Electro-Voice pro sound news sound innova ユーザーズマニュアル

he DVX Series is the latest
generation of high-performance
woofers from Electro-Voice (EV).

The story begins in spring 2005,
when EV launched its ZX5 as the
“world’s most versatile loudspeaker”:
a 2-way portable powerhouse capa-
ble of filling large spaces with con-
cert-quality sound, all while weighing
in at less than 50 pounds.

Word spread quickly. The motor

behind EV’s offering was built into the
ZX5’s sleek molded enclosure: the EV
DVX-3150—a brand-new, 15-inch
woofer, based on the all-new DVX
platform. It’s not often that an experi-
enced team of engineers is given a
blank piece of paper and asked to de-
velop a product that represents the
very best in all aspects, without com-
promising on a single detail. With
DVX, that was the mission. The DVX-
3150 features an all-new cone and
surround structure for very low distor-
tion and high excursion, along with
an all-new frame and motor structure
for high output with very low power
compression.

Having impressed everyone who

heard it in the groundbreaking ZX5,
the DVX concept soon materialized
again in the X-Line Very Compact,
the latest and smallest of the EV

line-array family. Shortly after the
launch of X-Line Very Compact and
its 12-inch DVX-3120 woofer-
equipped, XS212-LF cabinet (the sub
element in the XLVC line), the
phone calls began: “The XS212-LF
sounds incredible for its size, with
tons of power. Are these speakers
going to be available in the XLC
medium-sized line-array format?”

EV has always listened closely to

its customers, and these questions be-
came the impetus for EV’s engineers
to put DVX at front and center in
their transducer program, the result
of which was the development of a
brand-new, 12-inch LF driver, the
DVX-3121, and a new mid-bass driv-
er, the DVN 6.5-inch.

Which brings us up to date. Both

speakers made their debut at Info-
Comm 2006 inside the XLC127DVX
3-way, full-bandwidth line-array ele-
ment, based on the world-renowned
XLC127+. The DVX-loaded XLC has
all the sonic signatures that made its
predecessor a favorite, but with ex-
traordinary power handling and per-
formance specs that surpass those on
many full-sized line-array offerings. 

So how was all this achieved? Al-

low me to explain some of the
“sound innovations” behind the
DVX concept, at the drawing board

stage and beyond. Woofers, like all
loudspeakers, are governed by a
complex melding of disciplines: me-
chanical engineering, electrical engi-
neering, physics and acoustics. The
DVX line has been optimized in all
of these areas using the latest tech-
nologies. First of all, the DVX mag-
net structure, the motor that works
with the voice coil to provide the
drive force to the woofer, was opti-
mized for strength, stability, travel
and linearity. Nonlinearity in a
speaker’s magnetic field or suspen-
sion not only leads to added distor-
tion but also greatly impacts the life
expectancy of a speaker.

For example, if you have a speak-

er motor that is stronger when the
cone is moving out of the basket
than when moving in, the speaker
will tend to offset itself to the out-
side. Since the suspension of the
speaker (the surround and the spider)
can only move a finite distance in ei-
ther direction before being damaged,
you are going to stress these compo-
nents more in one direction than the
other. It also makes the speaker limit
(stop moving) too quickly in one di-
rection, and that means you lose sen-
sitivity and increase distortion. To fur-
ther compound this problem, the
magnetic field generated by the voice
coil can cause the field of the perma-
nent magnet to modulate. This is the

Efficiency and Accuracy By Design

Electro-Voice DVX Woofers

[59]

sound

the manufa

cturer’s view

started out as a studio engineer
many years ago, but I was
hijacked by a remote truck and

never looked back. The immediacy
and excitement of live music still
captivates me to this day. One of the
most enjoyable things about work-
ing in the field with so many differ-
ent acts for short periods of time is
the sheer number of great people
you get to meet and work with.

I’ve had the pleasure of hosting

some of the best engineers on the
planet in our remote trucks over
the years. Some of them already
have great chops for live work, and
some have had very little exposure
to the chaos of live work.

What I’d like to do in this article

is encourage everyone to get out
on the road more often. No matter
what your job description might
be, participating in a live show,
even from the sidelines, can be a
real boost to your enthusiasm for
the career you chose.

Especially if you are involved in

post work that has live music con-
tent, it behooves you to get out on
location to see how it’s done. This
works to everyone’s advantage be-
cause you may be able to impart
some wisdom to the live engineers
about post problems.

There are many ways to do it

right and even more ways to do it
wrong. Besides, it’s fun to see all

the geek gear the video guys bring
to the party. For you studio folks, it
might surprise you how advanced
the audio section is on modern en-
tertainment video trucks. It’s amaz-
ing how much gear you can pack
in a space 8x8 feet or less. Watch-
ing a pro production mixer, like Ed
Greene at the Oscars, handle sever-
al hundred inputs and outputs live
to air will make your hair stand up!

Things are generally a little

calmer over in our audio-only re-
mote trucks. We usually deal only
with the music elements. Of
course, that may mean 10 bands in
a row! You do have to scramble to
keep up. Our Classic Silver Studio
has the big Neve VR with recall and
Flying Faders snapshots, and that
works well when you have time to
reset. But if you want instant glob-
al reset, our new White Truck with
a pair of Yamaha DM-2000s is the
ticket. The Neve works best for
projects like Neil Young’s recent
film, Heart of Gold, and the Yama-
has for TV shoots like Jazz at Lin-
coln Center’s Gala, where you have
maybe a dozen different sets.

One of my concerns over the

years has been proper documenta-
tion of the media. At Remote
Recording, our trucks are equipped
with software to quickly document
all the relevant information for

[59]

Come Out on the Road

spars