Koji je po vama najbolji razglas u zemlji Srbiji

[AcaHari]

KV2 VHD nesto o tome

The gentle, peaceful countryside of the southern Czech Republic harbours a pro audio secret. But those in the know are spread to the four corners of the world, as KV2 Audio is possibly the most internationally-successful small manufacturer in the industry.
Co-founder George Krampera is a native of this part of the world, but made a name for himself as a speaker designer for Yorkville Sound and others in the West after fleeing the former Communist regime of Czechoslovakia. When democracy returned to the region, so did he – making full use of his well-earned reputation to begin a contract design operation and a formative relationship with Italian loudspeaker mainstay, RCF.

‘People are closer to nature here; it’s a perfect place to design,’ he says of his homeland. ‘You’re under no other stresses besides paying the rent and tax – the usual.’

The current company building in the small town of Milevsko was built by Mr Krampera and his colleagues during 1993/94, when he formed a company called Class A. At the time, he was working as a main supplier to RCF but later this became the headquarters of KV2. His output for RCF (which involved commuting regularly between Milevsko and Reggio around 600km to the south) included the electronics for the ART series among many other successes.

Under the Mackie regime that acquired RCF in 1998, work here continued on most of the Mackie-owned RCF speaker models. But Mackie had also bought Class A, so when the cracks began to show in the Mackie-RCF infrastructure Mr Krampera cut loose and built a new enterprise around his loyal team.

KV2 Audio came into being with a very distributed business model. The two co-founders live thousands of miles apart - Mr Krampera in the Czech Republic and company president Marcelo Vercelli near Seattle in the US. In addition, the director of European distribution Alex Paglioni is based in Poland, and two important directors, Andy Austin-Brown and Jonathan Reece-Farren, in the UK.

‘Our idea was to produce speakers based on very low distortion and much higher dynamics than other products on the market,’ Mr Krampera explains. ‘We have a mid-range model with third-harmonic distortion at 120dB of just 0.05 per cent. The problem with that level of distortion is that you can hear all the faults of the electronic components. Above about 3 per cent, those faults are masked. At the same time, once you build a speaker with less than 1 per cent distortion, your dynamic range increases from 30dB to 60dB. Therefore, the parameters of the system are pushing at the boundaries of our hearing, and the need for much higher tolerances arises. However, it doesn’t make sense to try to improve things much beyond this level, so we can set the benchmark for all our products here.’

R&D, production and manufacturing is centred in Milevsko, crucial market research and product strategy comes from the UK, while financing and sales are driven from Seattle. ‘Marcelo’s reputation was established through RCF and Mackie, and many of our customers are those who have remained loyal to him throughout all the changes,’ adds Mr Krampera.

He and M rVercelli first overlapped in 1995, when Mr Vercelli was selling RCF products in the US. The association blossomed with the advent of Fussion, an ealier attempt by Mr Krampera to attain extremely low distortion – later sold as a brand to Mackie. But Mackie’s subsequent acquisition of EAW seemed both to shift the high-end prerogatives away from them and towards EAW. To retain this focus, they came up with their own brand – a continuation of the thinking behind Fussion, but independent of any other corporate concerns.

The manufacturing arrangement has remained very stable. Under the auspices of Class A, a factory in nearby Kolín was used for RCF and Mackie products before production upgrades were implemented by Mr Krampera and his brother (who runs the factory) to accommodate KV2 Audio. Today the drivers are supplied to KV2’s custom specifications by both RCF and 18 Sound; the plywood is Baltic birch and everything is assembled at Kolín with the electronics made at the same factory – a well-known electro-mechanical facility over many decades of Czech industry.

