Don Bingaman is a retired aerospace engineer who has dabbled with DIY audio projects for forty years. Jeff McCabe is a retired Industrial Technology and STEM Educator and an expert cabinet maker who has built custom speaker cabinets for over 30 years. Jim Moellering is a business executive who has owned and managed an audio retail business, and understands finance, operations and supplier management.

Our engineering, design and business operations are conducted in St. Louis, MO, and our cabinet build and component assembly is done in Alvo, NE. Dayton Audio, Danville signal miniDSP, Eminence, Cube Audio and SB Acoustics provide our drivers and electronic components. VPE Electrodynamics and our suppliers have the collective capabilities to engineer, build and market anything, but we have chosen to build loudspeakers which address the real world problem of achieving realistic sound inside domestic listening rooms, (as opposed to anechoic chambers or showrooms).

We have selected two design philosophies to accomplish this: 1) low diffraction designs which minimize nearby reflections off side walls and floor through the use of tailored radiation patterns and floor coupling of the bass, and 2) abandonment of the Thiele-Small bass enclosure filter analogies. We linearize woofer bass response via use of digital signal processing (DSP) and slot-loaded dipole woofer configurations.

So why abandon Thiele-Small which has been a highly successful math model for both sealed and ported direct radiator speaker enclosures for nearly 50 years and which dominates current speaker design ? Many critical music listeners prefer enclosure-less electrostatic or planar-magnetic panels or open-baffle dipoles, (e.g. Linkwitz). The reasons for this preference are complex to explain but plain to the ear.

While conventional wisdom holds that the piano is the hardest instrument to record and reproduce accurately, we contend that the bowed and plucked string double bass is actually harder for conventional direct radiators to reproduce cleanly due to speaker cabinet resonances which are coincident with the harmonics of the double bass spruce body (or “soundbox”), itself.

It is obvious to the musician’s ear that something is wrong – except on planar and dipole loudspeakers. Dipole speakers simply sound more natural and more capable of reproducing the rich harmonic structure of the double bass which is both the foundation of the Symphony Orchestra and the time-keeper for almost every jazz combo – hence our cabinet-less design approach.