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A secret that people who sell audio equipment know is that about half of what you hear from speakers is really the result of the environment around them. Stores go to great lengths to calibrate and fine-tune the floor models you are supposed to listen to in a very specific spot while you’re shopping. However, your pricey new speakers likely sound completely different once you get them home and into your listening room.
“You can design a speaker to be perfect in a test environment,” says Jeff Kussard, Head of Operations at Concierge Audio. “But as soon as you put it into a different space, it changes character. There’s no alternative, if you will, to making a good choice about speakers other than to listen to them in your home.”
Auditioning the RMS One Speaker
Letting customers listen to the speakers in their homes is Concierge Audio’s game plan for selling their new luxury RMS One speakers.
Concierge Audio’s affluent customers reach out to them online, and Jeff says, “Our independent sales reps then take a pair of speakers to their home for them to audition rather than them going to a store and getting one experience there and getting another experience in their home.”
Concierge Audio’s approach works for two reasons. First, they have put in the effort to create a truly luxury speaker, unrivaled in terms of performance. Second, they do the calibrating and fine-tuning stores do to get the same perfect sound quality, but they do it in their customers’ homes.
Creating the RMS One
Each RMS One consists of one coaxial speaker that faces forward and six 6.5-inch woofers on the back of the speaker that fire rearward.
“We wanted to get the woofers as close together on the back baffle, not only because we had a goal for the overall height of the speaker, but also because we wanted to get those drivers as close together as possible to take advantage of acoustic coupling,” says Jeff.
Concierge Audio brought this challenge to MISCO, and Jeff explains why: they offer “American made” audio manufacturing. (MISCO has been creating speakers and sound systems in the United States since 1949.)
“One of the key things about MISCO for us,” continues Jeff, “is the synergy between all [their] services under one roof. They can work with us in terms of tweaks to the driver, and they can deal with almost any requests. And then they have this other side of their business for testing and calibration in the same space. That’s really attractive to us.”
MISCO custom designed a driver and basket combination that allowed Concierge Audio to get the six woofers stacked perfectly within the sleek RMS One enclosure.
Patented technology extends the RMS One’s operating range (down to 25 Hz in a typical room) while reducing distortion. The six woofers are configured as a line source and provide the equivalent of two 10-inch woofers, yet with much faster response.
Each RMS One features powerful digital signal processing (DSP) to perform frequency dividing (crossover), signal processing and digital to analog conversion. The DSP is what allows Concierge Audio’s salespeople to optimize speaker performance for a customer’s home.
A Concierge Audio rep uses professional grade room calibration software, the same used in recording studios around the world, to generate files for the left and right speakers. The process takes about 20 minutes. The files are fed into the DSP to establish the optimal equalization (EQ) and time constants for the speakers to sound their best in the customer’s home space.
Testing …1, 2, 3
Once the RMS One was designed, Concierge Audio worked with MISCO to establish performance targets both for production and for in-field calibration. MISCO is home to the most complete Klippel laboratory in North America for analysis and objective data. A Klippel Near Field Scanner using robotics can collect thousands of data points to create a 3D sound radiation pattern of a system. This is far superior to a single, on-axis measurement approach because it can describe performance at various listening positions and angles.
MISCO also performs rigorous end-of-line testing on each driver to ensure it meets Concierge Audio’s strict quality control requirements for consistency.
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Concierge Audio works with MISCO on their luxury RMS One speakers. Highlights of the partnership:Satisfying the Most Discerning Ears
The RMS One is built with music streaming in mind. Wireless technology from Audality, which features 17 patents, allows a listener to get the sound quality found in a concert hall via any app on their phone.
Jeff says it’s really fun to show off what a pair of RMS Ones sounds like. The Concierge Audio team gathered some experts who’d helped develop them for one demonstration.
“We had a group of about 12 to 14 people who’ve been in the industry for all of their lives. So I expected them to come in somewhat jaded, if not skeptical. And everybody was just blown away when they heard them. [MISCO President] Dan Digre made a comment on my LinkedIn post kind of singing the praises of it, which means a lot to me. The guy has been around the speaker business his entire life. You know he knows what a good speaker sounds like.”
Jeff and his wife hosted a fundraiser at their home for a charity that’s near and dear to them and showed off the speakers to their guests. The feedback they got there was also extremely positive.
“We heard comments like ‘This is better than a concert. As a matter of fact, you should start charging people to come and sit and listen to your speakers’ and ‘I’d rather be here listening to them than in a theater.’ This is really great.”
