AN-K Speakers

The AN-K is a compact ‘book shelf’ speaker design, using two drive units per cabinet and available in 4 models.

Unlike many ‘book shelf’ designs, the AN-K is relatively efficient and offers the amplifier an easy ‘load’, making it highly suitable for our range of superior quality, low powered valve amplifiers.

The design of the AN-K Loudspeaker, by contrast, follows an altogether different philosophy. It calls for a cabinet that complements the chosen drive units, rather than fighting against them. Instead of trying to kill the resonances, we tailor the cabinet to place them in frequency bands where they aid and enhance the operation of the drive units, culminating in a loudspeaker system that makes the most of the preceding amplifier’s output.

The material choice for the cabinet is an area where a great deal of research and development has taken place. Over the years, we have tried many different materials and combinations, a time consuming endeavour culminating in the current design, which utilises the highest quality Russian Birch ply for the entire cabinet. Bracing and internal damping is kept to a minimum and strategically applied to help, not hinder the drivers.

The cabinet has been designed to be placed close to room boundaries, where the bass performance is augmented significantly by the additional reinforcement offered by the nearby walls. In this position, it will outperform any similarly sized speaker regardless of origin, thanks in part to the shallow cabinet / wide baffle shape which gives the drivers the best possible operating conditions, allowing them to perform as if they are mounted in a virtual wall. This provides the most undisturbed sound field with the widest and most even dispersion possible from a real world cabinet shape.

The crossover is simple, essentially first order, hardwired and incorporates air-cored chokes and selected bipolar and polypropylene capacitors (either copper foil or silver foil, depending on model.) The internal cabling consists of either 99.99% pure copper or 99.99% pure silver Audio Note (UK) wire, depending on the exact model. (See specifications.)

Consistent performance is a major issue in loudspeaker design and unfortunately all drive units vary slight from each other, even if they look the same and have the same basic specification.

Many loudspeaker manufacturer’s will tell you that they provide “computer matched” crossovers, and whilst this may be true in one sense (each crossover may have been matched to have the exact same capacitance, inductance and resistance) this essentially “passive” method does not adequately take into consideration the mechanical and acoustic variance present in the drive units themselves, where minute differences in acoustic behaviour will result in quite substantial differences in performance and sound.

Therefore, to obtain the best possible combination of drivers and crossovers, we have developed a dynamic matching process. This ensures that each loudspeaker in a stereo pair matches a ‘master curve’ and also its partner, to within 0.4dB; to the best of our knowledge, no other loudspeaker manufacturer achieves such close matching and tests 100% of its production.