Sonicflare, CES 2008 Show Report "What can I say about Sonicweld I haven't already said before? Actually, quite a lot. In Vegas, the Sonicweld complete super system had a larger room than at the RMAF and for great results - there's nothing quite like judicious volume knob cranking for concert-level decibels. And yet, while the space was larger, I feel the Sonicweld system was just itching to peel the paint off the walls with 120dB blasts. As for technology I didn't cover in my RMAF analysis, one of the interesting elements of the Sonicweld Puserod speakers are the six titanium midrange drivers. The magic happens in the mid, as we know, and these 2" drivers with all of 1 gram of moving mass and neodymium magnets make the mids pop like almost nothing else out there. Simply, the Sonicweld system is, if nothing else, a speed demon that, with such tiny decay between the notes, lets you "hear into the music" with 1080p-like detail. This super accuracy means the Sonicweld system has a prototypical Precise-type sound. Tube junkies will think it needs more warmth and may get scared off by the hyper real dynamics. Then again, I heard comments from tube heads who couldn't get enough of the Sonicweld sound. When you're at this level, tonal characteristics are simply a matter of personal taste. One element everyone can (or should) agree on is the Sonicweld bass. I'm a firm believer that only a powered, EQed sub can truly handle the monster lows and Yello's "Planet Dada" track over the Sonicweld system was just worlds of sternum-pounding fun. While other systems were able to bang out the deep notes, the Sonicweld double 15" subs are truly in a class of their own if, for no other reason, than they integrate seamlessly with the rest of the system via the central DEQX processor. This digital EQ combined with two of the most serious 15" aluminum cone drivers ever devised created a bass experience that allowed you to feel the subsonic notes without bloat in the other frequencies. Absolutely wild. Hear these speakers if you get a chance." - Josh Ray The Stereo Times, CES 2008 Show Report "In an attempt not to mince my words, I'll qualify the Sonicweld Pulserod / Subpulse loudspeaker system ($100k) as this: Far and away, the best disappearing act I've heard from a loudspeaker with no exceptions. Keep in mind the system comes with everything minus a source so in terms of price, yes it's expensive but justifiably so. I must have spent two hours in this room attempting to find something, anything wrong or imperfect about these loudspeakers. Well, they're not going to sound as big as the really big loudspeakers, nor will they go as extremely low in the lowest octaves. But they do come so close to sounding so much like the big boys... I sat there in total awe. As a matter of fact, the only area this system did not match the amazingly musical Perfect 8s was in the low bass fundamentals. Everywhere else, midrange, presence, treble, soundstage - width, depth and dimensionality - believe it or not, the Sonicweld put on a demonstration I've never personally witnessed prior in anything remotely close to its size. My hunch is, when you look at them, they'll physically disarm you because you just can't believe the sound you're going to hear from such miniature drivers." - Clement Perry Sonicflare, Rocky Mountain Audio Fest 2007 Show Report "Paging Kanye West: Your new speakers are here. At $99k, the Sonicweld system has enough polished aluminum to out-bling Bugatti. And with active x-over, room correction and amazing sound, the Sonicweld system was the best Precise-type room at the show. Being the nosey guy I am, I asked everyone I ran into what their favorite room was. Sonicweld came up a number of times usually accompanied with arm waving and copious gushing. Taste is subjective, of course, but the Sonicweld's Precise-type sound was simply seductive. The speed of the 2" midrange array was incredibly fast with class-leading definition between notes. The sound wasn't too cool or sharp or etched, just perfectly flat and amazingly revealing. Those who like their sound colored, look elsewhere. But for those with a love of absolute accuracy (and have a recording contract at Aftermath), put Sonicweld at the top of your list. Sonicweld is located in Utah (along with 50% of the other high-end speaker manufacturers) and sells direct with in-home installation and optimization. $99k is steep, but the man behind Sonicweld Josh Heiner revealed there's a new system in the works. Once he's finished milling his current backorder of super systems, he's going to get down to a sub $10k system for the rest of us. TECH TALK The speakers are 4-ways with a silk dome tweeter, six 2" titanium midrange drivers and six 4" aluminum woofers. Double outboard 12" subs are in separate enclosures. Unusual for Precise-type speakers, the titanium drivers run wide-range while