So you asked for an Emerald Physics speaker for smaller rooms? And one that runs off of one amp? And one that looks great? Well, The Revolution continues.

I am very happy to introduce the new Emerald Physics CS3 digitally controlled open baffle point source loudspeaker. The CS-3 continues the revolution in high performance loudspeakers started by the original CS-2.

The CS-3 is a completely optimized, digitally equalized, open baffle 12 inch two way design with a point source 12 inch coaxial driver that runs from 32Hz-22Khz. It generates a realistic sonic picture, while operating mostly independent of the room’s acoustics.

The CS-3 was designed for listeners in rooms under 2000 cubic feet who want a smaller solution than the older discontinued CS-2 and the brand new CS-2.3. The CS3 can be run with a single amp versus the need to biamplify the larger and more powerful CS-2.3. It can be placed as close as 2 feet from the rear wall so it can work in very small rooms. The CS-3 is like a monitor on steroids. There is no need to use a monitor any longer when you can now get real open baffle full range performance.

Reviews and user comments on the CS-2 were superb. Now the bar is raised with improved sonics as well as much upgraded cosmetics. In the right room the CS-3 will outperform the older CS-2 with its better midrange coherency and superb imaging. The CS-3 is like a mini monitor with high efficiency (95Db) and bass extension to 32Hz.

The average audiophile can now listen to a small, full range, open baffle speaker system with performance that they never thought possible at even close to this price.

Design elements are as follows:

1) Eliminating the Room:
Emerald Physics has developed a method to control a speaker’s dispersion pattern in order to minimize room interactions and thereby eliminate most of the room’s sonic signature. Our patent-pending BDC (Broadband Directivity Control) technology is a turning point in the history of loudspeaker design. Until now, speaker/room interaction has been one of the major problems in home audio systems. Conventional speakers have wide dispersion and an omni-directional pattern in the bass range, sending large amounts of sound energy toward the room boundaries, which are reflected back into the listening space with a time delay. These are known as early reflections, which color the sound of the original signal. The omni-directional bass pattern also excites room resonances in all three axis which tends to cause the boomy, ill-defined bass commonly experienced in many systems. The solution is to create a speaker with a more narrow dispersion pattern as well as a more consistent dispersion angle across the frequency spectrum. Listening to mainly the loudspeaker’s direct field eliminates most of your room’s sound, creating a consistent and natural playback performance even in difficult rooms.

2) Eliminating the Box:
Emerald Physics uses a boxless design approach called open-baffle dipole in order to achieve several important improvements over conventional loudspeakers:

• Eliminates box sound – preserves the pitch and harmonic beauty of instruments.
• Eliminates deep bass limits – Flat response to 32Hz with 2.75 inch thick baffle.
• Eliminates impedance swings – Maintains same impedance curve as raw drivers.
• Eliminates large expense of box enclosure – typically the most expensive component in the speaker.

3) Eliminates the Peaks & Valleys in Frequency Response:
Most loudspeaker systems are rated at plus or minus 3dB. This equates to a 6 dB range at any give area in the frequency response as measured in an anechoic chamber. Once placed in a listening room, it is not uncommon to see 20dB variations. The CS3 exhibits an extremely accurate response of plus or minus ½ dB from 100 Hz to 20,000 Hz. This amazing high level of accuracy is achieved through the use of the included signal processor, which provides equalization via our custom software. Multiple preset files allow configurations to be chosen for specific room placement locations for optimum performance in most any room from 2-7 feet from the rear wall. The design allows the speakers to be very close to side walls with no sonic degradation.

4) Eliminating Dynamic Compression:
In a perfect world, a speaker would be able to play as loud as required with totally accurate tracking of the musical information as it gets louder. Unfortunately, in the quest for low frequency performance, many speaker designs sacrifice dynamics and efficiency for low bass response. This lack of efficiency creates a sound field that does not always reproduce each bit of musical information correctly. It is one of the reasons that many speaker systems sound out of balance when they play loud or the speaker is required to reproduce a large musical peak. By using several techniques including very efficient professional speaker components, a 12” woofer, coaxial midrange/compression tweeters and active digital equalization efficiency is maximized. This not only makes the CS-3 speaker system 95Db efficient, it also allows the speakers to sound great with inexpensive amps and associated electronics.

