Leonard Bellezza: Two key aspects of your speakers are the drivers, which were specifically designed to work as an ensemble, and the multi-layered composite enclosures. Let’s start by discussing the drivers, which you designed and which you manufacture at your own Toronto facility.

Lars Hansen: I designed, and we build all but the tweeter. After procuring and testing the best tweeters I could find, I discovered one that I couldn’t improve on, at least not at this point, and I decided to use it. Thanks to its astounding speed and the degree of control the sophisticated motor assembly has over the soft dome, all tweeter motion stops faster than it does in any other tweeter. As a result, it reproduces not only correct instrumental and vocal timbres but all the silence between notes as well — and that silence is critical to true musical reproduction. This tweeter has none of the ringing that’s usually heard as a hardness in the upper frequencies. None whatever. Yet it easily produces all the upper frequencies anyone could possibly hear, and it does that with the lowest distortion levels. Another advantage is incredibly wide dispersion, which in turn creates a comfortably broad listening environment without a narrow sweet spot.

LB: You’ve said your speaker line was built around the tweeter.

LH: Yes. Once we decided on the tweeter, we then designed both a midrange and woofer that would mate perfectly with it. These drivers employ an exotic multi-layered material that gives us the most inert cones available today. Because the cones are acoustically dead, they leave no sonic signature on the acoustic wave, and they also prevent any wave deformation regardless of how loudly they’re played. We mount the cone to the Hansen motor assembly, which is amazingly powerful. We think we have the finest drivers today’s science allows, and we’ve made sure they work as a matched system.

Dan Mondoro: You also designed your speakers’ enclosures, which you’ve said may well be their most important element. You’ve also said they’re the most difficult element to build.

LH: The only way to meet my sonic requirements was to abandon traditional panel construction and devise a free flowing design that would prevent both diffraction distortion and phase distortion. So we developed a new material, Hansen Composite Matrix, which consists of three different layers. Each of those layers comprises as many as six different components, and each individual layer is applied to a mold by hand — it’s not sprayed, and it’s not poured — to insure that each layer is a precise thickness. Beyond that, all the speakers in our line use Version 2 technology and have an additional layer of acoustical damping material applied to their internal cabinet surfaces. The construction process is so complex that it takes one man eight days to build the enclosures for a pair of Kings.

DM: Along with their sonic advantages, I’d like to point out that your enclosures pass a test audiophiles rarely worry about: they’re elegant enough for any home setting.

LH: I wanted my speakers to look as beautiful as they sound, so I consulted an accomplished designer, who’s in fact a woman.

DM: Many people who have seen them in our showrooms have been impressed by the cabinet finish.

LH: That’s gratifying after the many stages we go through, including fine wet sanding after intermediate steps and ultimately several clear coats. Our finish rivals the very finest exotic automotive finishes.

LB: Well, a speaker is seen more than it’s heard, though from an audiophile’s point of view, a speaker enclosure shouldn’t be heard at all. Sonically speaking, it should disappear, and your enclosures accomplish that feat remarkably well.

LH: Our enclosures are carefully designed around the radiation patterns of their drivers, all of which have very wide dispersion. Flat panel enclosures interfere with wide dispersion and cause diffraction. That’s particularly true in the high frequency spectrum, where sound waves are short. Since Hansen Composite Matrix doesn’t limit us to particular shapes, we were free to contour enclosures so they don’t interfere with sound waves. The high frequency energy traveling along a Hansen enclosure face never sees a corner or an angle that can diffract it and smear the sound. When our Version 2 technology, the internal fourth enclosure layer and an improved crossover, is added to the mix, the distortion floor is lowered to the point where you can’t hear the enclosure at all.

DM: You use a first-order crossover, which is unusual in the world of high-end speakers. Tell our customers something about that.

LH: With the enclosure out of the audible equation, sonic corruption caused by a crossover can be heard very easily. But our first order crossover introduces almost no corruption into the signal path. Our crossovers also employ hand selected high-grade components that are silver soldered point-to-point rather than printed circuits — again for the smallest measure of signal corruption. Finally, our crossover introduces the smallest amount of phase distortion. The reason manufacturers rarely use first order crossovers is that they do very little to protect drivers from seeing frequencies that would destroy them, and the few that do use first order generally produce speakers that can’t deliver information at the low end of each driver’s range with realistic dynamics. But our drivers are so well made that they don’t need the traditional level of protection a different order crossover could provide at high volume levels. And because our drivers were designed to work together in the first place, there’s no need for additional complexities in the crossover, which others must implement to resolve problems that unmatched drivers, whether off-the-shelf or modified, tend to cause.

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