the six woofers are bipoles firing forward and backward. All drivers feature individual ICEpower amplification controlled by a DEQX digital crossover and room correction unit. And that's just the beginning, check out their website for all the tech that goes into these amazing speakers." - Josh Ray The Stereo Times, Rocky Mountain Audio Fest 2006 Show Report "My next serious visit was to the Sonicweld suite. Truly, with a name like that – I had to go check it out. Right? What I found was a total speaker system that was both stunning visually but also very, very, excellent sounding as well. Here I found myself intrigued with the overall design and where I spent quite a bit of time. Not only did I play a variety of music, I also had an opportunity to chat at length with the designer, Josh Heiner. Josh is a very engaging person and quite willing to converse about his very special product. Essentially what Josh has designed is a total system where he completely does his own design work, performs his own machining, develops his own circuits (w/ICE power modules), etc. The total system costs a cool $64k and features unique beautifully machined aluminum. According to Josh, his design is geared for not only high sonics but also high domestic compatibility – also known as Wife Acceptance Factor (WAF). The system consists of 2 separate speaker towers, speaker construction is relatively compact (i.e., not requiring a large amount of space), beautiful and with precision machining. Each tower consisting of: 13 drivers each – six four inch mid bass drivers configured with 3 firing to the front and 3 firing to the rear). In turn, these drivers are powered by their own dedicated, internal 200-watt amplifier. Along with this, there are six other drivers covering the midrange and high frequencies. These include two-inch titanium dome midrange drivers and one-inch tweeters. Again, they have their own dedicated internal amplifier. The grill for each speaker is made of photo-etched stainless steel. The two subwoofers each sport 15” drivers and its own internal 1100-watt amplifier. Another unique feature of the system is the Preamp/DAC unit that includes DSP processing for EQ and listening room calibration. Basically this is a complete system package and all the user has to do is provide their preferred digital source. The sound of the system is excellent and engaging. Very open, dynamic, solid deep bass, clear mids, open extended highs, transient attack and impact were superb, and overall sound was very detailed and pleasingly smooth. Imaging was outstanding. Josh and I listened to many tunes with the Gonzalo Rubacalba CD, The Blessing, capturing the heart (and ears) of everyone who visited this room. No doubt, the Sonicweld system is likewise something special and for whoever goes this route – they too will have a blessing in their home. Hmmmm - is that a review coming that I feel Josh?" - Bill Wells The Absolute Sound, April/May 2006, Issue 161 "Best Sound at CES" "Sonicweld takes a systems approach with its active loudspeakers. Not inexpensive at $49,000-$64,000 (depending on subwoofers), the system comes complete with triple ICEpower modules for each quasi-line-array satellite speaker, a Subpulse bass module, and the DEQX PDC (preamp-style functions and digital crossover and room correction). Sonicweld's trademark CNC aluminum construction throughout is a mindblower." - Neil Gader The Absolute Sound, April/May 2006, Issue 161 "Best (DSP) Sound at CES" "Sonicweld, in a room exhibited with enough damping, very close to the reality of the recordings." - Robert E. Greene The Absolute Sound, April/May 2006, Issue 161 "In the world of conventional standalone speaker designs, DSP speakers from Sonicweld and Wasatch were using the DEQX digital box to good advantage. Both systems used crossover slopes much steeper than usual, taking advantage of digital filters with steep slopes but linear phase. Both speakers have very flat frequency response and excellent phase behavior. The also have very wide dispersion patterns, which implies some considerable dependence of the sound on the room characteristics (above the bass, where DEQX room correction was being used). As it happened, the Sonicweld was in a large, heavily curtained room. It sounded very smooth all the way up, and indeed offered quite stunning performance. Neil Gader called it "lovely," and it seems an apt word. I had the sense of hearing very exactly what was on the recordings. Listening to my own playing (from REG plays Dvorak, available on regonaudio.com) was like looking in a mirror, sonically speaking, so exactly did it sound like my own instrument." - Robert E. Greene Bound for Sound, issue 8 1998 Sonicweld. Doesn't exactly sound like a music company, but of all the speakers at the show, of all the speakers in Las Vegas, this may have been the most innovative, the most