New PS Audio speakers?

I think part of the reason is that international shipping is a crap shoot at best and a disaster at worst. There is no way to guarantee condition of the shipment on delivery or if it will arrive at all.

You can use expedited services which are a completely different story but charge an appropriate amount of money for the services and the shipping cost could easily go over the cost of the component depending on component cost.

The other reason is physical support becomes impossible unless a service facility is on your continent and that adds another layer of cost to the equation.

Many vendors just dont have any interest in overseas sales and it is completely understandable once you look into the trouble involved…

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7 posts were merged into an existing topic: We also love cars

The ever vigilant @Elk found the 600 thread that eluded me. It’s here:

Thanks Elk!

Well, as Paul as mentioned publicly multiple times, our pricing model is cost plus and doesn’t factor in the R&D cost. The R&D cost is factored into ROI calculations but that is more about the upfront decision whether or not we’re going to pursue a certain product or product category.

These speakers have represented a very significant investment (developing our own high performance drivers, IP, tooling etc.) but they are quite important to the overall product vision of the company beyond a simple line extension.

I spoke to a fellow that now works at a major vendor/design house that formerly worked at a major speaker company and the told me right when I started that “high end speaker take 4 years”. This was 2.5 years ago. I asked him why he said that and he described them going through multiple design revisions and eventually hiring BMW design group for ID and then having some production challenges with their pure titanium cone drivers. Anyway, it was a bit prophetic but I’m really really happy with where we have ended up performance-wise at least.

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So I’m curious Chris. I know you brought your own experiences to the table. Can you touch on what were your ‘oh wow’ or surprise moments during this journey?

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Thought you all might like to see one of the glamour shots we took of the FR30 on a recent photoshoot.


And, for those interested in the dark charcoal color speaker, here’s a sneak peek. These photos still have to be retouched and little flaws in the prototypes removed, but hopefully you can see past that to get an idea (like the little dimple imperfections in the dark speaker’s passive radiators which won’t be there in production).

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Very nice…again, huge improvement over that last iteration.

Love the look. What is the width and depth?

I’d say aesthetically these fit into the sweet spot that speaker designers should shoot for. Meaning, I doubt there will be many potential consumers who are offended by their looks enough to write them off based on looks. So it will come down to sonics, as it should.

Are they so visually striking as to cause many to say, I absolutely love the look and gotta have them because they looks so much better than 90% of other $25k speakers (for those for whom such aesthetic considerations play arguably a bigger role than they should)? No, I highly doubt that. But they look fine, much better than before as has been stated by many, and the risk with trying to create a speaker that many consider beautiful is that because it is so subjective in doing so you will also turn many off.

So I think these are right in the sweet spot that they need to be. Good re-engineer in that regard.

The side drivers worry me from a sonics perspective, as I’ve never liked a speaker that had a topology like that. But I’m open to having my mind changed.

GOAL! :grinning:

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They look so huge compared to this picture…I think I need Chris standing aside to make a decision what to prefer.

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Amazing looking speakers, can’t wait to hear them, great job team PS Audio :grinning:

Looking superb. I want one, hopefully the lower tier model is similarly good looking. Is there a way we can have silver feet for black speakers. I wonder how that will look.

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As far as the side facing circles that you see, these are not active drivers. They are custom passive radiators and function essentially like a bass reflex / port, though have certain advantages when it comes to distortion/output and freedom from midrange resonances. They are only “doing something” in the very deep bass and are horizontally opposed on opposite sides of the enclosure to minimize enclosure vibration.

The waves down at their tuning are ~45 feet long and are completely omnidirectional and so you don’t need to worry about their orientation affecting sound in some way.

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Got it, thanks. I know for some time one of the design iterations included active bass woofers like GoldenEar and Martin Logan do (powered woofer) and I couldn’t really keep track of how the design has changed over the iterations.

Yup. They all look the same, just smaller, etc.

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Will the bigger ones be line sources or not?

Chris has yet to decide but probably. He’s got some interesting concepts.

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Years ago there was a comment by John Atkinson of Stereophile about the Infinity Modulus speaker system, something along the lines of “to see them is to want to own them”. This mentality applies 10-fold to the FR-30.

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Geez, I really want to hear these.

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