Acoustic Cardioid

The sound quality of your audio system is primarily determined by your loudspeakers, and the way your loudspeakers interact with the acoustics of your room. One way to get a great sounding system, is to design a purpose-built room from the ground up, in which the (usually soffit-mounted) loudspeakers are part of the design. This works. But because of cost and space requirements, it's attainable only for the happy few.

Most of us work and live in real-life rooms, with less than perfect acoustics, and limited space. This is where the 8c comes in. In its essence, the Dutch & Dutch 8c is a highly accurate integrated audio system that adapts to, and works together with the acoustics of your room. You’ll get great sound, even in rooms with little or no acoustic treatment. We call it RoomMatching.

The 8c's have a range of technologies on board that will ensure that they interact with your room in a favorable manner. One of these technologies is the Acoustic Cardioid.

If you think of conventional loudspeakers as an acoustic light bulb, then you could consider the Acoustic Cardioid of the 8c an acoustic spotlight. By aiming the 8c at the listener, its sound is focused at the listener. This ensures a clear direct sound and less interfering noise caused by reflections in the room.

The main benefits of the Acoustic Cardioid are:

❥ You'll hear sound with greater clarity.
❥ You'll notice less interference of the room, more of the recording itself.
❥ Optimized integration with the tweeter.
❥ Can be placed close to walls.

Cardioids can also be made by means of a second driver, a DSP channel and a second amplifier. Althought here can be good reasons to do it that way, we think that it's generally more elegant to solve challenges in the acoustic domain, if possible.

We believe the Acoustic Cardioid is a quite elegant solution because of two reasons. Firstly, the acoustic cardioid requires only a single driver, of which the back-wave is used. It's very hard to design an Acoustic Cardioid to perform well, but we are proud to say that we've mastered the science and art of the Acoustic Cardioid. Our Acoustic Cardioid performs as well, or even better, than active multi-driver DSP based cardioids on the market. Its simplicity makes Dutch & Dutch's Acoustic Cardioid a very efficient solution.

Secondly, in conventional box loudspeakers, the back-wave is a nuisance, that will have to be dealt with in one way or another. You normally don't want the back-wave to find its way out of the box, and into the room, where it can interfere with the desired sound that's radiated by the front of the loudspeaker driver, and designers of high-end loudspeakers go to great lenghts to indeed keep that from happening.

With the 8c's Acoustic Cardioid design, we actually make use of the back-wave to form the cardioid. Killing two birds with one stone, quite elegant indeed!