The English manufacturer Russell K gets its name from its founder, Russell Kauffman. The company has been developing and manufacturing acoustic systems for 5 years. Yes, this is a short period of time, but the total experience of the Russell K team in the Hi-Fi industry is more than 50 years. The company's loudspeakers have become participants in more than a dozen reviews in various independent publications and have received several awards. The main technical features of Russell K are flexible, moderately "playing" body walls and the fundamental absence of damping filler. From the point of view of more mundane matters, such a technical characteristic as the lower limit of the frequency range will be of undoubted interest: even for shelf models it reaches 30 Hz, and for floor models - up to 20 Hz.
Technological solutions
Body wall mobility
Cabinet walls that curve to match the music deliver crystal-clear sound without the artifacts found in simple boxes. The cabinet is one of the main causes of sound coloration due to the energy going into it from the speakers. A few years ago the BBC conducted a study on cabinet design and found that stiff, heavy cabinets stain the sound, making the spoken word unnatural. The BBC's solution was to use thin walls with heavy bitumen pads attached for damping. Our own research has shown that a heavily damped thin wall cabinet works well in the midrange, but too much cabinet flex will soften the bass response. Our solution is to keep the cabinet walls thin and use internal reinforcement shelves to control the flexible cabinet design. In the Red series, the cabinet only vibrates when the speakers are playing, but stops instantly when the speakers stop, delivering near-perfect sound reproduction.
Speaker load
Innovations to make full use of the speaker's capabilities deliver natural bass response. Red 100 and Red 150 feature a bass reflex on the front panel with additional mechanical bass loading and damping system. On each side of each woofer, there is a reinforcement shelf containing several holes, and there is also a bass reflex port under the bottom shelf. The midrange energy coming from the rear of the woofer stays within the two shelves, and only bass is pulled out of that section of the cabinet to be routed to the bass reflex port. The result is a dramatic reduction in midrange standing waves and an almost complete absence of midrange energy exiting the port tube. The very low tuned ports (35Hz on Red 100 and 21Hz on Red 150) deliver extremely tight and extended bass. This ensures that the bass is now perceived as separate instruments and not as monotonous noise.
No internal damping
Without damping material, the cabinet plays with the speaker for extremely accurate sound reproduction. Most loudspeakers have some form of damping inside the cabinet to absorb the energy radiated from the rear of the speakers. However, our research has shown that if the enclosure is well designed, with adequate internal bracing and baffling, damping can be detrimental. Damping slows down the sound, making it out of sync with the sound output from the speaker. In the Red series, we removed the damping, which allowed the cabinet to breathe, but only in time with the dynamics, so that there was no distortion from the cabinet.
2nd order crossover
A finely tuned crossover ensures perfect sound balance. At Russell K, we have spent thousands of hours researching the effect of different types of crossovers on sound, ranging from 6dB (smooth rolloff) to 24dB (very steep rolloff). We have found that it is the harmonious combination of speaker rolloff and crossover rolloff that produces the best sound. The Red series uses a modified 12dB device, with only one coil and one capacitor. We've spent hours fine-tuning the crossover, adjusting the components for vocals and different types of music playing on various electronic components. This lengthy process of fine tuning ensures that our speakers sound natural.
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