It’s one thing to be curious and knowledgeable but it is another to extrapolate and innovate. And Phil Jones is one the Golden Geese. Those who lay Golden Eggs, of loudspeaker technology and development that give the manufacturer a reputation of excellence. Any truly successful loudspeaker manufacturer absolutely needs one, or they are merely re-enclosing a famous maker’s transducers. That isn’t nearly as notable, no matter how clever the acoustics of their speaker box.

But what came from that clumsy absurd experiment with a repaired woofer, set Phil thinking.

That big old fifteen inch Gauss speaker cone, with all its extra moving mass of glue, however thinly spread, was really using the elasticity of the suspension, top roll and bottom spider. And the air ducts within the motor assembly, were now moving so much air, that despite the incredibly stupid amount of power Phil was dumping in it, the driver just played on. And on, yet it somehow seemed to keep the perfect tone that Phil was giving the amp from his tone generator. It didn’t start making ugly squawking or gurking noises. It just shook the flat to bits until he stopped the watts. That Gauss’ suspension was like my old Volvo’s.

It wasn’t until some time later that Phil got in touch to tell me about his new venture and to ask if I fancied a career change from running a rehearsal studio? For he had started working on the new cone concept, based on this massive woofer’s behaviour and come up with something. A genuine leap forwards in one key area of physics.

Rigidity.

OK, here’s a super-quick run down of the Loudspeaker Physics Conundrum: In order to faithfully reproduce sound from the signal input, without distortion nor colouration being added, a loudspeaker transducer needs to be of nil cone-mass, limitless power handling (for headroom) and to be absolutely pistonic throughout out its travel. It also needs to be able to ignore the acceleration at the end of each change of direction of travel and just go the other way, regardless despite, say, ten thousand gravities needed to reverse the direction of a tweeter dome at 20kHz.

That is literally not possible. How well a speaker makes sound is often measured in’efficiency’ or how loud it is at a metre away, with just one, exact watt. Expressed in dB, anything above 90dB is good. To handle big power, you will lose efficiency. A Lamborghini Countach went fast by pushing a lot of air out of the way, with a terrible coefficient of drag. The AE1 had a lowish efficiency, but took 200W rms.

What Phil Jones had found out was pure materials science and he took advantage of it. That crazed rigidity was what he sought. And he found it in anodised aluminium. Here’s the sexy bit. Alumina, or Aluminium Oxide, the anodised ‘ceramic’ layer on the top of anodised aluminium, is a solid 9 on the MOH scale. That puts it up with emeralds, rubies, carborundum and just one notch below diamond!

That anodised layer is HARD. And it will NOT squeeze nor stretch at all. So, what if you spun a skinny aluminium speaker cone and had it anodised all over, both sides? You’d get a laminate, a posh word for a sandwich. Two layers of anodised alumina, with the original aluminium cone in between, and it became a truly incredible cone material.

Trouble was, it was heavy, so the driver got smaller and smaller until the optimum scale for this effect to take place was found at a mere five inches. And of course as the cone was metal, it needed a sexy little pointy cone instead of a dome in the middle, of the same material. On a seriously compliant foam surround. The driver was ready to rock.

But there was more and this was why everyone was getting excited. You can call it the tinfoil effect.

The truth is, cooks burn themselves. Look in Pixar’s ‘Ratatouille’. Part of the the animators’ genius veracity was to include this in the cartoon, subtly, with marks on the chef’s arms. And we have all done it. But have you also noticed how as soon as you take tinfoil off the meat, it cools instantly and cannot hold enough hotness on its own to burn you? Unlike the Yorkshire pudden tin.

Likewise , at 0.2mm thick, that ridiculously rigid metal cone is one rapid heat dissipator. And the coil wound onto the back of this small speaker was a funkin’ doozy. Just like as if a public address engineer had designed it. Oversized and able to eat 200w, you could spank it without cooking it. It stayed cool.

All speaker coils are deep in the guts of their magnet, heat builds up and normally takes its time to dissipate. In the AE1 five inch, that heat was thermally coupled to the cone and was conducted away in an instant, by the metal cone acting like tinfoil. That and the fact it was on an absurdly long-throw suspension, made it like a naughty piston, wanting to pump your world.

The resulting sound definitely gave you goosebumps. Although tiny boxes, the AE1 could do stuff that only big fancy, even more expensive speakers could do. And play without power compression. That one thing that normally makes you realise it’s speakers and not life.

It’s about the large signal spikes, the crucial phat bits. The ‘ting’ of a drumstick tip on the bell of a cymbal. The things that need a big, fast driver. Except for AE1, you didn’t. Coupled with a blisteringly fast tweeter, Jones had a winner on has hands.

Alvin Gold’s review of the AE1, “Working out with the AE1” was an astonished assessment, with images of small but weighty hand-barbels in the article. The guys at Acoustic Energy were over the moon. Jones once referred to Alvin with a term you can’t use if you don’t want to upset the religious. But he deemed Alvin a deity! I simply remember thinking how one day, it’d be lovely to be seen as a speaker expert, like Alvin.

What an experience it was.

I grasped that chance of the new job. From my hessian-lined dungeon rehearsal studio to a new small industrial unit in Ealing. I could commute.

I got to specify and order our work stations and we got the parts coming in. The cones from the motor racing company, who had finally learned to use small tiny clips to hold our delicate cones when anodising. The hand-assembled passive crossovers, built by just one person. They had to be made with special inductor coils with ferrite end caps, or they too would warm, fill up and power-compress. This was another mad-power inner feature.

Along with asymmetric inner walls to the boxes, via some floor screed that added epic mass, the AE1 was like a model T ford. You could have any colour as long as it was Grittex black.

Like a P.A. box.

The speaker grilles were held on by plastic inserts that had a hole or a tiny butt-plug in the bit that showed once inserted into the MDF location. These were called Eelons.

The world’s richest man is named after speaker grille holders.

The fancy AE1 badges on the front were a violently expensive item and the serial-numbered rear panel decals were a preciously-guarded final component. At the end of each production run, the serial numbers were recorded.

Longhand, in my Filofax.

And of course, we needed more models. Yet Phil was essentially a P.A. genius. So the AE2 just had two of these mad drivers with the tweeter between, and took more power. The AE4, was very rare and had four of the small drivers, around one of the lovely tweeters and absolutely required you to be in a very big room, some way back, like um, a concert?

Thus what was once, a lazily over-mixed glue repair, became a phenomenon of Eighties speaker heritage.

It wasn’t long before it was worked out how to make a bigger metal cone driver, with AE DNA, which became the AE3 and even how to make the boxes pretty enough for better ‘partner acceptability’, with wood finishes and all.

And now, that was all so long ago and Acoustic Energy is roaring into its fourth decade, with time-served Golden Geese of their own and a new AE1, fortieth edition.

I remain deeply proud to have been a part of this, right at the beginning, and, I admit, have been bragging about it in print ever since. After all, these ears tested every tweeter we were going to use, in a test enclosure of ‘known good bits but no tweeter’ parts. I had test boxes with no crossover but both drivers, and I had one with only the main driver missing.

I lined a bit of racking with rubbery sheet to make an inert test space and would play music through every component, HF, LF and crossover, before they were builded into finished speaker enclosures.

One day, I found a crossover that sounded a bit dull. I called Phil over from the office and asked him to listen to it. At first he wasn’t sure what I meant and then he could hear it too. Taking a multimeter to each component on the passive crossover board, he found a fault.

One resistor was off-spec by 0.18 of an Ohm. He said I had golden ears.

It was a good day.