FREE Shipping in the Contiguous 48 States! Worldwide Shipping!
Unrivaled performance
At CSS, we strive to be a no-nonsense audio company. You can rest assured that the things we do and technologies we use are done to improve audio quality, not to fill marketing materials. That's why you'll always find things like shorting rings on our drivers and bracing in our cabinets. We would rather sell you a truly high end driver or well built cabinet than cut corners to sell you something cheap. You can read about some of our technologies below.
XBL^2 Motor
XBL^2 motor technology creates very flat BL curve over wide excursion range. In a typical motor, BL is very strong at low excursion and gradually gets weaker as excursion increases due to the voice coil leaving the area of high density flux. As BL gets weaker, distortion increases. With XBL^2, the motor is split into two or more regions of high density flux. Once a properly sized voice coil is introduced, it results in an extremely flat and stable BL curve over a wide range of excursions, leading to reduced distortion.
The graphs to the right show two curves. The blue is a typical motor and the red is a motor utilizing XBL^2 technology. As you can see, BL versus excursion is much flatter over a wider range and THD is much lower even at the extremes of excursion.
Shorting Rings
Shorting rings lower motor inductance. Inductive variation over excursion can be a significant cause of distortion in loudspeakers. Shorting rings can be used in any driver (and they are in all of ours) to reduce inductance and distortion. When coupled with the XBL^2 motor design, this leads to very low levels of inductive change over varying excursions and therefore, very low levels of distortion overall.
Many companies leave these out due to cost. Shorting rings are typically made of aluminum or copper, which can be expensive on their own. They also need higher levels of quality control to be implemented properly. We prefer to sell you some of the best drivers money can buy rather than cut corners here.
Aluminum Frames
Aluminum frames are much more expensive to produce and cost more to ship because of their additional weight than stamped steel frames. However, when you have a high excursion woofer or subwoofer that can move some serious air like the ones we carry, all that excursion can lead to flexing or ringing in a stamped frame basket. Flexing can cause various nonlinearities in cone motion leading to distortion or muddy sound. An undamped stamped frame is also more likely to audibly ring. That's why you'll only see cast frames on our woofers.