imaginative, the most objectively and technically seductive of the lot. Made of magnesium woofers and a beryllium tweeter, the five faced cabinet is milled from thick aluminum billet (I ain't lying). True constrained layer damping is used to isolate the individual cabinet pieces from one another, and the drivers from the cabinet (the word "cabinet" doesn't seem correct here). It's a dipolar design meaning that the back of the cabinet, ala' some of the finest Genesis designs. And the crossover--totally unique I am told by the designer--is one that utilizes not a capacitor or inductor. Hmmmm, I wonder. The sound? Open and free of speaker induced contaminates...ruthlessly honest. But, can you stand the truth? When the reviews of this monumental work materialize, look to BFS first." - Martin DeWulf Audiophile Voice, volume 4, issue 4, p. 14 "Sonicweld is a newcomer that takes some truly unique approaches to design and construction. [Editor's Note: "Unique" is a wildly overused word; mostly its users mean "unusual," but here I do mean unique, that is I know of no other designs like this.] The astonishing imaging of this dipole comes, in my opinion, from the use of a "cabinet" structure made from machined aluminum billets of aerospace alloys and the extensive use of constrained layer damping. The result is one of the very most inert speaker structures ever made. They have also devised an extraordinary crossover that uses no reactive parts, is almost purely resistive (these speakers are within an quarter ohm throughout their range), and show a maximum of five degrees phase shift. Hear this one if you get a chance." - Gene Pitts Audio Musings Issue 4 1998 "WHEN THE audioMusings PARTNERS AGREED that we wouldn't cover the HiFi '98 show here in Los Angeles, I agreed wholeheartedly. I have been to three audio shows in the past year, and it's hard to get excited about components when you see them over and over again in less-than-perfect show settings. I was expecting to see the same things I saw at CES this past January in Las Vegas. After the first day, I discovered I was wrong - I saw at least three things that knocked my socks off. On the first day of the show, I ran across a speaker by a new company called Sonicweld. They only had a static display that day, but what I saw made me eager to come back the following day to give them a listen. These speakers are made entirely of aerospace grade allovs, and are precision machined from solid billets. They make use of a special damping material which makes them very inert. I know, I tapped on them. They also feature a unique crossover which boasts no reactive parts in the signal path. Sonicweld's engineer and designer is Joshua Heiner. How did they sound? Incredibly warm and lifelike, considering they're made of cold, hard metal. For more information on Sonicweld, visit them at www.sonicweld.com." - Carol Clark HiFi News & Record Review, volume 43 no. 9 "Sonicweld launched one of the most controversial speakers at the show, though I didn't catch its name nor glean much from the pretty, though data-free brochure. What stopped everyone in their tracks was the enclosure: this stand-mounted two-way design - two mid/bass drivers mounted above and below the tweeter - features a cabinet machined from a solid billet of aerospace alloy. It looked absolutely magnificent, it behaves as a dipole, and there are no solder joints in its construction. It climbs way up on the lust list if you fancied a DeLorean on the grounds that its bodywork consisted of unpainted stainless steel. To Robocop, this speaker looks organic." - Ken Kessler Stereophile, September '98 "More heavy metal was offered up by Sonicweld. They're new speaker guys on the block with the Timpanogos, whose cabinets and supports are hewn from solid slabs of aircraft aluminum (the drivers are metal too). We imagined they'd sound cold and ring like a bell. Wow, were we wrong. The sound was the way we like it; deep, tight, and groovin'." - Lonnie Brownell & Richard Rosen Design Awards Received in 1999 for the Timpanogos loudspeaker system Web Links http://www.sonicflare.com/archives/vegas-2008-sonicweld.php http://www.stereotimes.com/CES08CPF.shtml http://www.enjoythemusic.com/magazine/viewpoint/0208/aachapter100_2.htm http://www.sonicflare.com/archives/sonicflare-top-speakers-of-2007.php http://www.tonepublications.com/images/pdfs/TA_013.pdf http://www.sonicflare.com/archives/rmaf-07-sonicweld-99k-super-system.php www.stereotimes.com/ShowReportRM2006BW.shtml www.enjoythemusic.com/rmaf2006/warnke/ www.bigpicturebigsound.com/hifi-meets-industrial-design.shtml www.icepower.bang-olufsen.com/sw2783.asp www.shows.soundstagelive.com/shows/ces2006/facesplaces3.shtml www.cryo-parts.com/he2006.html www.enjoythemusic.com/rockymtn2005/sunday/page3.htm www.soundstagelive.com/hifi98/final_jmu_hard.shtml www.soundstagelive.com/hifi98/daily4_cov.shtml