The culmination of all this experience is KV2’s VHD (Very High Definition) loudspeaker range, introduced at Frankfurt this year and holding centre stage at the Plasa exhibition in London. Although initially pitched above MI standard, embodying all of Mr Krampera’s thinking about low distortion and wide dynamic range, a full-on assault on high-end touring has still to be attempted. Objective tests on the Fussion product in 1995/96 predicted touring-level sound quality but, until recently, Mr Krampera was not satisfied with the quality of electronics available to drive the sound. ‘It’s a shock to discover how certain preamps and summing amplifiers deal with the issues of driving the cable,’ he says, adding that VHD’s electronics – in the VHD2000 amplifier, VHD3200 subwoofer amplifier and LD4 line driver – meet his very high standards.

One significant breakthrough came when a new generation of ICs came on the market from Burr-Brown, a division of Texas Instruments. Although most of the system is resolutely analogue, at the heart of VHD’s delay line are two BB converters that support both PCM and DSD formats. ‘We’re using DSD for a new delay line for VHD,’ Mr Krampera reveals. ‘In PCM, you’re using all the power to define two points and sampling is only 96kHz. In DSD, the sampling is 6MHz, 70 times more than PCM – a very well-defined signal with very little loss of information. You won’t really notice that difference from 1m, but over distance with live music the increased intelligibility is obvious.’

Recognising the strength of the installation market worldwide, KV2 is less concerned with making installation-specific products than with satisfying live sound requirements at cost-effective prices. The products can then bring the advantages of touring sound quality to any environment. That said, Mr Krampera believes you can only hear the true differences in quality when listening to live music. ‘We’ve been testing VHD for over a year and the difference between live music and even SACD is huge,’ he says, ‘We even moved the sampling up to 6MHz to satisfy a formula I have to achieve a certain dynamic range and bandwidth, but there is so much loss of information from an SACD recording – never mind CD – that there’s no point. It’s perfectly adequate for home hi-fi and radio, but nor for large public sound systems.’

Nevertheless, KV2 customers consistently testify that business has improved thanks to an indefinable improvement in sound quality whatever the application, but particularly where some live element is involved - launches, presentations and corporate events. The next phase of development will see flying, stacking and rigging solutions for VHD, as it gears up for potential concert touring and festival customers. ‘You don’t need any exciters, you don’t need to add any HF,’ he says. ‘It’s there naturally. It’s enough just to reproduce correctly what you have, if you have the correct microphones and the system is completely flat. People often call me and ask me why they have to turn the HF down – that’s because the microphones are normally set to boost HF through a typical system. With VHD that’s not necessary and the result is a more natural, intelligible sound.’


The company’s vision is resolutely professional, with quality the utmost priority. ‘The market for dried breakfast cereal is probably 150 times bigger than ours,’ Mr Vereclli states. ‘But we have one big advantage: the high-end loudspeaker market moves very slowly – glacial speed, as I always say. It’s the tip of the iceberg, you know it’s moving but you just can’t see it. We don’t have the sort of product development cycles that you see in, say, the cell phone industry.’

Accordingly, he is keen to avoid the pitfalls of price-driven manufacturing. ‘A lot of manufacturers get involved in a “race to the bottom” - how cheaply can you buy an active speaker?’ he says. ‘But the distribution channels are so consolidated, especially in the US, that you end up making no money. For the sake of top-line sales, they’ve completely forsaken profit. Add the current exchange rates, and you cannot make those products in Europe, it’s impossible. So you have to make them in China, and every time it happens it simply succeeds in driving down prices. However, in our segment of professional audio, lower prices do not guarantee more sales. There is a finite number of professional customers out there, and they respond to quality.’

KV2 Audio hovers somewhere between this MI paradigm and high-end pro audio: ‘Not as expensive as Meyer, not as cheap as Behringer,’ as Mr Vercelli puts it. Enter VHD, a product range aimed at 20,000-capacity venues and a more discerning clientele. But, most of all, it’s made by people with a heritage that all at KV2 Audio hold dear. ‘There’s a reason why BNC is the top supplier of compression drivers to pro audio, and it’s not price,’ he reflects. ‘Price is not the only issue. The person who will buy VHD, or an EAW or Martin Audio rig, is a very different customer.