My impressions upon hearing the first speaker to result from this new initiative, the $300,000 Ultra 11 (which launched at AXPONA 2017), was that it represented a new benchmark, unmistakably surpassing the performance of every other speaker, regardless of price, that I had heard to that time. In November of 2015, the seed of what would become the Ultra line had germinated. Upon hearing how effectively they had achieved their desired goals with this speaker, the notion struck them both that they simply had to reimagine their entire flagship line. It was during the delivery and installation of this $750,000 statement design that Leif and Damon heard the VR-111XS in the customer’s purpose-built 25′ by 75′ by 16′ room, and realized just how successful their three-and-a-half-year-long journey had been. This meant that Leif Swanson, Albert’s handpicked successor who has studied and worked with Albert for more than a decade, would assume the mantle of VSA’s head designer.
As the finishing touches were being addressed in preparation for delivery and installation in mid-2015, he announced his retirement. The realization of this heroic loudspeaker would prove to be Albert’s swansong. All enclosures were fabricated with VSA’s proprietary “Triple-Wall Laminate Construction,” a unique constrained-layering technique utilizing three fundamentally different materials, each with vastly different “Q.” The second nine-foot-tall tower housed four 12″ magnesium subwoofers (with quad voice coils), each one powered by its own amplifier, while the third enclosure housed the impressive custom dividing network. Each channel included a nine-foot-tall concentric-array/line-source hybrid, housing eight magnesium 7″ woofers, four magnesium 5″ midrange drivers, two 1″ horn-loaded magnesium dome tweeters, and an Air Motion Transformer super-tweeter, with an identical set of tweeters (two domes and an AMT), mounted in an ambient array on the rear baffle. What would come to be known as the VR-111XS was housed in six separate enclosures, three per channel. (It’s unnerving to realize that even the most highly regarded speakers produce on the order of 3 to 5 percent distortion or more at their rated output.) Even today, in any given system loudspeakers have the highest percentage of distortion of all components in the chain. The overarching focus of this design was to reduce all forms of distortion, mechanical and electrical, to the lowest levels achievable.
MARTIN LOGAN MOTION FX BIPOLAR DRIVERS
Once Albert had settled on the drivers necessary for this ambitious project, Damon Von Schweikert, Albert’s son (and as of fall 2015 VSA’s CEO), spent a year on the enclosure alone. It will come as no surprise that Albert already had a theory for such a design, and this single project would overshadow everything, save standard production at VSA, for more than three years. To understand the genesis of the new-generation VSA Ultra loudspeakers, we must go back to 2012, when a loyal, long-time VSA flagship owner contacted company founder Albert Von Schweikert and asked him to construct a one-of-a-kind, cost-no-object speaker.
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