January 2012 - New Year, New Drivers
Happy New Year to customers and colleagues throughout the world.
Apologies for the silence on the website. We have been busy in the background, refining our ideas for the new Jordan drive units. Lowther have been very helpful and we are slowly progressing towards the first small run of units.
I wish to incorporate a number of new ideas, so this has not been a case of merely putting the existing Jordan JX92S back into production. We have secured an overall improvement in performance throughout the entire frequency range and the new driver maintains the dimensions of the original chassis. It will therefore be a direct physical replacement for existing enclosures.
Initial results are looking very promising indeed and we hope to have the first units in February.
Once the new JX92S is available, we will be developing an upgraded version of the JXR6HD. We hope at that time to have a new enclosure design available for the linear array which provides improved stereo performance from a very elegant cabinet.
September 2011 - Bringing manufacturing home
One of the greatest difficulties encountered in product development is the transition from design to manufacture. The most effective situation is where all the necessary facilities are 'in house.' The designer can then have immediate access to the crucial pre-production stages where the most effective design-to-production procedures can be established by face-to-face dialogue
However, when design and production are widely separated, this is impossible and sending samples back and forth between the designer and the producer is costly and time consuming. But failure to do so can result in the designer losing all control over any changes in materials or procedures, which may appear small but could significantly affect design performance.
This is particularly relevant in the case of high performance loudspeakers where the final judge of sound quality is subjective and cannot be assessed remotely. Therefore, the opportunity to keep all aspects of design and production within one country offers very significant advantages.
August 2011 - Why hi-fi?
A deep involvement with loudspeaker design has taken me, not only into various branches of physics but also into the deeper regions of the human psyche including psychological, social and economic factors.
The original objective for so-called Hi-Fi was to re-create, in the home, the subjective experience of live vocal and traditional instrumental music. The idealized concept was a window on the orchestra where the loudspeakers would sonically disappear and the wall of the listening room would appear to open up onto a live stage performance. The level of realism had reached the point where convincing A-B comparisons between loudspeakers and live musicians were often given at Hi-Fi venues.
However, these priorities have now been somewhat skewed with the advent of modern, electronically generated and processed music, which is often played at dangerously high levels well beyond the threshold of pain and causing permanent damage to our hearing mechanism. In this case the original objective is no longer relevant. The Jordan reference sounds are those created by live, acoustically generated vocal and instrumental sources that have no electronic processing. We will adopt the term Organic from the food industry, which is applied to products that are unprocessed and have no artificial colouring or flavouring. (This is in no way intended to denigrate the tastes of those who prefer sausage meat to prime fillet steak).
There is of course also, a vast amount of popular, well-recorded music, which can benefit tremendously from the true Hi-Fi approach particularly with solo voices and instrumentalists where the performance is perceived to be almost live in the room.
Regardless of musical preference, by far the greatest technical challenge to loudspeaker system design is to re-create the perception of a large-scale classical concert scenario embracing traditional orchestral choral performances, which may include the lowest notes from a full size pipe organ. These create sound fields of immeasurable complexity but have been reproduced quite convincingly. Obviously this type of music demands a substantial loudspeaker system capable of resolving very fine detail.
To me it is rather sad that, in spite of there being just as many women music lovers as men, the audio industry has emerged as a largely male preserve where concern for parametric exactitude becomes an objective in itself The advent of computer test programmes has exacerbated this. It must be said that, at best, the accuracy of such tests are unlikely to better +/- 20% even with experienced operators.
E J Jordan Designs has endeavoured to create loudspeaker drive units which will provide the most realistic re-creation of real music as possible. These we have referred to as building bricks in sound and used singly or in combinations offer a virtually a limitless range of possible systems to suit every possible requirement. Including, most importantly, acceptance by the lady of the house
June 2011 - The Goodman's Minim
I learnt most about speakers by writing about them.
In the process of writing my book, Loudspeakers, I got involved with producing a lot of the basic equations. This brought up the loudspeaker trinity of efficiency, bass extension and box size. I realised that you could trade any one for the other two. You could make the box as small as you liked and keep a given bass extension but you sacrificed efficiency.
I had a book on the shelf - Langford Smith’s Radio Designer’s Handbook - and thought, I wonder if I can get bass from a box that size? So I made one, a reflex box with a two inch wide range driver. And blow me down, it produced respectable bass. It could even do organ music but only at 8 watts.
This was whilst I was at Goodmans. In the event, the design wasn’t developed as it should have been. Under Ed Newland, the owner of Goodmans, I had been given considerable freedom to pursue my research.
When Newland died, my work was sidelined and my assistant at the time, Laurie Fincham, took over development of the little reflex box. It was decided that the design needed a tweeter. He put in a dedicated bass unit, added a tweeter and that became the Goodmans Minim. It worked well but it was no better at high frequencies than the one I produced. But from this beginning, the classic British bookshelf speaker was spawned.
I, meanwhile, decided to pursue my ideas on my own, outside the mainstream.