A Big Beginning: SYSTEM 3D
In 2015, the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, London commissioned a bespoke passive speaker system from Graham Audio for the augmentation of their live performances. The ROH had a unique criteria: the loudspeaker system needed to faithfully reproduce not only the sound and timbre of the human voice but also the emotional content contained within that performance. Graham Audio turned to Derek Hughes to co-design a four-box, high-resolution speaker system capable of being driven by any amplifier, one that would provide the same continuity of sound and detail as their other speakers, but on a grand scale for the theatre.
During the summer of 2021, for their performance of “The Dante Project”, the ROH mounted the System 3D speakers on gantries, high above the audience, and fired the music up against parabolic reflectors suspended from the ceiling. The sound deflected off the reflectors and bounced down to the audience. The effect was to replicate the sound of angels in heaven, singing overhead. That evening, the audience experienced a mesmerizing slice of heaven.
The design of the SYSTEM 3D necessitated a custom, high-resolution passive crossover network without any digital correction or manipulation, providing the high-resolution speaker system with sufficient power and delicacy to be used on the opera house stage. The four-box SYSTEM 3D loudspeaker used a separate mid-top cabinet, aligned to a twin-bass unit on each side. As it was intended for professional applications, the SYSTEM 3D was finished in black fabric with carrying handles on either side. Its domestic equivalent, called VOTU (Voice of the Universe), was re-engineered to present a different form factor and featured an automotive paint finish.
VOTU - Voice Of The Universe.
Building on the research and development that delivered the bespoke SYSTEM3D - a high-quality professional sound reinforcement loudspeaker system, originally designed for the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, London - the VOTU builds on this expertise to bring new levels of refinement and authority to the discerning home enthusiast or professional user alike.
The VOTU uses two 10" drivers which cover the bass frequencies and extend up to 800Hz, where a refined 3" soft dome driver takes over, covering the critical midrange region until 4kHz, at which point the high power 34mm soft dome tweeter comes in to play. The midrange dome is mounted above the tweeter to improve the integration between it and the tweeter.
The crossover network uses high-grade capacitors and air core inductors that won't saturate at high power levels. These premium components ensure that harmonic distortion is kept at extremely low levels for maximum preservation of low-level detail.
As with all Graham Audio loudspeakers, the cabinet follows BBC "thin-wall" practice, where careful damping of the relatively thin panels is designed to move all colourations away from the midrange area where we are most sensitive to low-level resonances. The sculpted 3-part front panel and high-gloss lacquered finish will suite both classic and modern interiors.
This flagship system can be used with amplifiers up to 1000 watts per channel, and is capable of breathtaking dynamic performance, while losing nothing of the subtlety and resolution associated with Graham Audio loudspeakers, even when played at very low levels late at night. Truly the best of all worlds!
HiFi+ review of VOTU.
https://hifiplus.com/articles/graham-audio-votu-floorstanding-loudspeaker/
Enter Mirama, and Midrange Magic
It was only after Derek Hughes had redesigned the Graham Audio LS5/5 in 2019 with terrific success that the company undertook the Mirama project. The goal was reproducing midrange magic on a grand scale. Oftentimes, loudspeaker designers seem to have overlooked what constitutes the essence of musicality in their quest of delivering greater resolution and vanishingly low distortion. But Graham Audio have not forgotten their legacy of faithfully reproducing the human voice—the very soul of the music—expressed by the critical midrange frequencies.
The Mirama builds on the original VOTU, but with higher power handling and an extended low-frequency range down to 25Hz. The Mirama is a two-cabinet design, the larger of which is a floor-standing, front-ported, 10 cu ft reflex enclosure containing an 18-inch woofer. It is flanked above by a pair of 10-inch woofers handling lower midrange frequencies (25 – 150 Hz +/- 2dB), each employing a vented motor, anodized aluminum cone and shorting ring to reduce distortion. The upper cabinet is a sealed-box design housing a 7-inch upper midrange driver (150 – 20 kHz) and a ribbon tweeter. This cabinet is fitted onto the bass cabinet with rubber feet in recesses to provide accurate positioning of the cabinet, together with reducing acoustic coupling between the two enclosures.
The result is a seamless and coherent loudspeaker system that optimally balances remarkable midrange clarity and resolution, high- and low-frequency extension, with definition that defines the state of the art. When designing a loudspeaker that has both high-power handling and an extended low-frequency response, the radiating area of both the bass driver and the reflex ports is crucial to delivering clean and powerful bass. Here, an 18-inch woofer together with a horizontal front port was chosen as the best solution. This, together with the 10-cu ft cabinet, gives the Mirama a strong and extended bass response, a solid foundation on which to build the rest of the design. The cabinet is internally braced to ensure that any panel resonances are above the bass-to-mid crossover point. The two 10-inch drivers in a sealed compartment are tuned to complement the response of the subwoofer, with both panel and standing wave damping of the style used in the rest of the Graham Audio loudspeaker range.
The crossover network is mounted in the lower cabinet, with upper and lower cabinets connected by a link cable with professional-grade Speakon connectors. The crossovers use high-quality components to complement the drive units. As with all Graham Audio designs, air core inductors are used, which do not suffer at all from the compression and distortion effects associated by any cored inductor. The improved sonic quality of such components more than compensates for the increased cost associated with them. High-quality polypropylene capacitors match the performance of the other components of the system. Each loudspeaker has two pairs of high-grade binding posts, one pair feeding the 18-inch subwoofer and the other feeding the rest of the system. This enables the user to use either a single amplifier to power the entire system, or to bi-amplify the system, using one amplifier for the subwoofer and a separate amplifier for the other drivers.
The furniture-grade enclosures feature fine, genuine wood veneer, oriented so the veneer grain flows between the upper and lower cabinets to give visual unity to the design. The cabinets are constructed using the thin-wall, damped approach that distinguishes every loudspeaker in the Graham Audio range, resulting in low coloration, ensuring that any cabinet resonances are considerably reduced, and the ‘Q’, effectively the length of time the resonances persist, is minimized so as not to impact sound quality. Inherent in any cabinet design, internal standing waves can be radiated both through the cabinet walls and back through the driver cones. Graham Audio uses rock wool to damp out these resonances, the thickness and positioning of which is chosen for maximum effect. The result is a loudspeaker whose sound is coherent, resolving, and emotionally engaging with every musical performance.
The Mirama embraces every sort of music, from a single plucked note on a violin to a thousand-piece orchestra celebrating life with a visceral Mahler crescendo, uplifting the spirit and reproducing sound on a scale rarely experienced in the listening room.
Graham Audio offers floor-standing and stand-mount loudspeakers in a variety of models, sizes, and finishes. The Mirama is the largest—and first—in a series of three new models. Designed to fill a 1,000 sq ft room, it will be followed by a second model, suitable for rooms of 500–600 sq ft, and the smallest, designed for 300–400 sq ft rooms. Regardless of their size, every Graham Audio design shares a voice that expresses the very life of music with its Midrange Magic.
