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2nd Rethm In 1998 Jacob George, an architect practicing in Los Angeles and India bought a 5-watt amplifier. His search for an efficient loudspeaker led him to the infamous Lowther driver. This anachronistic whizzer-cone driver has long been regarded as the only dynamic speaker that could better the famed Quad ESL introduced in 1957. Jacob acquired pair of the Lowther drivers and built an experimental enclosure. The sound, while uncannily realistic in most regards, quickly revealed the Lowthers Achilles heel - an annoying mid-range peak, affectionately known to audiophiles as the Lowther quack. Jacob realized that if he could tame the offending peak the Lowther would almost certainly assume its rightful place as the worlds best loudspeaker. Many attempts have been made over the years to tame the peak, such as doping the cones with some damping substance, or stuffing the space behind the whizzer cone with wool. Every previous attempt threw out the baby with the bath water by interfering with the speakers natural clarity and dynamics. An architect, Jacob envisioned cantilevering an absorber between the two cones to reduce the interaction of the woofer and whizzer-the most probable cause of the problem. The quack disappeared. Any remaining colorations turned out to be distortion caused by poor design of the rear- loaded horn enclosures required to get adequate bass from the 8 inch cone. His design is a precision tubular fiberglass horn, which virtually eliminates standing waves. The loading chamber is slanted downward at 45 degrees, thereby eliminating reflections created by the flat back wall of other designs. In the Rethm, the full potential of single driver design is realized. The obvious advantage of no electrical crossover is further enhanced by the fact that some small diameter tweeter is not being driven into distortion as it attempts to reproduce the lower frequencies near the crossover point. The Rethm Loudspeaker sets new standards in realistic musical reproduction in the home.Hear them for yourself at a Rethm loudspeaker dealer. __________________________________________________ |
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3rd Rethm A more compact, less expensive loud speaker, the Third Rethm is based on entirely the same principles as the second rethm: it uses a full range driver: it is horn loaded: the enclosure is designed with the same attention to detail such that it eliminates standing waves and box colourations. __________________________________________________ |
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