Art Audiophile

Company profile

"Our components do not contain any earth-shattering novelties; the precision in important details brings the audible result for you", this is how Art & Audio introduced itself at the Funkausstellung 1993.

Art & Audio - Galerie und HiFi-Geräte was a small business in Berlin-Wedding, where the owner tried to present high-quality HiFi equipment, mainly from Germany and England, in a cultivated atmosphere, in an environment of art and occasional live music.

A range of handmade loudspeaker cabinets, amplifiers and turntables of his own manufacture also appeared under the brand name Art Audiophile.

In addition to sales in the company's own shop, the equipment was presented at the Berlin Funkausstellung in 1989, 1991 and 1993, and, at its launch in 1987, at the Swiss High End in Egerkingen.

Art & Audio had been founded in October 1986 and closed down after several break-ins in early 1998.

In the meantime the former owner has again developed a new speaker and also a new amplifier, in which he has put his own ideas into practice. However, it will not go on sale; instead, circuits with explanations for interested music lovers and do-it-yourselfers were published in December 2018 in the diy-hifi-forum (amplifier [1] and MC preamplifier [2]) and in the forum of the Analogue Audio Association (amplifier [3] and MC preamplifier [4]) (as of autumn 2019).

The developer can be reached by mail: artaudiophil -at- googlemail -dot- com.

Art & Audio liked to use type names with a Francophile ambience for its loudspeaker boxes. They are characterized by a narrow design, which is due to the development goal of minimizing baffle reflections. Art Audiophile was one of the first manufacturers in Germany to use this design.
The narrow design is achieved by using Monacor SPP110/8 "HiFi bass-midrange drivers" with a small outer diameter instead of large bass drivers. In order to nevertheless gain enough diaphragm area for sufficient air movement to produce bass, the larger models are equipped with several bass-midrange drivers per speaker.

The drivers used were refined in the course of further development of the speakers, for example by replacing the original diaphragm feed strands with fine strands. From 1991 on Monacor drivers were equipped with a diaphragm developed by Monacor in empirical tests. The diaphragm was glued into the driver with backed polyester wadding and acts as a mechanical low pass filter; these drivers are recognisable by the dust cover that is not domed. For the high frequency range, partly modified drivers by Dynaudio (D28AF and Esotec) and Matsushita (Technics TH400) were used.
The drivers are almost exclusively preceded by 6dB crossovers and often amplitude-defined series band stops for phase and impedance correction.

Until 1991 preamplifiers were offered exclusively in transistor technology, after that as hybrids with tubes for signal amplification. Downstream Class A impedance converters provide low impedance outputs of 50 ohms. All inputs and outputs are in-phase.
The power amplifiers for loudspeaker cabinets with good and medium efficiency are built in Class A technology and basically with channel-separated power supplies.

Characteristics of the turntables, also called "frontend" at Art & Audio, are the belt drive, the triple decoupling of the motor from the cabinet and an integrated device for centering the record. In addition, from 1991 onwards the turntables were mainly sold together with a 3-leg table with spike decoupling.

Products

• power amps
• Loudspeakers
• Turntables
• Turntable Preamplifier
• Preamplifier

Weblinks

Brochures of the years 1989, 91 and 93 on Hifi Archiv [5]