The Reference Compact
A two-way, sealed standmount built around a 34-millimeter pure-beryllium dome tweeter and a 6.5-inch carbon-composite mid-woofer. Both drivers are characterized on the bench and continuously during operation, then corrected per-driver in real time by a feed-forward loop on FPGA. The Reference Compact is the architecture given the most accomplished two-way driver complement we know how to build.
The architecture, with the most accomplished two-way drivers we know how to fit
The Origin Compact is the architecture distilled to its smallest complete expression. The Reference Compact is the same architecture in the same enclosure class, with the most accomplished two-way driver complement we have been able to engineer around. The cabinet is a similar size to the Origin Compact for the same room-placement reasons; the drivers and the front-end electronics are not.
Both drivers in the Reference Compact are chosen for a single property: the location of their first breakup mode. Beryllium and woven carbon-fiber composite are the materials with the highest stiffness-to-mass ratios available for a dome and a cone respectively, and the geometry that wraps them places both first breakup modes outside the operating band of each driver. The result is a two-way loudspeaker that is mechanically linear over its entire reproduction range — before the correction loop adds anything.
Then the correction loop adds something. Same architecture as every Excité product: every parameter that drives non-linearity is measured directly, both during driver characterization and continuously during operation, and a feed-forward correction is computed on FPGA, per-sample, per-driver, ahead of amplification.
Two drivers. Chosen for one reason
The tweeter is a 34-millimeter pure-beryllium dome. Beryllium is chosen because no other material combines its mass and stiffness: a fraction of titanium's density, and a Young's modulus above 300 GPa. The combination places the dome's first breakup mode roughly an octave above the audible band, where it cannot affect what we hear. The 34 mm diameter is unusual — most tweeters are 25 to 28 mm — and is chosen to carry the mid-treble cleanly with significant authority below 2 kHz, allowing a lower crossover point and reducing demand on the mid-woofer near its upper limit.
The mid-woofer is a 6.5-inch carbon-composite cone — a woven carbon-fiber weave saturated in a polymer matrix, chosen for the same reason as the dome: high stiffness, low mass, and the kind of internal damping that puts breakup well outside the operating band. The motor is underhung rather than overhung: the voice coil is shorter than the magnetic gap, not longer, which keeps the force-displacement curve nearly flat across the entire operating excursion. Distortion at any meaningful drive level is correspondingly low; the architecture's correction takes it lower still.
The two drivers cross over with a linear-phase FIR filter, not a passive crossover. They are individually amplified by a Nilai 500 Class D module each. The correction loop runs on a custom carrier board around an AMD Kria K26 SOM, with a dual-OCXO precision clock domain feeding an ESS9039 PRO converter ahead of amplification.