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Anechoic chambers are facilities designed to absorb sound. The best chamber in the world is the size of a gymnasium with 12 foot long wedges of sound absorbing material and yet it is only capable of neutralizing signals down to 60 Hz. It is folly to believe that some foam stuffed into a shoebox sized enclosure will do what our anechoic chamber cannot. Clearly, if we are to be successful, we must face the real world function of an enclosure. Our cabinet must not be “dead”, it must instead be an “energy sink” drawing sound away from the drivers and dissipating it as a heat sink does drawing heat away from transistors and dissipating it in an amplifier. We would never design a heat sink out of a thermally inert material and then figure we can get it to function be painting the outside with aluminum!

Enter the world of composites. A composite is a combination of materials combined to create a unique material that has characteristics unlike any single (homogenous) material that exists as a single entity. So...what? Single materials possess common traits such as the stiffer they are the more they ring and will be inherently unstable with regard to energy storage. Dealing with this in the past meant highly sophisticated Band-Aids. We at Cerious Technologies just happen to find this to be an oxymoron. Why not design a material that is rigid and inherently stable with regard to energy?

Other loudspeaker companies attempt to deal with this by choosing the “least offensive” material, such as phenolics and other “exotics”. They all, however, are fatally flawed. They all behave as a single material does. You must choose: Do you want rigidity or a stable energy platform? You cannot have both. Even traditional composites such as Carbon Fiber behave closely to homogenous materials. It quickly became obvious that a new design direction must be undertaken.
Cerious Technologies research into ballistic armor offered a new material, one that was extremely rigid, yet was designed to absorb the tremendous impact of objects designed for destruction. This extremely high loss material is a proprietary synthetic ceramic, a material that can be engineered to have differing and specific properties to match applications. The particle density, energy storage and resonance properties can be controlled to “fine tune” panels constructed of this material allowing complete control of the behavior of each panel.

The synthetic ceramic used, once set, does not take well to machining. For this reason the cabinets of the Ceramic Reference are cast in molds. A co-molding process is used, so that a high loss inner portion is surrounded by a more rigid structural ceramic. In addition, fluid filled tubes line the inside of the enclosures “vibrating” to actively dissipate internal acoustic waves. The enclosure “system” is so efficient at dissipating internal acoustic energy that no internal sound absorption material is needed.
The Satellites

The satellites are designed to handle frequencies from 80 Hz to 25 KHz. Each enclosure is cast of synthetic ceramic. Each section is designed to dissipate specific acoustic inputs resulting in an acoustic “Black Hole” behind the midrange driver. Three 7 cm aerospace grade aluminum/Kevlar composite tubes run vertically through the center of the enclosure breaking up any standing waves by creating uneven surfaces throughout the enclosure. Each tube is filled with different materials to have unique resonance characteristics further broadening the spectrum of energy dissipation.
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