SpectraFlora

Rediscover meaning in music with our gorgeous, emotive Australian designed and made speakers

What makes us different: the SpectraFlora sound

Much is made in HiFi about reproducing music as the artist intended. Often that’s interpreted as technical excellence—a transparent listening experience that captures the technical details of recordings. To us, that represents a great misunderstanding of art.* What musicians really want to convey is not technical—they wish to convey meaning through emotion.

Overwhelmingly, the feedback we get from listeners is that our speakers sound “live,” which we take as a great compliment. However, our aim is not to simply create a live sound but one that is emotionally impactful. For people who feel what our speakers offer, the feedback is often that they’re the best speakers they’ve ever heard.

Our approach to R&D: optimising for emotional impact

At each step of development our goal is to invoke physiological emotional responses such as waves of chills. When tears of joy are shed during an optimisation step of many, many iterations, then we move onto optimising the next aspect of design until they’re shed again. That emotional impact can’t be predicted or optimised through measurements and data analysis.

We use twenty to thirty test tracks that we’ve heard hundreds of times. What’s incredible and surprising each time a design element comes together just right, is that the emotional response is just as great as if we hadn’t heard the track over and over while listening critically each time.

  • Description text goes hereDynamic sound, not frequency response, seems to correlate with emotional impact and, surprisingly, there is no objective measure of dynamic sound (although excessive power compression would clearly prevent dynamic sound).

    Getting the time domain right seems to be necessary but not sufficient for emotional impact and we spend a lot of time getting time domain responses technically correct as a starting point. We pride ourselves on how well our speakers reproduce piano and it’s doubtful piano could be emotionally impactful without getting timing right across its large frequency range.

    Vocal intelligibility is necessary for emotional impact and is a priority. Not just intelligibility, however, but how emotion is expressed through the subtlest inflections that can only be conveyed through high levels of detail and dynamics, again, across a large frequency range.

  • DescriptioA flat frequency response is easy to achieve and is often our starting point for tuning crossovers, but we have not yet concluded with any prototype or final model that flat is best for emotional response. In fact, in reverberant rooms, where most speakers end up, a flat response sounds awful because of the exaggerated midrange from reflections. That’s not to say our speakers have garbage frequency responses—they don’t—our responses are nice and smooth. But they’re not flat. We prefer a dip in the midrange as explained below in comparison to other speakers in the high-end market.n text goes here

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