5) Eliminating the Need for Expensive Electronics & Cables:
The CS3 is a very accurate reproducer of sound. Many speakers, due to their designs, require the need for very expensive electronics to achieve satisfactory performance. Conventional designs have problems with the impedance of the drivers due to mechanical and electrical resonances and the passive crossovers used. As mentioned earlier, passive crossovers are power-robbing components. The CS3 maximizes power transfer. The high frequencies are not harsh or strident and therefore, the need for a softer sounding tube amplifier is not required for the tweeters. The need for expensive cables that filter out high frequency information is also not required. The need for 200 pound amplifiers with huge power transformers is not necessary since the CS3 is very efficient and does not require the large amounts of power that expensive amplifiers offer into low impedance's. In fact, you may find that you will spend hundreds of dollars per channel rather than thousands of dollars per channel to drive the CS3.

The power of the above synergy is evident in the final product. A great looking, nearly full range speaker system, that is a superb answer for smaller rooms for audiophiles who thought they would need a small monitor up until now.

The finished product is a 2.75 inch deep, 41 inch high speaker, that is 16.5 inches wide (see photos). It is flat from 32Hz-22Khz .5/-3 db. From 100Hz to 20Khz it is flat plus or minus 1/2 of a Db! And it is 95Db efficient. It portrays an open, out of the box sound that you have to hear to believe. Once you listen to open baffle, "boxless", bass, you may never want to listen to a box speaker again. The coincident point source bass/midrange/ tweeter is a major upgrade over the CS-2. The CS3 is a single amplified design with crossover at 900Hz from woofer/midrange to tweeter.

In addition, the new cosmetics are a major upgrade from the original CS-2.

Prices
CS-3's are $2995.00 a pair in Black.
The optional wood finish is $300.00 a pair and available in Cherry (Shown), Maple and Mahogany.
These are only sold Internet Direct and come with a 30 day in home trial.
We also offer discounts for users who do not need a trial as well as full system discounts if you need amps and associated components as well.

Call me at 770-667-5633 to discuss these wonderful loudspeakers. Visa and MasterCard accepted.

We will ship worldwide into countries without a local distributor.

As a point of Reference here are some review quotes from the older CS-2. From 60Hz up, in a small room, the CS-3 is a better speaker:

“I think of how little the Emerald Physics CS2s cost for what they do. This is the world of DSP as it should be. By comparison, the little boxes that people are sometimes paying the Emerald Physics’ price for—or even many times that price—seem like toys, unable to offer the power and scale, the dynamics, the top to bottom transparency and the sheer quantity of musical information that the Emerald Physics speakers produce, always with a feeling of complete ease and without demanding much amplifier power. After this, I would find it really hard to go back to little boxes, no matter how good the little box might be nominally. So will you, I think, if you have a vivid memory of concert sound. No speaker is perfect, and perhaps with price-no-object drivers and so on, designer Clayton Shaw could produce even more remarkable sound, albeit at a higher price. But the Emerald Physics CS2 comes remarkably close to putting at your ears the literal sound of the recordings you play on it, via the all-important minimized interaction with your listening room. Good by any standard, at its cost it is quite amazing. A wonderful achievement in speaker design.”

“The speakers do very well on intimate music. But it is in large-scaled music—or in smaller-scaled music played in large spaces—that they really distinguish themselves from almost all others.”

“The results are startling. My wife Paige, who is not an audiophile but has listened to a lot of speakers (how could she avoid it?), commented upon her first listen: “Oh, so that is what this stereo imaging stuff is about.” And indeed the stereo imaging behavior of the Emerald Physics is surprisingly precise—with the blurring arising from room sound largely removed, this is strictly “X marks the spot” precision.”

