“I confirm with my signature and by our reputation

that it is our upright wish and goal to invent, design

and manufacture the most honest products possible.

That means that here, you do not get less than what meets

the eye from the outside. But even much more.”

Sven Boenicke

Boenicke Audio has existed for almost 20 years now, yet we have grown slowly, always focussing on the quality of our products, not the number of units to be sold. In today’s hifi market with an overwhelming number of brands (some say 20’000 worldwide!), the question is: Does anyone need so many? And does it make sense to repeat again and again what has been “invented” and built thousands of times before? Applied to the realm of loudspeaker building, we clearly think that it makes no sense yet again to build a bass-reflex box made from MDF, damp it with foam, put a dome tweeter and one or two cone-drivers on the perpendicular front baffle, coat the box with plastic (lacquer), mount spikes and have a standard crossover network designed for it - yes, did you know that many “big” loudspeaker manufacturers do not have real in house skill anymore, but have their models designed by third parties who actually do not have much emotional link to the finished product? This is a fact, and we think it might be the main reason why the hifi product market seems to have become so impersonal. Why the retail value of a product has become so “important” - it seems, it’s more about buying and selling (and this is only possible if 99% of all gear is exchangable) than about finding a really good product and keeping it for many years of pleasure and excitement. 20 years ago, you could see fewer speaker models with “perfect” piano high gloss finish, but maybe you could in fact discover and hear the “handwriting” of the actual designer of that particuliar model. The ratio between seeing and getting (what you see is what you get) has never been as deceiving and superficious as with many of today’s loudspeakers. Boenicke Audio’s goal and deepest wish is to think about, design and finally build and market products that precisely reflect our ethic and honest way of living; and our accuracy of observing - hearing. With our products, it’s the other way round: you get even more than the eye meets from the outside. But do not be fooled if you do not see more than a sleek, elegant product without any unnecessary add-ons. Here’s the explanation why you get more than you see: If for the sake of clarification we divide existing loudspeakers on the market in as few as 3 categories, we would say that in the first category there are the MDF boxes with standard crossovers, maybe even designed by third parties. In the second category we would see the brands for whom in most cases “less is more” holds true. Brands that select their speaker drivers with enough care so that they do not need complex crossover networks to compensate for the drivers’ anomalies and shortcomings. Brands that maybe thought of a way of using better sounding materials for their enclosures than MDF, or brands that build dipole speakers that sometimes use no crossover at all and certainly no box at all - in other words: brands with some true selling proposals, unique or not.

In the third category we see the brands that do at least what is described in category 2, and on top of that they even actively boost sound reproduction quality by adding certain elements to the signal path, to the enclosure, drivers or any other part of the entire speaker. Brands who do things no-one else does. Describing such a category 3 company, we must describe ourselves, because - and this is as far as we honestly can say - we do not know of any other speaker-building com-panies who clearly can find themselves in this category. In today’s market full of products lacking true identity and real unique selling proposals, we are deeply convinced that Boenicke Audio is one of the very few exceptions, and within that small group the only category 3 contender. The founder, head and owner of Boenicke Audio, Sven Boenicke, is the only person in the company who acoustically designs, assembles and brings to sonic life every unit that leaves our house. All final decisions are made by him. What never happens here is that opposing interests of different departments within the company destroy the homogenity and ultimately the quality of a product. The finance-department will never forbid the use of superb but costly tuning parts or enclosures milled from massive wood. So, all our products truly bear Sven’s uncompro-mised handwriting which we consider to be the key factor to create a truly outstanding product and sound experience.Also as far as we know we are one of less than a handfull of companies who build their loudspeakers from solid wood throughout. There is much gossip on the internet that solid wood speakers are always built as resonating instruments and therefore try to imitate wood instruments. If someone takes a look at the cross-sections of our CNC-milled enclosures it should become clear that our enclosures are not designed to act as resonating bodies. On the contrary, we try to make our speaker bodies as solid and non-resonant as possible. Then, some may ask “why natural wood then?” The answer is very simple: First, if you mount a speaker driver on a certain mass of a particuliar material such as solid wood (or MDF or aluminum, just to name other examples), the material-inherent sound properties of that material will strongly affect the way the speaker driver itself sounds. This is a fact, but virtually no-one seems to know about it - or take it into consideration when building a speaker driver or an entire loudspeaker. Almost every driver manufacturer knows that using an aluminum phase plug can help to get heat out of the magnet system - but compared to a wooden phase plug it adds gross coloration (yes, aluminum to the human hearing is a clearly non-neutral, but a sonically colouring material)! Secondly there is no such thing as a non-resonant enclosure, so in reality some degree of sound energy is always being dissipated by the enclosure itself. It seems evident that a body of solid wood with a thin oil or wax coat-ing will resonate in a more natural (less damped!) way than the same body made from MDF with a plastic coating.

