Ken Berger's association with VUE devalues the organization IMO.
Pedigree? There are may formerly loyal EAW customers (with $100k's EAW purchases) who would never again consider a company he is associated with.
And I agree: A TrueExtant diaphragm on a Radian structure is not revolutionary. (IIRC EAW spec'd TAD w/850 early on)...
I take exception with this, to put it nicely. I am sure there are people out there who have issues with me, there have always been some. I am also thankful for the 100’s of people in the US and through out the world who I can call as friends and associates in this industry, many of whom begged me for years to do something interesting in the pro speaker market.
I do not know what Jim is going off about and would suggest he contact me directly rather than spreading innuendos.
My experience in this industry includes building not one but a few of the greatest teams, products, brands and companies (including founding of prosoudnweb.com) speaker for itself – I am confident that my personal credibility stands on it's own merits.
The quality of VUE's products also stand on their own,we are not ashamed of the fact that we engineer our products in the US, Germany and China, this should not be an issue. Many pro speaker companies have issues for historical reasons in acknowledging the amount of manufacturing done in Asia. Almost all the drivers in the world use some Chinese parts today, they virtually own the market for magnetic materials (we can discuss the politics of this and weather it is good long term but we can not deny this).
With regard to our drivers we are very proud of what we have accomplished in so short a time. In our larger systems we do use a radian supplied motor assembly along with a heavily modified version of the Materion Truextent 100mm diaphragm, and we are very proud of the performance we have been able to achieve with this assembly. In fact our modified diaphragm / voice coil assembly will produce an order of magnitude less power compression (10x less in the 10-70 watts range) than the standard hifi optimized Treuextent diaphragm. The current driver is more robust than the TAD 4000 series ever was, it uses a totally different type of BE process for greater strength, it can hit the phase plug (never should but it can) without shattering. We used the Radian magnetic assembly for time to market as tooling our own would have delayed our original systems by a year. To answer another post both our Be diaphragms are 100% Be, and this does impact the cost of the systems substantially as our diaphragms domes cost more almost any comparable complete drives.
We also enveloped the first totally new Beryllium compression driver in more than a decade and that is what we use in the al-4 and al-8. This was a totally ground up design including dome geometry, voice coil, phase plug and magnetic assembly.
With the exception of the compression driver in our a-class systems all the drivers in our systems are designed and built exclusively for VUE. That is something very few other companies can say these days.
As an example the woofer in the al-8 is to our knowledge the only 3 inch voice coil 8 inch driver in the pro industry today. Also as an example of our diver capabilities the al-4 woofer utilizes a kevlar cone and butyl rubber surround, making it totally unique.
One of the lessons I learned at the companies I helped build and the many others I have consulted with over the years is the Not Invented Here Syndrome limits what a company can achieve, it limits the spread of technology. It is one of the reasons so many companies do somethings well and not others. With VUE we worked very hard not to limit our selves and embrace partnerships to bring the best technology from many sources together to build better performing and integrated products. That's why we sought out key development partners form day one with companies like: Materion (Northern California) to advance HF driver capabilities, and AFMG (Berlin) to develop better modeling and beam forming software, and Pascal (Denmark) to develop light weight amps that produce real useable power and ALLDSP (Germany) for the first integrated DSP and networking and control architecture.
The performance of our (VUE Audiotechnik) systems also speak for them selves. We are happy to arrange demos for anyone in th US (please let us know we will put you on the schedule, the list of request increases every day). We have won major system designs and completed a number of installations through out the US. We have been slower than we would have liked in bringing the al-4 and al-8 to market, we spent more time than we had hope for in development along with ramping production slowly to maintain a pace that enables very high standards in terms of quality procedures.
In less than a year we have shipped well over 1,000 line arrays systems and the number is growing faster each month. We have a range of advanced systems in development for release over the next few years. Speaking for our team we feel we have accomplished more, faster than any pro loudspeaker company in history, especially considering we are still a very small new company. I want to personally thank everyone who has helped us accomplished so much in such a short time, this is a great industry and it is made up of amazing people.
We are very busy and we are still a very small tight group working to build something great. From some of the comments here (many of which I hope I have answered) it is clear we need to get out more, something I hope to do more, and will.
Ken Berger
CEO VUE Audiotechnik
Founder of EAW, Prosoundweb.com, VUE Audiotechnik