“This is the real “soundstage,” not some artifact generated by reflections off the walls of your listening room. The speakers sound as if they were in no room at all, nearly, and the original acoustics are nearly all you hear. The large radiating area in the lower frequencies and the dynamically unfettered upper-frequency driver made the whole sound effortless.”

The above quotes are from the December 2008 “The Absolute Sound” review written by Robert E Green (REG)

“It's extremely difficult to divide up a budget of $6500 (or less—way less) between a single pair of speakers and even a stereo amplifier and find another package that'll combine to outstrip this system under review in most of the criteria that I find important; full extension at the frequency extremes, transparency and immediacy, and dynamic articulation. In fact, I can't think of anything that comes close. So yes, if full-frequency extension, transparency, real-world dynamics and, most of all, truth are what you are looking for in a speaker system, then yeah, you owe it to yourself to hear these giant killers.
All you need to know is that the CS2 sounds great, it plays loudly, it's more dynamic than any speaker I know of around its class and it's got the full frequency extension to keep you happy for years and years.”

“In the end it may be easier to address the type of listener for whom the CS2 may not be the Holly Grail. This listener will probably be looking for aesthetic beauty, likely in a small artfully finished box. He won't care much about full frequency extension and he's not impressed by powerfully extended bass, no matter how well executed—he knows that such considerations are for those lacking in real class and taste. He thinks he's above all that. He's also looking for something with a laid-back presentation because he's not impressed by the realistic dynamics found in live music. He may also be looking for a sweetening through the upper midrange and treble that certainly isn't here. I won't argue with him here because this is one of those areas where I don't find that there's an absolute reference in live music—two different seats in the audience will usually provide two very different realities here. But I will warn him that sometimes laid-back speakers can lack the spark and the excitement that the CS2s routinely convey. They're often not as engaging. In short, this guy's looking for a speaker that tailors music to meet his idea of sonic reality; he's not all that interested in hearing exactly what's recorded on his discs.”

The above quotes are from the Positive Feedback review by john Potis.
Read the entire review at:
http://www.positive-feedback.com/Issue38/emerald_physics_2.htm

“Normally, I allow review speakers to break in for at least 100 hours before I do any sort of serious listening. But from the instant the first disc started playing I couldn’t help but to pay attention. The CS2’s create a presentation that is eerily familiar to The Carver Amazings in that the starting point of the sound comes from such a wide space. It brought a whole new definition and reference to the phrase , “wall of sound”.

“As he talked about his wish for a large, vaulted television/music room in a log cabin home my thoughts quickly turned to the speaker I’d most want in that space. After three months with the CS2, I knew that they would be my first choice without question. With their ability to create the highly desired “wall of sound”, and the capability of taking difficult sound spaces out of play (large window-filled walls, etc.) at a price that belies their sonic capabilities it was an easy choice.
The Emerald Physics CS2 may just be the next game changer in the digital music wave.”

“To my amazement the CS2’s do just what Clayton intended and Walter promoted. The speakers do indeed make a very difficult sound reproducing room sound very good. No, it’s not a replacement for my living room, but much better than I thought possible.”

Above from the Affordable Audio review that can be read in its entirety at:
http://www.affordableaudio.org/aa2008-10.pdf

Brands carried:
Acoustic Zen, Artison, Audio Space, Audio Zone, Audiophile APS, Balanced Power Technologies, Bel Canto, Creek, Denon, Dodd Audio, Emerald Physics, Epos, Gallo, Gini Systems, Graham Slee, Jolida, Marantz, Mark & Daniel speakers, Modwright, Musical Fidelity, Music Hall, NAD, Original CD players, Peachtree Audio, Project, PS Audio, Quad, Raysonic, Rolls Bellari, Shanling, SONOS, WADIA, Wireworld, Wyred 4 Sound, Xindak.

Sales policies on our website at www.underwoodhifi.com

Link to more info