Phase Technology dcb-1.0-lr Informationshandbuch

small and whether your needs are for stereo reproduction or any of the many surround sound implementations, Phase

Technology’s Digital Audio Reference Theater System (dARTS) can provide a solution. The system is available in several

different form factors to accommodate virtually any room’s aesthetics and installation challenges.

Phase Technology is a division of United Speaker Systems, an American OEM manufacturer of quality speakers since 1955.

As a name brand, Phase Technology dates from the early 1980s and has always had a reputation for engineering and

building exceptional speakers. Many of the basic patented technologies in the loudspeaker industry were developed by

Phase Technology’s founder, including the soft-dome tweeter and the manufacturing process for flat-piston drivers. Even

after more than 50 years, Phase Technology is still a vertically-integrated manufacturer, engineering and building its own

speaker drivers, crossovers and cabinets. This commitment to in-house production in the United States yields superior

construction and superb quality control at all levels of the manufacturing process. The payoff from this is evident by Phase

Technology being consistently rated as one of the best suppliers in the audio-video industry for the past nine years, as

voted on by the nation’s dealers and published annually by the trade journal Inside Track. In their 2004 survey, published in

January 2005, Phase Technology garnered five first-place votes out of the 15 categories available for rating.

Once Phase Tech began researching the feasibility of developing a completely integrated audio system, they began

discussions with D2Audio of Austin, Texas. D2Audio is the leader in development and production of digital amplifier

modules for many applications. Phase Technology worked in concert with D2Audio to custom-design a specific amplifier

module for dARTS, matched to their speaker drivers. Conventional analog amplifiers have gotten very good over the

years, but they still change the signals by adding or losing information, creating distortion. This happens because they do

not react quickly enough to the constantly changing demands of the program source. Digital amplifiers, on the other hand,

are much faster in their response times. Think of the difference between standard analog television and what we see now in

digital and HDTV. There is so much more information being processed and sent to the screen that the resolution and detail,

the life-like recreation of images, and the depth and dimensionality of the picture is immediately apparent to everyone. So

can it be with digital audio amplifiers. If they are designed properly with accurate tracking of the input signals and

effective filtering of the output to the speakers, the amplifiers can dramatically improve sound quality over what we’ve

become accustomed to for the past century.

No matter how well the amplifier/speaker package can be made to perform on a laboratory test bench or in an anechoic

chamber, it is ultimately limited by the interactions with the room in which it is placed. Knowing what was being done in the

professional audio and music world, Phase Technology contacted Audyssey Laboratories in Los Angeles, a spin-off of the

University of Southern California’s Immersive Audio Lab, founded in 1996 by Tom Holman, inventor of THX and Professor

of Film Sound at USC, and Chris Kyriakakis, a Professor in the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. The company was born

when Tom and Chris came together to create a system that more easily calibrates and equalizes theaters. Chris was

looking for a difficult project to tackle for his tenure at the university, and Tom challenged Chris to develop a system that

was not only better than existing methods but also performed these functions automatically.

After surveying all the existing room equalization technologies available at the time, Tom and Chris combined their

expertise in room acoustics, psychoacoustics and audio signal processing to develop the framework that would ultimately