Visit to Involve Audio, Mentone

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Glenshoreham

Well-known Member
Joined
Dec 26, 2018
Messages
159
Location
Melbside
This afternoon, I paid a visit to Involve Audio, where @chucky3042 kindly gave me a tour of the site, and introduced me to a dedicated team of engineers, designers, and physicists.

I should note that, as I was onsite during normal 9-5 hours, Cool Business Things™ were happening. 🤓 The office is the R&D nerve centre of both the Involve (audio) and Zenaji (domestic battery) businesses, and several innovations for both are in various stages of design, development and production. I'm familiar with some of the headaches that can arise during commercialisation/manufacture, and appreciate Chucky taking the time to - among other things - give a crash course in electrostatic speakers and SST to a novice.

I was treated to a demonstration of the Surround Master via the Akoustos™ amplifier and Y4 monitors in 4.1 (the LFE being handled by a compact dual-driver subwoofer derived from Whise design), then a demo of the awesome studio monitors Chucky was working on last week.

Three tracks played that I was already familiar with in surround were Pink Floyd's Money, Talking Heads' The Lady Don't Mind (Extended Version), and Boz Scaggs' ..... Thanks To You? Hahah, hope I remember hearing the right track! All sounded amazing: I really wasn't expecting David's beeps to wander 'round the room! 😃

There was also a cracking excerpt of a gunfight - which did a fantastic job of placing gunmen on all sides of the listener - and a proper eye-opener for me, hearing Cold Chisel's Saturday Night through four channels, and experiencing the crowd noises from all around.

I also got to peer inside a pre-production SM2! Thanks Chucky, for inviting me to the headquarters where the eagerly-awaited SM2 was designed, developed, and refined. Definitely saving up to purchase one! Might hafta forego attending food festivals for awhile, to ... 😆

This is the first thread I've commenced on QQ, so I hope I've nominated the appropriate place for it. If not, may I please ask for it to be moved accordingly? Cheers!
 
Man what a great experience & wonderful post. Thanks! In all the years I've been loving high end audio and the celebrity designers there in, I've never seen a team like Involve being so open, friendly, and sense of humor.

Were the 3 tracks you mentioned stereo or quad? Did you compare the Involve/QS decoding versus The Sweet Spot? The latter really intrigues me as I know what to expect from QS, but TSS is a wild card to me.
 
This afternoon, I paid a visit to Involve Audio, where @chucky3042 kindly gave me a tour of the site, and introduced me to a dedicated team of engineers, designers, and physicists.

I should note that, as I was onsite during normal 9-5 hours, Cool Business Things™ were happening. 🤓 The office is the R&D nerve centre of both the Involve (audio) and Zenaji (domestic battery) businesses, and several innovations for both are in various stages of design, development and production. I'm familiar with some of the headaches that can arise during commercialisation/manufacture, and appreciate Chucky taking the time to - among other things - give a crash course in electrostatic speakers and SST to a novice.

I was treated to a demonstration of the Surround Master via the Akoustos™ amplifier and Y4 monitors in 4.1 (the LFE being handled by a compact dual-driver subwoofer derived from Whise design), then a demo of the awesome studio monitors Chucky was working on last week.

Three tracks played that I was already familiar with in surround were Pink Floyd's Money, Talking Heads' The Lady Don't Mind (Extended Version), and Boz Scaggs' ..... Thanks To You? Hahah, hope I remember hearing the right track! All sounded amazing: I really wasn't expecting David's beeps to wander 'round the room! 😃

There was also a cracking excerpt of a gunfight - which did a fantastic job of placing gunmen on all sides of the listener - and a proper eye-opener for me, hearing Cold Chisel's Saturday Night through four channels, and experiencing the crowd noises from all around.

I also got to peer inside a pre-production SM2! Thanks Chucky, for inviting me to the headquarters where the eagerly-awaited SM2 was designed, developed, and refined. Definitely saving up to purchase one! Might hafta forego attending food festivals for awhile, to ... 😆

This is the first thread I've commenced on QQ, so I hope I've nominated the appropriate place for it. If not, may I please ask for it to be moved accordingly? Cheers!
👍 Would be heavenly
 
Man what a great experience & wonderful post. Thanks! In all the years I've been loving high end audio and the celebrity designers there in, I've never seen a team like Involve being so open, friendly, and sense of humor.

Were the 3 tracks you mentioned stereo or quad? Did you compare the Involve/QS decoding versus The Sweet Spot? The latter really intrigues me as I know what to expect from QS, but TSS is a wild card to me.

Thanks Sonic Wiz. :) All tracks that we played were from a stereo source (CD), and he demonstrated for me the ability of the SM to create the quad atmosphere from that material. In the case of those three tracks, I’d heard them in 5.1 before, on the SACD/DVD-As of those albums.

Chucky explained the notable difference in soundstage size between QS decoding and Involve’s TSS. The technical aspects of that are a bit beyond me; however, listening to the formidable studio monitors helped me appreciate the stability of imaging it can achieve, as the location of the listener changes. I wish I was a bit more technically-minded, so I could understand it all in greater depth. :LOL:
 
Hi All

It was a great pleasure showing "Glenshoreham" around - there has now been 3 QQ members to do so. The others being Dwight and Rustyandi. Our doors are always open for that!

Two minor corrections

Glenshoreham listened to SST (sweet spot technology) not TSS (two speaker surround). Once upon a time we called it "total perspective" our patented technique to eliminate the sweet spot in the room and get rid of the need for the hated center channel.

The track "money" by Pink Floyd" was encoded by our Involve format encoder from the leaked Alan Parsons preferred discrete discrete mix of DSOTM, the rest of tracks we played were plane oLd vanilla stereo.
 
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The track "money" by Pink Floyd" was encoded by our Involve format encoder from the leaked Alan Parsons preferred discrete discrete mix of DSOTM, the rest of tracks we played were plane od vanilla stereo.

There was an official release of it on the Immersion blu-ray.
 
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