair until you know for sure it's worth the
effort.)
I compared my single cabinet, then an 8
inch two-way design, on almost a daily ba-
sis with the better speakers we had at the
store. Tweak, compare, tweak, compare,
and more tweak and compare. This went on
for about a year until I had a speaker that I
and everyone who worked at the store
thought was better than everything else we had. Once I reached that point, I built a
fresh PAIR of the speakers. You can imagine the anticipation of hearing a pair for the
first time after listening to only one all that time!
During this process I learned that you can easily judge the transparency of a
loudspeaker by listening to only one. Basically if a single loudspeaker could disap-
pear by itself then you knew a pair of them would be great!
With a finished and tweaked out pair that everyone agreed was the best sound we had
at the store I set off for the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago to see and listen to
the best of the best. I was surprised to find how few the number of speakers were that
came close or were in even in the same league as my own. Mostly what I saw and heard
was overpriced half-baked ideas that sounded like crap. I remember thinking "this is
what hi-end audio is like?"
The CES experience, being my first, was a profound bit of enlightenment. The prices
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