The Origin Compact
A two-way, sealed standmount built around one principle: distortion that cannot be measured cannot be corrected. Each driver's non-linearities — motor, suspension, inductance — are measured directly, both during characterization and continuously during operation, and corrected per-driver, in real time, by a feed-forward loop on FPGA. The Origin Compact is the most concentrated expression of the architecture every Excité product is built on.
The speaker we wanted most
Before Excité was a company, it was a question: what does a small standmount sound like when nothing about its engineering is compromised? Not its drivers — selected for the predictability of their non-linear behavior and characterized individually before they enter a cabinet. Not its enclosure — designed and measured to a single sealed alignment. Not its signal path — converted, crossed, corrected, and amplified on hardware built for the purpose.
The Origin Compact is that question, resolved in form. It is the smallest expression of the architecture that runs through the Excité line, with no concession made to its size. The objective is unfashionable in its simplicity: measurement. The signal that arrives at the input should be reproduced as faithfully as the physics of the drivers permit, and we should be able to show our work.
The objective is to correct from what is known rather than what is estimated. Every parameter that drives a moving-coil driver's non-linearity is measured directly — in characterization and continuously during operation — and the correction is built from those measurements, sample by sample.
A loudspeaker is a measurement instrument first.
Two drivers. Each measured. Each corrected.
The Origin Compact is a two-way, sealed-enclosure design. A 5.5-inch mid-woofer covers the lower three octaves; a soft-dome tweeter covers the rest. They are amplified individually, crossed over with a linear-phase FIR filter, and corrected per-driver in real time.
Three parameters govern a moving-coil driver's distortion at any meaningful excursion: the motor strength as a function of cone position, Bl(x); the suspension compliance as a function of position, Kms(x); and the voice-coil inductance as a function of position and current, Le(x, i). In most loudspeakers, these non-linearities are accepted as inherent. In some systems they are estimated. In ours, they are measured directly — driver-by-driver during characterization, and continuously during operation.
That live measurement is what makes the correction tractable. A real-time, feed-forward loop on FPGA, ahead of amplification, computes a per-sample correction from the parameters in their present state — at this excursion, at this current, at this temperature. Nothing about the driver's behavior is left to assumption at runtime. The result reduces the driver's harmonic and intermodulation distortion to numbers ordinarily reachable only by drivers we cannot afford.