PMC calls it ‘the speaker you’ll never hear’. They might be right because at first I thought I was listening to a fully active system. The PMC Fenestra turned out to be a passive loudspeaker. Imagine my surprise. It has the dynamics, the clarity, imaging and deep clean bass of an active design. And it looks kind of sexy. Speaking of elegant. Elegant design and advanced engineering come together to produce the ultimate musical listening experience. The top-of-the-range fact model combines new materials, innovative aerodynamic engineering, groundbreaking vibration-cancelling design, cutting-edge cabinets and drivers, PMC’s patented Advanced Transmission Line (ATL™) bass-loading technology and state-of-the-art looks to create a loudspeaker which adds no sound of its own to the music it reproduces.
No added flavors or colouring
Other loudspeakers produce unwanted vibrations in the drivers and cabinet that colour the sound. Just as a shaky camera cannot produce a clearly focused image, these unwanted vibrations reduce the clarity and precision of the sonic imaging. With fenestria, such unwanted resonances and unnatural colouration are engineered out of the design, leaving nothing but music.
Suspended in space
The nest’s minimal, sculpted form is decoupled from the cabinet, connecting with it minimally via four isolation mounts. This excludes vibrations that might colour the treble and mid-range, while the baffle-less design excludes reflections that degrade the imaging in traditional cabinet loudspeakers, creating the sonic impression that the drivers are suspended freely in space.
Vibration Ccncellation
All loudspeaker cabinets, irrespective of their structure and weight, radiate energy at their resonant frequency. Extensive vibration studies carried out during Fenestria’s development phase gave the PMC design team the precise data they needed to tackle this issue in the evolving loudspeaker. Adding a large weight (a so-called tuned mass damper) to the top of skyscrapers prevents the formation of destructive seismic vibrations during earthquakes. As the building oscillates, the mass moves in opposition, cancelling out the unwanted resonances. Using the same principles, the planar wings of Fenestria’s cabinet have been precisely engineered to resonate in opposition to rest of the loudspeaker assembly, so that unwanted vibrations are eliminated before they ever leave the cabinet.
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