Even if a solid wood enclosure like the one of our W10 is very heavy and extremely non-resonant, the low degree of inner damping of unglued wood is a main reason for the speaker’s ability to reproduce music with so much true light in the harmonic structure of each tone, which we have so far not discovered with any other loudspeaker brand elsewhere, regardless of price. As described in the second category, we only use speaker drivers that can be operated without many correcting parts in the passive crossover and still exhibit a very linear frequency reproduction. Of course there are many other reasons why Boenicke Audio is the only true category 3 contender. Do you know of another manufacturer who uses Harmonix Tuning Bases, C37 lacquer on driver baskets and sometimes diaphragms, Marigo VTS dots, Steinmusic Speaker Match, L2 Modules, Davids Black Wonder, Bybee Technologies Golden God-dess filters, cryo-treated cotton-isolated Audio Consulting silver wire (sonically correct oriented), Duelund Pio Cast Capacitors (sonically correct oriented) and WBT Nextgen terminals? And do you know a manufacturer who tests every type of driver for the correct sonic (not marked) orientation? Anyone who modifies the signal path of the already world-class RAAL ribbon tweeters and uses custom-made Audio Consulting silver-cryo wire transformers with them? Imagine that each and every of the above described items and tuning devices mean a gain in reproduction qual-ity... And we assure you that it is well and truly audible. If you leave one out or replace the terminals (for example) with inferior ones, it’s not the same level anymore. One or two changes might seem not dramatic, but it all accumulates - in both directions. This is all just to show that we are really serious with our place in category 3. For example with the B8, it was a really difficult decision to deliberately leave this category and go down to 2: The B 8 does not come with tuning parts built-in as standard, because the price of the finished speaker just does not allow it... We agree that all this does not help much if each loudspeaker model sonically is not well tuned and balanced in the end. We are very privileged that Sven started to make his own music recordings in the early nineties. With the help of one or two splendid minds, he managed to create and build something we would call the most radical, probably best sounding 6-channel recording chain in the world - it exists only once. In the last 15 years Sven recorded close to 300 concerts - most of them live with audience, some of them for the production only. But in any case the recordings were made in natural environments such as concert halls, churches and other rooms. With every recording, Sven was present in the soundfield of the original music from beginning to end - and not only in the control room of a recording studio.

(Technicians who consider their memory of the sound in the control room as their true reference will have a problem judging the absolute level of quality of a sound referenced by the original sound in the field - because they never were in the field in the first place.) Sven has the ability to remember sounds in a photo-graphic way, especially the harmonic texture of a sound that shows as perceivable “colour” of a sound he can remember over a long period of time by means of storing a tightly matching corresponding colour in his virtual eye. So, back to the speakers: Each speaker is fine-tuned using our recordings. This is the only way Sven can know what he is doing - he uses the remembered reality as the ref-erence, nothing else. And from time to time, we demonstrate this process to the interested audience at shows, for example in 2010 in Vienna where we performed live music and played back the recording via the system right after the live event. We are happy if we are somewhere in the region of 90% of the original - a value which most “professionals” would dismiss as a ridiculous illusion anyway. At Boenicke Audio it’s all about this: Coming very, very close to original sounds is not an illusion, but an achiev-able goal - and even now that we have achieved this goal, we will not stop working on an even better experience of the reproduced beauty of sound.

RAMSTEINERSTRASSE 17

4052 BASEL

SWITZERLAND

+41 (0)79 959 05 50

www.boenicke-audio.ch