SB Acoustics continues to deliver on its Satori high end speaker development program benefiting from the vast experience and unique skills of its Danesian Audio engineering team in Denmark. Built on the remarkable foundation of Sinar Baja Electric and its decades of manufacturing experience in Indonesia, combined with the engineering expertise of its Danish team, lead by former Vifa/Scan-Speak engineers Ulrik Schmidt and Frank Nielsen, the SB Acoustics Satori range is the ultimate expression of product development and vertical integrated manufacturing.
Created as a disrupting alternative to the high-end transducer market, the SB Acoustics Satori range offers a relatively affordable line of products that delivers on performance and unique approach in every model, including through the use of unique materials and design innovations. Every Satori product is assembled in a dedicated, temperature- and humidity-controlled clean facility in Sinar Baja's main industrial unit, where every single component produced in the group's other factories are all rigorously submitted to the most stringent quality control.
This high end transducer range has now expanded with the addition of a coaxial Satori design, the first coaxial in SB Acoustic's vast range of home audio and hifi drivers to be able to bear the designation. The new MT19CP-8 Satori coaxial expands this flagship SB Acoustics line, already offering woofers, midbass, midrange, and tweeter transducers.
Looking at the current Satori family, the addition of a coaxial driver was a predictable move, but not an effort to be taken lightly. Coaxials are extremely popular at the moment, with many speaker designers very focused on time domain coherence, and the market increasingly looking to approach speaker designs that translate correctly multichannel and spatial audio sources. For smaller, more convenient home audio systems, high-quality coaxial options are also in high demand.
The new MT19CP-8 Satori attempts to showcase the advantages of that time-aligned approach in a full-range coaxial driver that doesn't compromise on the extreme levels of performance already demonstrated by the Satori range. Egyptian papyrus fibers were a distinct option in cones since the first models in the Satori range, including the now familiar proprietary white paper cones where the visible fibers quickly became a distinct feature.
The first surprising feature in the new MT19CP-8 coaxial starts with the option to go for a larger 7.5" woofer, while the Satori largest midwoofers are all 6.5", from where they transition to 9.5" subwoofers. This larger cone size allows the MT19CP-8 to deliver a solid low frequency response down to 50Hz, comparing favorably with the 9.5" Satori WO24P-8 paper woofer, which extends the frequency response down to 30Hz. As SB Acoustics confirms, the new MT19CP-8 Satori coaxial will offer a linear response into the midrange range with excellent tweeter performance, ideal for larger multi-way speaker designs, or extended generously to the midbass range for smaller bookshelf speakers.
As SB Acoustics also explains, the MT19CP-8 was an extensive development project trying to address all known constraints that are typical of coaxial drivers, aiming not to compromise on the overall power response and linearity. To achieve those goals, the engineering team designed the 26mm high-frequency unit from the ground up, extracting all the high performance of a soft dome tweeter with custom designed neodymium motor, copper cap and CCAW voice coil on a fiber glass former.
The lower frequency range, which crosses over generously in the 1kHz range leverages also an optimized neodymium magnet system with extended copper sleeve, generously vented pole piece with a 6mm air gap height, and 1.5" voice coil wound with copper clad aluminum wire. The vented cast aluminum chassis and vented pole piece ensures optimum strength of the ensemble and optimized cooling for low compression.
The larger woofer cone surface almost masks the presence of the relatively small dome tweeter at the center, making the proprietary papyrus infused black paper cone, suspended in a soft rubber surround, its most visible frontal feature. The rubber surround is a purposefully developed low profile triple roll design for minimum high frequency diffraction.
This versatile, wide bandwidth coaxial transducer, is already making its way to Vance Dickason's Voice Coil Test Bench, allowing our readers to confirm the expected high level performance already found throughout the SB Acoustics Satori family of speaker drivers. Vance Dickason has just finished characterizing the SB Acoustics 9.5" Satori WO24TX-4 TPCD cone woofer, which our readers will find in the September issue of Voice Coil.
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