the honest company

- the honest company
“I confirm with my signature and by our reputation
that it is our upright wish and goal to invent, design
and manufacture the most honest products possible.
That means that here, you do not get less than what meets
the eye from the outside. But even much more.”
Sven Boenicke
Boenicke Audio has existed for almost
20 years now, yet we have grown slowly, always focussing
on the quality of our products, not the number of units to be
sold. In today’s hifi market with an overwhelming number
of brands, the question is: does anyone need so many?
And does it make sense to repeat again and again what has
been “invented” and built a hundred times before? Applied
to the realm of loudspeaker building, we clearly think that
it makes no sense yet again to build a bass-reflex box made
from MDF, damp it with foam, put a dome tweeter and one
or two cone-drivers on the perpendicular front baffle, coat the
box with plastic (lacquer), mount spikes and have a standard
crossover network designed for it - yes, did you know that
many “big” loudspeaker manufacturers do not have real in
house skill anymore, but have their models designed by third
parties who actually do not have much emotional link to the
finished product?
This is a fact, and we think it might be the main
reason why the hifi product market seems to have become
so impersonal. Why the retail value of a product has become
so “important” - it seems, it’s more about buying and selling
(and this is only possible if 99% of all gear is exchangable)
than about finding a really good product and keeping it for
many years of pleasure and excitement. 20 years ago, you
could see fewer speaker models with “perfect” piano high
gloss finish, but maybe you could in fact detect or hear
the “handwriting” of the actual designer of that particuliar
model. The ratio between seeing and getting (what you see is
what you get) has never been as deceiving and superficious
as with many of today’s loudspeakers.
Boenicke Audio’s goal and deepest wish is to think
about, design and finally build and market products that
precisely reflect our ethic and honest way of living; and our
accuracy of observing - hearing.
With our products, it’s the other way round: you get even
more than the eye meets from the outside. But do not be
fooled if you do not see more than a sleek, elegant product
without any unnecessary add-ons. Here’s the explanation
why you get more than you see:
If for the sake of clarification we divide existing
loudspeakers on the market in as few as 3 categories, we
would say that in the first category there are the MDF boxes
with standard crossovers, maybe even designed by third
parties. In the second category we would see the brands for
whom in most cases “less is more” holds true. Brands that select their speaker drivers with enough care so that they do not
need complex crossover networks to compensate for the drivers’ anomalies. Brands that maybe thought of a way of using
better sounding materials for their enclosures than MDF,
or brands that build dipole speakers that sometimes use no
crossover at all and certainly no box at all - in other words:
brands with some true selling proposals, unique or not. In the third category we see the brands that do at least what is
described in category 2, and on top of that they even actively
boost sound reproduction quality by adding certain elements
to the signal path, to the enclosure, drivers or any other part
of the entire speaker.
Describing such a category 3 company, we must
describe ourselves, because - and this is as far as we honestly
can say - we do not know of any other speaker-building companies who clearly can find themselves in this category.
In today’s market full of products lacking true identity and
real unique selling proposals, we are deeply convinced that
Boenicke Audio is one of the very few exceptions, and within
that small group the only category 3 contender.
The founder, head and owner of Boenicke Audio,
Sven Boenicke, is the only person in the company who
acoustically designs, assembles and brings to sonic life every
unit that leaves our house. All final decisions are made by
him. What never happens here is that opposing interests
of different departments within the company destroy the
homogenity and ultimately the quality of a product. The
finance-department will never forbid the use of superb but
costly tuning parts or enclosures milled from massive wood.
So, all our products truly bear Sven’s uncompromised handwriting which we consider to be the key factor to
create a truly outstanding product and sound experience.
Also as far as we know we are one of less than a handfull of
companies who build their loudspeakers from solid wood
throughout. There is much gossip around on the internet that
solid wood speakers are always built as resonating instruments and therefore try to imitate wood instruments. If someone takes a look at the cross-sections of our CNC-milled
enclosures it should become clear that our enclosures are not
designed to act as resonating bodies. On the contrary, we try
to make our speaker bodies as solid and non-resonant as possible. Then, some may ask “why natural wood then?”
The answer is very simple: first, if you mount a
speaker driver on a certain mass of a particuliar material
such as solid wood (or MDF or aluminum, just to name
other examples), the material-inherent sound properties of
that material will strongly affect the way the speaker driver
itself sounds. This is a fact, but virtually no-one seems to
know about it - or take it into consideration when building a
speaker driver or an entire loudspeaker. Almost every driver
manufacturer knows that using an aluminum phase plug can
help to get heat out of the magnet system - but compared to
a wooden phase plug it adds gross coloration (yes, aluminum
to the human hearing is a clearly non-neutral, but colouring
material)! Secondly there is no such thing as a non-resonant
enclosure, so in reality some degree of sound energy is
always being dissipated by the enclosure itself. It seems evident that a body of solid wood with a thin oil or wax coating
will resonate in a more natural (less damped!) way than the
same body made from MDF with a plastic coating.
