

The things which never change are vibrations. As a matter of fact, both performing artist and audiophile artist are working with aerial vibrations as the basic medium. Everything else are just tools to capture and release the original vibrations. As it turns out, air is not an easy medium to work with. It's everywhere*. Where a sculptor works on a detached piece of stone and a painter with a dedicated surface, the audio artist works with all the air in the world which is vibrating and thus interfering. These interferences may be benign or not. In the audiophile room he is trying to introduce the air movements similar to those of the original event. All equipment is set up for the purpose of moving the air in the room such that the illusion is created of being at that original event and hearing what the original artist heard then and there. Here we remember that the original can be the live recorded performance or the multi-tracked post-processed finished production as the performing artists and recording crew heard it in the studio for final approval.

* As we've learnt with Franck Tchang's devices, this has implication. Unless your room was a sealed air chamber, its air communicates with (is part of) the air outside as well as the air inside other rooms, even the refrigerator's chilled air in the kitchen. Things you 'do to' other spaces filter back into the listening room wherever air is concerned.

It must be clear that the audiophile’s listening room is crucial to reproducing these desirable air movements. In most cases the listening room is far smaller than the studio or original venue. This immediately implies a completely different sound pressure level. Where a big room has plenty of space to handle a dynamic outburst, a smaller room overloads in no time. That causes all manner of compression as the pressure needs to go somewhere. Playing at lower levels is one solution but it does diminish the raw energy of the original. It's better to combat these compression issues directly.

A loudspeaker is the most dynamic piece of equipment in any hifi set. It is supposed to move the air in such a way that small and large waves are treated equal and that the total outcome fools our brains into believing that there's three-dimensional width, depth and height in an overlaid acoustic with real musicians playing. It's all make-believe but that’s what we’re after - the best possible ... er, mind fuck.

While doing its best to take part in the creation of our virtual audio reality, the loudspeaker driver carries out the heavy work. Exciting air is not easy. Doing so in a controlled fashion is even harder. Especially mid and low frequencies need tricks to be emitted believably. Here the speaker manufacturer goes through hoops to create a product that is riddled with compromise but still delivers the best musical result for the money. Compromises are related to price, size, frequency response and of course materials. One thing our speaker maker cannot anticipate completely is how the finished product will interact with the audiophile’s room. The voicing the speaker designer performed was based on averages from sessions in his own listening room and that of friends performed with his own electronics and that of his friends. Add some measurements in an anechoic chamber and that's about it.

Once the audiophile decided on any particular loudspeaker after many anxious listening sessions in his own room assisted by his ever-so-patient cooperative audio dealer—hey, abused as they are these days by the Internet, those still do exist!—it's now all up to him. He has the raw material, his blank high-quality canvas on which to create his masterpiece. Being a man the audiophile has various tools (which of course goes for the audiophile woman too). The human is a toolmaker after all. This sets us aside from primates and other close biological cousins. So with his tools our homo sonus starts to work on his canvas of room+speakers. He connects the right amplifiers, the right sources and starts to listen. Now he notices that the tools interact. One component exerts a certain influence on the other. The excited air in the room not only sets his hearing mechanism into sympathetic action, some component starts to resonate. Tiny vibrations interfere with electronic parts. Those cause the sound of the system to change. Time to assert control and fight off these gremlins.

Now let us introduce one possible tool to fight these resonance gremlins. Meet Franc Audio Accessories. Pawel Skulimowski is the man behind this brand. With a mechanical engineering degree of the University of Gdansk in his pocket, he decided to go audio. That choice was predicated upon his experiments with audio equipment since childhood. There was always a means to make the sound better. It of course helps when formal studies lead you to profound material knowledge and how to process these materials for the intended purposes.