Superlative Audio LLC is a small company dedicated to pushing the limits of current technology to achieve the most lifelike and musical sound reproduction of any equipment.
Our technology group has experience with everything from musical instrument design to integrated circuit products. Starting from basics we have searched for the best, no-compromise technologies and have invented many new ways of achieving our goals. Starting with the development of speaker systems and then the supporting electronics we feel that we have eclipsed previous technological thresholds over and over again.
Technical Overview
Superlative Audio embarked on creating the ultimate sound reproduction technology. The result is the SAS-1 series of fully electrostatic full range speakers.
After a careful review of potential technologies, electrostatic speakers showed the greatest promise. Traditional electrostatics designs have incredible clarity, but many drawbacks. Performance issues resulting from their traditional dipole operation and large area planar transducers create difficulties in bass reproduction, speaker placement, imaging and a small “sweet spot” which limits listening locations.
In the 1970’s much progress was made to eliminate these problems. The most promising technology was achieved with the acoustic lens and monopole operation pioneered by Harold Beveridge. After review of his products it was found that they missed the mark on many important acoustic performance parameters. After an independent development process new technologies were developed which removed these artifacts and a new level of performance emerged.
These developments included new materials, new lens, transducer and cabinet designs, new manufacturing technologies were created and new approaches to speaker structure combined to make a speaker which has very few technological limitations.
The result is the SAS-1HF, a perfect line source radiator with full range 60Hz-20kHz single diaphragm monopole operation. This enables the sound to emerge as a perfect cylindrical wave emission with no “back wave” to disturb imaging. The phase coherence is uniquely impeccable since the sound is effectively coming from a single transducer.
Since there are limits to the loudness of low frequencies that a single transducer can provide a new type of electrostatic bass driver was developed. It is utilized in the SAS-1LF. This too is a line source monopole transducer that covers 25Hz-400Hz. Because of the huge frequency overlap between the two speakers a crossover point can be selected for the type of listening to be done.
Integrated into the speakers are amplifiers specially designed for use with these speakers. These amplifiers use patented technology that perfectly drives the difficult electrostatic loudspeaker loading. Many electrostatic speakers use resistive isolation systems to decouple this load from traditional amplifiers. This isolation also reduces the clarity and accuracy of the sound. With the integration of the amplifiers with the speakers, there is no need for these circuits and there are no fidelity degradation resulting from speaker cables interacting with the amplifiers or the speaker. This has resulted in a new level of clarity, dynamics and nuance. All the crossover and equalization is done at line levels with analog or digital processing.