Carfrae Loudspeakers - Audio Evidence
Carfrae Loudspeakers - Audio Evidence
Carfrae Loudspeakers - Audio Evidence
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WHAT HI-FI<br />
TEMPTATION<br />
MARCH 1999<br />
<strong>Carfrae</strong> BigHorn Loudspeaker<br />
We’ve reviewed some big speakers in our time, but these<br />
behemoth boxes stand a staggering 2.2m tall. They’re the<br />
brainchild of Jim <strong>Carfrae</strong>, whose fascination with horn<br />
speakers led him to create a speaker radically different<br />
from anything he’d seen, or heard, before.<br />
The body of the horn is made from curved sections of<br />
18mm birch ply, which can be finished with a choice<br />
of real wood veneers. Everything else is made of solid<br />
maple, a wood chosen for its tonal qualities as well<br />
as its looks.<br />
The extraordinary look of the <strong>Carfrae</strong>Horns is dictated<br />
by the use of a ‘tractrix contour’ - a shape derived from<br />
mathematics to give the soundwaves a clear path through<br />
the hom. The drive units are Lowther DX4s (costing<br />
£6OO each), mounted directly to a 40mm-thick tube of<br />
solid hardwood, while sensitivity is a high 108dB/W/m.<br />
Hooked up to a Vardis S15 amplifier fed by a Michell Orbe<br />
tumtahle and DPA Renaissance Pulse Array CD player,<br />
the detail these speakers produce is<br />
breathtakin. Listen to a selection<br />
of Keb Mo tracks and every pluck<br />
of guitar string or snap of a drum<br />
is conveyed with lifelike accuracy.<br />
Voices are handled particularly well,<br />
kd lang’s solo vocal on Don‘t Smoke<br />
in Bed from her Drag album sounding<br />
pin-sharp and having tremendous<br />
presence in the centre of what is a<br />
wonderfully evocative soundstage.<br />
The <strong>Carfrae</strong>Horns won’t suit all,<br />
and they need a very large room to<br />
accommodate them. But for sheer<br />
delicacy, scale and intimacy they’re a<br />
rare treat indeed.<br />
REVIEWS<br />
<strong>Carfrae</strong> <strong>Loudspeakers</strong><br />
Ashleigh, Kingsbridge Hill, Totnes, Devon. TQ9 5SZ United Kingdom<br />
E-mail: info@carfrae.com ( 01803 868461<br />
Web: www.carfrae.com Fax 01803 868461
Anyone who visited the Excelsior<br />
Hotel exhibits at The Hi-Fi Show<br />
last September will remember<br />
seeing a large, rather alienlooking<br />
speaker, presiding over the<br />
entrance adjacent to the TAG McLaren<br />
stand. This £18,000 construction is<br />
the work of one Jim <strong>Carfrae</strong>, designer<br />
and builder of horn speakers, and more<br />
specifically those based on the Tractrix flare<br />
contour. On a recent visit to the home of<br />
<strong>Carfrae</strong>, I had an opportunity to see and hear<br />
these remarkable horns in action.<br />
Based in rural Devon, a few miles<br />
outside Totnes and within trekking distance<br />
of Dartmoor, a pair of these magnificent<br />
horns were set up in an airy listening room<br />
in the converted farmhouse from where<br />
<strong>Carfrae</strong> works. Jim has devoted much time<br />
and research into developing these speakers<br />
into a commercial product<br />
The main carcass of the loudspeaker<br />
is made by a John Makepeace trained<br />
cabinetmaker from continuous sections<br />
of 18mm birch laminate ply, veneered to<br />
customer specifications. By hand-building<br />
this cabinet using a vacuum forming process,<br />
the unique curve comes into shape which<br />
avoids both straight lines and parallel<br />
surfaces, and ensures no one section is<br />
straight. This helps prevent the formation of<br />
standing waves..<br />
The <strong>Carfrae</strong> Horn was designed with<br />
the help of Jim’s brother, an engineer who<br />
wrote a software program to calculate the<br />
course of the horn What differentiates this<br />
horn’s profile from most designs is the<br />
adherence to the ideal without any nasty<br />
sharp bends, unavoidable when folding the<br />
horn into a more compact box. This horn<br />
deviates, it is claimed, by<br />
no more than a millimetre<br />
along its tract. The current<br />
incarnation is designed<br />
for the Lowther DX4<br />
driver, a twin-coned driver<br />
with lightweight paper diaphragm<br />
and Neodymium magnet. This is held<br />
rigidly in a 40mm thick wooden cylinder,<br />
hewn from maple, with the rearward radiation<br />
directed through the 3.34m Tractrix chamber.<br />
But before the start of the horn proper, the<br />
driver chamber acts as a low-pass filter,<br />
screening frequencies above the upper cutoff<br />
of 200Hz- chosen as its wavelength is<br />
an odd multiple of the horn length, avoiding<br />
cancellation effects<br />
Listening soon showed that the sounds<br />
the system could make were an exercise<br />
in naturalness, a step closer to the original<br />
sound, as one well-quoted pundit would say.<br />
In the sweet spot, some ten feet or so from<br />
the horns (themselves backed into corners to<br />
augment bass delivery), there was a tangible<br />
presence in the room, excellent if not totally<br />
3D imagery, and a stunning sense of detail.<br />
The vinyl front-end comprehensively bettered<br />
the CD rival-not through any particular fault<br />
in the digital equipment, which I have heard<br />
giving believable results before- but maybe<br />
because of the purist ethos in the analogue<br />
front end.<br />
With CDs, the horns proved<br />
they could play at high volumes<br />
with little sense of constriction<br />
or ‘cuppy’ coloration, handling<br />
dynamics as only a good horn<br />
can. Low-level detail was<br />
astonishing, giving a great sense<br />
of atmosphere, especially with<br />
live acoustic music. A jazz<br />
quartet piece featuring two<br />
double basses showed not only<br />
the subtly different timbres of<br />
the instruments but also the<br />
techniques of the respective<br />
players-all with palpable<br />
imaging. And talking of<br />
bass, this was not that<br />
shy, despite the design’s<br />
inherent sudden rolloff<br />
below a specific<br />
frequency. The<br />
quoted literature<br />
notes a response of<br />
32Hz-22kHz (no dB<br />
roll-offs given), and<br />
the speaker was heard<br />
to go deep despite<br />
the DX4 not being<br />
optimised for the<br />
horn at the time of<br />
my visit. This has,<br />
I am informed,<br />
now been corrected for the<br />
better.<br />
From the initial concept,<br />
it has taken two years to arrive<br />
at the horn made today. Now,<br />
the virtually no-compromise<br />
design of the original horn is<br />
about to be joined by a smaller<br />
and cheaper version, known<br />
affectionately as the ‘Little Big<br />
Horn’ and scheduled to debut at<br />
the Frankfurt High-End Show.<br />
Jim hopes to sell this half-scale<br />
version (which may yet feature<br />
an auxiliary bass driver to<br />
supplement the lower<br />
frequencies) for under £5000.<br />
Until then there is this amazing<br />
transducer to dream over, or to<br />
save the pennies for.