Cathedral Monolith Prototypes
This past weekend, our creatively cool new neighbors across the street gave me a mid-construction tour of an amazing addition to their recently purchased turn-of-the-century house. Part of the new modern design features a large open barn-like room right behind the original structure. This centrally-located space will showcase an ever-changing array of large-format photography, paintings & other art originals. As “Marco” (name changed here for complete anonymity—heh) took me through he space, he mentioned the use of clear varnished baltic birch plywood throughout the overall project, and my ears immediately perked up!
In regards to acoustic engineering, high quality baltic birch plywood is of particular interest because of certain inherent properties that make it an ideal material for building speaker cabinets. The 90-degree criss-crossing of its grain make it incredibly rigid, therefore reducing unwanted sonic vibrations in the walls themselves. Additionally, the thin laminated layers in the plywood create a sonically-neutral characteristic which creates a perfect environment for reproducing accurate music without sonic coloration. Anyway, blah, blah, blah… there’s good reason why audiophile-makers have used baltic birch plywood as a go-to material in their speaker box designs for decades. And in recent years, plywood, once used only as a backing material, has come to the forefront as a sleek industrial, yet somehow warm modern material.
Another interesting feature in the gallery room that Marco described was the use of rubber castors on custom-constructed baltic birch furniture pieces— not only would the artwork change on the whims of the owners, but the configuration of the room itself would be reconfigurable as well. When I brought up the concept of a large single floorstanding speaker that could fill the entire room with amazing music, he envisioned it on castors, which I thought was a brilliant idea. Not only would the speaker be easily moved anywhere in the room, but the rubber castors would isolate the speaker from the floor, minimizing unwanted vibrations into the wood floor.
While their home addition project won’t be completed until Spring 2021, I thought it would fun to imagine what this large floor standing speaker might look like. Acoustically, the Heinsenfolg Cathedral series was a great starting point with its wide-dispersion drivers and relatively simple cabinet construction that will translate well using the baltic birch plywood.
Like the Cathedral series, a perforated metal screening curves across the top of the “belfry” or bell tower section to encase a facade-mounted white ceramic-coated aluminum tweeter that produces the crisp & silky highs with smooth harmonic richness. An acoustically-paired 6" mid-range punches satisfyingly tight mid-bass from the main cabinet. Additionally an 8” woofer will be a welcome addition to push visceral, satisfyingly deep bass through the massive airspace of the extra large room.
Shown below are three possible silhouettes featuring a wide stance designed to minimize tipping when moving the speaker around the room on its castors…
Like all of our Heinsenfolg lifestyle speakers, the Cathedral Monolith would feature prodigious built-in amplification, DSP-tuned cabinets and upgradable connectivity designed to last a lifetime. A hidden open nook on the back of the cabinet would neatly conceal any additional lengths of the single power cord and its paired wireless unit of the owners choice whether it be easy-to-use bluetooth HD, Alexa-enabled devices, Sonos, etc.
