It's more than a decade now since Frans Van Hauwaert, researcher and acoustics expert, built his first loudspeaker sets that stunned the world by their realism and sound quality. Audiophiles in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany have come to appreciate and admire the exceptional reproduction of music, truly recreating the presence of a concert hall in your living room. Defying all laws of acoustics, Van Hauwaert has now built a set in titanium, pyramid-shaped, which again shows surprising clarity and realism.
The never-ending quest for the perfect sound continues … read more

Discover the soul of purity ©

It was back in 1987 that Frans Van Hauwaert surprised the audio world for the first time with a loudspeaker set that showed uncanny realism, depth and clarity. For more than twenty years, this electronics expert and acoustician from Kalmthout, near Antwerp (Belgium), had been looking for the perfect way to reproduce music.
During that time, he attended numerous concerts and performances, experimented with all sorts of materials, and finally ended up with a unique concept. Contrary to many of his colleagues, Van Hauwaert does not just build a loudspeaker based on the best components he can find, assembled according to a fixed design.

For him, every loudspeaker is a musical instrument that has to be tuned for perfect reproduction. Whereas an average loudspeaker is tuned to one or two frequencies, Van Hauwaert's models are adjusted to some forty odd frequencies, almost one for every instrument in an orchestra. By carefully choosing each and every component and handcrafting them meticulously into the final loudspeaker set, the designer has been able to create models that truly stand out from the crowd - even if that crowd consists of other high-end loudspeaker sets.

"Rear" speakers

When we went to listen to Van Hauwaert's first creations, we just couldn't believe our ears - and eyes. Before us were just two very slim loudspeakers - "sound columns", Van Hauwaert likes to call them - that emanated a sound belying many times their diminutive size, truthfully recreating a live concert hall ambience. We were immediately very suspicious as we had only heard this sort of depth and realism in multi-speaker systems, usually supplemented by digital delay equipment.

However, there was nothing there except those two speakers which recreated the exact location of the members of an orchestra with extreme precision - as if you were sitting in the very concert hall, and not on a couch in Van Hauwaert's listening room. Goose pimples all over!

But perhaps even more amazing : the loudspeakers were facing me with their rear, projecting their sound to the back of the room. During his countless visits to concerts, Van Hauwaert had been able to calculate very precisely where the ideal listening spots in a concert hall were and how long it took for direct and so-called reflected sound ( off the walls, ceilings, chairs, etc. ) to reach the listener. By digesting all this information in his "reprojection" technique, it did not really matter in the end where you placed your loudspeakers in the listening environment - at worst your seat in in the concert hall changed slightly, say from row ten to fiftheen. And by not showing the drivers themselves, they also had a much more pleasing look.

Thedra

Those loudspeakers, called Thedra, were an almost immediate success. Günther Neuhold, conductor of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of Flanders, was one of the first to be seduced, followed by wellknown musicians like Walter Boeykens, Robert Groslot, the Cantando choir, etc. Many audiophiles in Germany were interested as well, and even Belgium's Frenchspeaking television channel, RTBF, dedicated some airtime to the speakers. Several multinational companies offered them as a gift of "Made in Flanders Technology" to important foreign visitors.

Van Hauwaert didn't stop there. In the years to follow, he developed several other models with different shapes and sizes, but all with the same basic characteristic : and exceptional sound realism. Even old recordings suddenly seemed to come alive, with details you had never even suspected to be there. In 1994 he even managed to have one model auctioned at Sotheby's, making it the very first loudspeaker ever to feature in that famous house. And just to prove that his concept could work equally well in other surroundings, Van Hauwaert also developed a high-end system for luxury cars like Rolls Royce, Mercedes and BMW.

Living material

Then, in 1997, Van Hauwaert changed course radically. In all of his previous models, he was convinced that, during the reproduction, only the drivers themselves should be active and that all the rest - the enclosure, the sound proofing, etc. - should remain silent. "But now I have come to realise that every material has a soul of its own and reacts differently to any 'impression' it has to digest - including acoustic impressions. The extensive research I did in concert halls when perfecting my recording technique, has shown me that it is not just the architecture but also the materials used in a venue that determine why one concert hall sounds wonderful and another one doesn't"
 
That's right, we didn't tell you yet, but Van Hauwaert has already made over 400 classical recordings in various concert halls, churches, cathedrals, and other locations in Belgium and abroad. He uses a new, natural recording technique with just two microphones which has already resulted in a number of CD's, and which, combined with his great speakers, will put you dead in the middle of the recording location.

It is this experience that he transferred to a new loudspeaker concept almost two years ago, oddly enough in a loudspeaker designer's nightmare : a pyramid. What's more, he threw out a number of well-established loudspeaker design principles, using very thin walls ( 10 millimeters or less ) whereas all other manufacturers would go for thick, inflexible materials, for instance.


 

And now for something entirely different …

"The fact is", Van Hauwaert explains, "that a pyramid emanates an exceptional amount of energy which we can use to the extreme for loudspeaker reproduction. And because of this technology, we can build this loudspeaker in almost any material". To prove his point, first he had a model made in steel, about a meter high and, like his predecessors, with a very high efficiency - about one hundredth of a watt was already sufficient for perfectly audible speech and music reproduction, despite the fact that the speakers could easily handle peak loads of 250 watts or more. And now, he has really gone to the extreme : his newest model, dubbed the Metamorfose, is made of … titanium, of all things!

"Actually, it was the scientific challenge that drove me to try this out", he admits. Titanium is a precious metal with very special characteristics. For one it is very 'communicative' : if you beat with a hammer on another hard object, it will resound or sing for nearly 16 seconds - enough to make any church bell jealous. The amazing thing is that once you pump some music into the loudspeakers, the sound becomes crystal clear. Even though it is contrary to all theories that only the loudspeaker cone should be allowed to come alive, the whole enclosure is resounding".

(article written by Frans Godden; published in ID-SIDE, September '99)