The new Firewall for Loudspeakers will be made of four separate units. These will be placed between the speaker end of your speaker cables and the speaker terminals themselves. Each unit will have its own speaker terminal which accepts both banana and spade connectors from the speaker end of your existing loudspeaker cable. The terminal will be housed in a small transparent enclosure. From here, a short C-MARC™ loudspeaker cable umbilical, highly flexible, will extend to a termination of either banana or spade (you choose which for your application). This will connect directly to your loudspeaker's terminal. One complete set of this new Firewall for Loudspeakers will consist of four such separate units. One for Left positive, one for Left negative, one for Right positive, and one for Right negative. All will be marked clearly for easy installation.
Firewall for Loudspeakers Production, or How DARPA missed the Audiophile Boat
Years of Effort
The LessLoss Firewall has gone through a lot of research and development since its inception. What began as a novel idea about implementing Skin-filtering by exploiting the naturally occurring Skin-effect of current running through a wire has been expanded upon many times since its inception. Today we are actually using field structuring around the conductor in unique ways. The Firewall 64X is a LessLoss proprietary technology, based on precisely positioned directional metallic particles within a thermoplastic carrier. The result becomes kind of a micro-transformer. Kind of a ferrite core filter. Kind of a directional set of A/C diodes. Very much kind of a near field Blackbody for signals. That pitch black background, so important to stable "3 AM" type sound quality, is getting set to a higher and higher bar at every step of our way. People keep asking, 'Can it really get any better than this?' Answer: you bet! When the Firewall for Loudspeakers is connected to the signal at the speaker terminal, it brings a cosmic change to the sound quality.
The brains, heart and soul of the new Firewall for Loudspeakers
The new Firewall for Loudspeakers is so effective because in designing it we did not ask the typical questions. We asked fundamentally different questions and came up with fundamentally different answers.
This product is not about what the amp sees in terms of impedance or load. This is no Zobel network or other invasive technology. What the speaker does in conjunction with the amp remains absolutely the same as before.
In terms of electrical performance, what the amp will "see" per polarity when sending its signal through the Firewall for Loudspeakers is a 16mm^2 cross section of pure copper, which is incredibly high conductivity, much higher than most any loudspeaker cable, and certainly more than any internal wiring of any loudspeaker. So, in no way does the Firewall for Loudspeakers impede dynamic signal flow, nor does it influence the impedance of the speaker that the amp sees. In flowing through the Firewall unit, the signal is conditioned without ever influencing its resistance at all, at any audio frequency. This has a profound effect because only the most natural results follow, without any adverse effects to micro-dynamics. The amp (any amp in fact) will continue to perform in conjunction with the speaker exactly as it did before. The resulting sound quality, however, is greatly improved.
Our approach can be split up into three basic terms.
(1) The brains (unique in-house controlled copper processing),
(2) the heart (proprietary Firewall noise reduction solution)
(3) and the soul (special assembly approach).
A perfect balance of the three, all three being exemplary and far beyond the typical scale for audio solutions, results in a magnificent boost in sonic performance. Let's take these three and unpack them.
(1) The Brains
In standard extrusion processes, the copper undergoes many forces until the desired size is achieved. Pictured at the top of the image below, you can see a standard copper wire as extruded using industrial methods. Next to this standard copper wire, you can see our copper that we use in the Firewall for Loudspeakers. It is a completely different beast. This is created in house through proprietary means
LessLoss proprietary copper sourcing and in-house processing creates absolutely purpose-specific raw material which undergoes absolutely no tension or forces other than those which are specific to each polarity of our design. Thus, the positive and negative Firewall for Loudspeakers units are completely different from the very inception of the individual conductor material used. This is no typical exercise in choosing different off-the-shelf metals for positive and negative polarities to get a 'house sound' deemed 'nice.' It goes much more fundamentally into the nature of the material itself. We come intriguingly close to dancing with the concept of brownian noise itself.
This time-consuming and fundamental level of detail adhered to in production creates a material (seen here next to standard copper) which bears a physical malleability closer to that of lead (or even butter), than industry sourced copper. Thus, even its acoustic properties are fundamentally different than those of standard copper. Industrially annealed copper, known as 'soft,' does not even come close.
In slightly different lighting, this image shows in direct comparison how different our in-house made raw material is from standard copper. Standard copper, even soft annealed type, withstands considerable pressure. Our special material does not at all and must be handled with the most extreme care.
(2) The Heart
The heart of our solution is the special Firewall technology we have been constantly working on and perfecting for over a decade now. Again, due to the proprietary nature of the solution, we cannot delve too deeply into its every intricacy. But we can explain how it is made.
It is made by laser. Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS), also known as Laser Powder Bed Fusion (LPBF), is an Additive Manufacturing (AM) technique designed to use a high power-density laser to melt and fuse metallic powders together. This process has the ability to fully weld the metal powder material into a solid three-dimensional part of any conceivable shape or form.
We are using the most advanced AM system called Direct Metal Laser Sintering (DMLS). Research on this process began in 1995 as a German research project at the Fraunhofer Institute. This new technology was first commercialized only in the year 2000.
Since the components are built layer by layer, it is possible to design organic geometries, internal features and challenging passages that could not be cast or otherwise machined.
A computer process slices the 3D CAD file data into many ~20 micrometer thick layers. The thin layers are, one by one, selectively smelted by the laser which is located in a tightly controlled atmosphere of argon gas. This is no simple desktop operation. Oxygen levels must be kept lower than 500PPM to prevent explosion. The high-power ytterbium fiber laser beam is literally hundreds of watts strong. The laser energy is intense enough to permit full welding of the particles to form solid metal, without creating a porous internal structure.
(3) The Soul
When the brains and heart come together, in strict fashion according to our best knowledge resulting from years of countless experiments and discoveries, the soul of the device shines through. The transparent housing refracts the ambient light creating optical illusions of a fantom third Firewall inside. Continue turning the cylinder and at times it can even appear that there is no wall thickness.
This approach takes care of two things. Firstly, structural integrity of all of the sensitive components is maintained, even if you throw this device around or drive on it with an industrial vacuum cleaner. It is rock solid to the user, and liquid soft to the signal. Secondly, the lack of any colored material surrounding the active portion of the Firewall guarantees the most natural sound quality possible.
As in any refined balancing act, too much of any one ingredient will inevitably color the outcome. The closest thing to a total absence of coloration is the least electro-magnetically filtering material, which means in this case absolutely pure transparency. This allows the perfect conditions for the new Firewall for Loudspeakers solution to really shine. Magnificently so, as you will instantly hear
Of course, with a solution so effective and mature, we need a flexible umbilical of the same uncompromising performance. C-MARC™ cable is the only choice for this, of course. Nothing even comes close in terms of purity, naturalness, and silence of operation.
One listen, and you'll see why.
