The Reference
A three-way, sealed floorstander built around the same 34-millimeter pure-beryllium dome tweeter as the Reference Compact, a 6.5-inch carbon-composite midrange freed of bass duty, and two 9.5-inch long-throw carbon-composite woofers. Every driver is individually amplified, individually corrected, and continuously measured. The Reference is the architecture pushed to the topology that lets each driver do only what it does best.
Each driver, doing only what it does best
The Reference Compact is a two-way: the same 6.5-inch carbon-composite driver covers everything from the bass to the lower treble, then hands off to the beryllium dome. The driver is good enough to do that — but it is doing two jobs. The midrange has to share excursion, displacement, and motor force with the bass.
The Reference takes that same 6.5-inch carbon-composite driver and frees it of bass duty. It becomes a dedicated midrange, operating only between the bass-bin handoff and the tweeter handoff — entirely within its linear range. Bass goes to two dedicated 9.5-inch long-throw woofers with the same diaphragm material, and the tweeter is the same 34-millimeter pure-beryllium dome that anchors the Reference Compact.
The result is a four-driver, three-way loudspeaker in which every driver operates in only the part of its range where it is most linear. The architecture — per-driver amplification, per-driver feed-forward correction, direct measurement of every parameter that drives non-linearity — then operates on already-clean drivers to push the residual harmonic and intermodulation distortion to the noise floor of the room.
Four drivers. Each diaphragm optimized
The tweeter is a 34-millimeter pure-beryllium dome — the same driver used in the Reference Compact. Beryllium for its mass-to-stiffness ratio: a fraction of titanium's density and a Young's modulus above 300 GPa, placing the dome's first breakup mode an octave well above the audible band. The 34-millimeter diameter carries lower frequencies cleanly, allowing a relaxed crossover to the midrange.
The midrange is a 6.5-inch driver with a woven carbon-fiber composite cone — the same diaphragm technology used as a mid-woofer in the Reference Compact, here freed of bass duty. Operating only between the bass crossover and the tweeter handoff, it stays within the central, most linear region of its motor. The motor itself is underhung — a voice coil shorter than the magnetic gap — which flattens the force-displacement curve across whatever excursion is asked of the driver.
The two woofers are 9.5-inch long-throw drivers, using the same woven carbon-fiber composite cone technology. Two of them, in a sealed alignment, doubles the radiating area and effective excursion for any given SPL, halving the per-driver excursion required to reach a given output. Same correction applied to each woofer individually, with each driver's non-linearities measured directly during operation and compensated per-sample on FPGA.
All four drivers are amplified by their own Nilai 500 Class D module, and the entire signal path — conversion, FIR crossover, correction, amplification — runs from a single dual-OCXO precision clock domain.