Why do people make audios? There are common
things between owners of numbers of audio producing companies and designers. They
like music and naturally get interested in audios then make audios to get their
own sound. There are 3 steps to get to make audios.
Certainly, some people get another
occupation on the way like they get to work in professional sound area instead
of hi-fi. This is the typical way to eventually make consumer products.
Courbe which is recently attracting public
attentions is the similar case. Mr. Park, Seongje, the owner of this company,
has been interested in music since he was young and purchased turn table and
amplifier for the first time when he was a university student. After getting a
job, he kept investing most of his salary in replacing sound equipment. So to
speak, he spent a lot of time in step 1 and 2. Especially, he was interested in
speaker so he purchased 50 kinds of speaker over 20 years. If you keep
listening to music at home in this way, it might eventually make you a master.
In 2006, he happened to know one person who
was doing DIY in Daejeon. He ordered the speaker which applied Accuton unit for
fun but its sound was unexpectedly outstanding. Its quality of sound was almost
the same as original one but with only one tenth of the price. It was pleasant
surprise to Mr. Park since he had been using only famous labels and it made him
think of making one for himself. In other words, he finally got to step 3.
Maybe he was fortunate or maybe not, he
left his company and naturally had more spare time. At this point, his idea
fermented inside his head started to wriggle which was to apply different theories
pursued by many speaker makers. It is the sound which is purely made by driver
with removing resonance as much as possible. He put lots of thoughts on
removing all disturbances to speaker such as noise or resonance.
Finally, he came up with this idea to
divide drivers by range and make cylinder shaped encloser for each driver then
connect them. This is how beginning was made and he held a small recital to
introduce it to speaker lovers. The recital was successful with total of 60
participants. Two orders for set were made at the recital and he decided to
officially start up a small company.
Of course, Mr. Park didn’t do all the
designs for newly introduced products. He was introduced to professional
engineer and actualized his dream with the engineer’s help. You can say he put
his passions built up inside to the product to have the balance and quality
which are acceptable to everybody.
Let’s look at the meaning of company name “Courbe”. In Korean, it has the same pronunciation as French painter Courbet but it is spelled differently. Actually he was looking for the same meaning “curve” in different language and finally found “couved” in French. That is how the name “Courbe” was made. It means “curved” and it suits the design policy so you can say the name fits perfectly to his company.
Encloser was made of pure hardwood instead of MDF or HDF which is more common. MDF or HDF is made by mixing chemical with sawdust to improve strength. Pure hardwood is strong as it is but it is hard to change its shape. But he chose pure hardwood for several reasons.
Firstly, you can use its natural wood grain
instead of attaching veneer to it. You can get natural beauty by doing this.
Secondly, he chose to use birch because it
is used to make musical instruments along with maple tree. It has natural
resonance as musical instrument so it is loved by the company seeking for this
kind of encloser. For example, Sonus Faber uses it for part of its products and
PenAudio uses it for making entire cabinet.
However, making process is extremely
difficult. You need to use Finnish hardwood to get the best quality. Then you
make it into a ring shape and stack them. You need to attach it one by one and
press them for a day to get a stable shape.
After that, you need to smooth the surface
but it is not doable with machine as it is a round shape which means you need
to do it by using hands. Then, you need to paint English furniture oil over it
for several times. You need to paint furniture oil and leave it dry for a day
then paint it over. You can get a rich color and it will become highly
resistant to outside humidity and temperature in this way.
It’s not finished here. Natural varnish is
used at the last step. It is to give a shine and high quality varnish for furniture
is used.
Because they put this much efforts on
making enclosers, you don’t have to worry about wood grain being curved or
damaged. You can have my words on this.
Let’s find out the structure of driver.
Advanced Courbe looks like it takes 3-way but actually it takes 2.5-way.
Technically, they just add a woofer to it after improving entire part of
mid-range. Tweeter and mid are from Norwegian brand SEAS. He picked the mid
from one of XL series made by the same company because of its importance.
However, arranging these round shaped units
horizontally can cause a phase issue. The arrangement was not precisely
suggested by the company but you can push tweeter part slightly to inside of
mid-base part because the deviation is not different so much. One electronic
company performed actual measurement for this. If you are a very sensitive
person, you can adjust the arrangement by yourself. Companies like Wilson Audio
or Ascendo also strongly recommend it.
To
test the sound of this equipment, we used pre and power made by Krell and also
utilized phantom and 402e. In addition, K-01 by Esoteric was used together with
clock generator, G-02.
Next song was third movement of
composed by Dvorak and played by Boaux Arts Trio. It started with
simple piano playing which is quite tantalizing. Then combination of violin and
cello made their entrance which is very attractive. Especially, deep and long
sound of cello from high quality low range was very pleasant. Generally, the
sound was very sophisticated and sound of each instrument was accurate. The strongest
attraction of this equipment was its strong and deep mid-range.
Next song was sung by
Jewel. It started with clear accompaniment of acoustic guitar. The echo of
guitar playing sounded very nice and you can obviously feel the strong
strumming. Then it was vocal’s turn to join the music. Jewel’s twangy voice
sounded very attractive. It started with gentle sound and got gradually
stronger. You can hear the beautiful backup sound of piano and natural sound of
drum beating the floor. It was a very clearly and sensitively tuned sound.
Last song was by Wishbone Ash. It started with acoustic guitar playing then drum,
base, piano and organ were joined in an orderly manner. The content of the song
was quite complicated but it sounded just fine. You can imagine pleasantly
waving shape while listening to the rhythm of sound. Regarding vocal, it was
slightly high tone of voice which expressed deep sorrow but not in an exaggerated
way. You will be sucked inside of the music. It was 2-way design and
technically low-range was stopped at 40Hz but it sounds perfectly when you
listen to classic or rock. You can feel the strong professionalism of designer
at this point.