Even if a solid wood enclosure like the one of our
W10 is very heavy and extremely non-resonant, the low
degree of inner damping of unglued wood is a main reason
for the speaker’s ability to reproduce music with so much
true light in the harmonic structure of each tone, which we
have so far not discovered with any other loudspeaker brand
elsewhere, regardless of price.
As described in the second category, we only use
speaker drivers that can be operated without any correcting
part in the passive crossover and still exhibit a very linear
frequency reproduction: none of our speakers have more than
two functional passive crossover parts built-in. It’s the capacitor in front of the (mid)tweeters and sometimes a graphiteresistor. And of course, this capacitor and resistor are the best
available: Duelund Coherent Audio. In our models where
the Duelunds would not fit in due to size, we have to use the
second-best solution. And in the fully-active version of our
B-speakers, you will not even find a capacitor. Of course
there are many other reasons why Boenicke Audio is the only
true category 3 contender: do you know of another manufacturer who uses Harmonix Tuning Bases, C37 lacquer on
driver baskets and sometimes diaphragms, Marigo VTS dots,
Steinmusic Speaker Match, L2 Modules, Davids Black Wonder, Bybee Technologies Golden Goddess filters, cryo-treated
cotton-isolated Audio Consulting silver wire (sonically correct oriented), Duelund Pio Cast Capacitors (sonically correct
oriented) and WBT Nextgen terminals? And do you know a
manufacturer who tests every type of driver for the correct
sonic (not marked) orientation? Anyone who modifies the
signal path of the already world-class RAAL ribbon tweeters and uses custom-made Audio Consulting silver-cryo wire
transformers with them?
Imagine that each and every of the above described
items and tuning devices represent a gain in reproduction
quality... And we assure you that it is well and truly audible.
If you leave one out or replace the terminals (for example)
with inferior ones, it’s not the same level anymore. One or
two changes might seem not dramatic, but it all accumulates
- in both directions.
This is all just to show that we are really serious
with our place in category 3. For example with the B8, it was
a really difficult decision to deliberately leave this category
and go down to 2: The B 8 does not come with tuning parts
built-in as standard, because the price of the finished speaker
just does not allow it... The same is true for our Studio12
speaker, which is mainly intended as a studio monitor. We
leave the choice to the customer if he A) wants an extremely
good work tool for his mixing desk - but that tool must
not be too “audiophile”, because then the mix could not be
played through most other normal setups and speakers. Or
B) if he wants the Studio12 in category 3 quality with every
goodie built-in.
We agree that all this does not help much if each
loudspeaker model sonically is not well tuned and balanced
in the end. We are very privileged that Sven started to make
his own music recordings in the early nineties. With the help
of one or two splendid minds, he managed to create and build
something we would call the most radical, probably best
sounding 6-channel recording chain in the world - it exists
only once. In the last 10 years Sven recorded close to 300
concerts - most of them live with audience, some of them
for the production only. But in any case the recordings were
made in natural environments such as concert halls, churches
and other rooms. With every recording, Sven was present
in the soundfield of the original music from beginning to
end - and not only in the control room of a recording studio.
(Technicians who consider their memory of the sound in the
control room as their true reference will have a huge problem
judging the absolute level of quality of a sound referenced by
the original sound in the field - because they never were in
the field in the first place.)
Sven has the ability to remember sounds in a photographic way, especially the harmonic texture of a sound that
shows as perceivable “colour” of a sound he can remember
over a long period of time by means of storing a tightly
matching corresponding colour in his virtual eye.
So, back to the speakers: Each speaker is fine-tuned using
our recordings. This is the only way Sven can know what he
is doing - he uses the remembered reality as the reference,
nothing else. And from time to time, we demonstrate this
process to the interested audience at shows, for example in
2010 in Vienna where we performed live music and played
back the recording via the system right after the live event.
We are happy if we are somewhere in the region of 90%
of the original - a value which most “professionals” would
dismiss as a ridiculous illusion anyway.
At Boenicke Audio it’s all about this: Coming very,
very close to original sounds is not an illusion, but an achievable goal - and even now that we have achieved this goal,
we will not stop working on an even better experience of the
reproduced beauty of sound.
RAMSTEINERSTRASSE 17
4052 BASEL
SWITZERLAND
+41 (0)79 959 05 50
www.boenicke-audio.ch