Airpulse A100 Bluetooth Speaker System

Stand out with the design of speakers that speak to modern-day sensibilities with their clean, sleek angles. The bold highlighted cabinet adds a modern day feel to the décor of the room.

The A100 cabinet is built with 18mm thick high-strength MDF finished with an attractive piano lacquer. To further reduce sound coloration, the cabinet interior is fully lined with professional waved sound absorption material. The oval shaped vent tube in the A100 is carefully designed to minimize wind noise. The internal wiring is made by TRANSPARENT.

The A100 horn-loaded ribbon tweeter inherits the mechanism of the tweeter in the Airpulse 7001 near-field monitor speaker. The thin aluminum ribbon diaphragm is designed for high sensitivity, superb transient response, extended frequency range, and well-defined resolution. The meticulously formulated horn shape produces directional and optimized high frequencies from the ribbon tweeter, so they are aimed at the listening space, minimizing unwanted effects from room reflection. This also leads to superior imaging of the speaker for full and three-dimensional sound with each detail well defined.

The mid-woofer is a 5″ driver with a hard anodized aluminum alloy cone suspended in a heavy, rigid cast-magnesium alloy frame. The Proprietary Aluminum Alloy Cone (PAAC) of the mid-woofer was designed from analysis of all types of cone geometry and materials using a Klippel Laser Doppler Interferometer. The 35mm diameter voice coil is larger than most loudspeakers of this size for less power compression because they run at a cooler operating temperature. Sonically, this means a more realistic dynamic representation of the music. The cooler running temperature of the voice coil also has the added benefit of a more reliable loudspeaker, since a cooler voice coil means less chance of speaker failure.

Most loudspeakers use round copper wire in the voice coil, but Airpulse uses a single-layer, edge-wound, copper-clad aluminum ribbon. Ribbon voice-coil wire provides more electrical conduction in the magnet gap and increases efficiency and power handling and helps lower distortion.

The mid-woofer features an under-hung motor structure with a high-power neodymium motor to provide a high magnetic flux to cover the whole voice coil of the loudspeaker. This type of magnet structure is engineered to completely energize the whole voice coil with allowance for extreme cone excursion giving far better bass and considerably less inter-modulation distortion.

For uncompromised performance, the A100 mid-woofer uses a rigid cast-magnesium alloy frame. Its rigidity reduces speaker coloration, and its material helps to dissipate heat efficiently from the voice coil much faster than a typical steel speaker frame, which all leads to increased dynamics and power handling, and ultimately, a satisfying musical experience.

The power amplification part is built with two TAS5754 Class-D amplifiers from Texas Instruments. This component is one of a handful of Class-D amplifiers in the market that combines high input sample rate support and high output PWM carrier frequency. These two characteristics are essential to achieve low background noise and low distortion. The up-to 192 kHz input sample rate support guarantees the entire link of digital processing run without any change of the signal’s sample rate. Its 768 kHz output PWM carrier frequency, twice the 384 kHz of traditional Class-D amplifiers, is even more suitable to drive the high-sensitivity ribbon tweeter. One TAS5754 is connected in bridge mode for left and right channel woofer and the other amp is connected in bridge mode for left and right channel ribbon tweeters.

The analog front end also uses components from Texas Instruments. They’re specially configured to work at 96 kHz to offer a frequency response up to 40 kHz. The wide range input frequency response guarantees thorough signal acquisition with very low distortion. To avoid cross-talk between the two analog ports, the A100 uses a relay instead of a semiconductor switch.

The PCM9211 SPDIF receiver is also from Texas Instruments, and supports input sample rates up to 216 kHz. With very low output jitter, the unpacked audio signal can be delivered to the XMOS processor with virtually zero loss.

The Bluetooth audio receiver is built on Qualcomm’s Bluetooth chipset, which supports aptX decoding and offers a far better audio playback quality than what the SBC codec can present.

Meticulous tuning work enables the A100 to accurately reproduce any type of music.

The integrated USB function lets you play high-quality audio sources without compression, so you can enjoy lossless music from your computer after installing the appropriate software.

The A100 features independent treble and bass adjustment functions to help you easily set the brightness of the high frequency and the amount of bass according to your preference and the size of your listening environment.

• 1200mV max subwoofer output
• 10W to each tweeter, 40W to each mid-woofer