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German Physiks Borderland MK IV Loudspeaker

German Physiks Borderland MK IV Loudspeaker

Ah, Germany. Home of Bavarian pretzels, Pilsner beer, finely crafted watches, and some of the best stereo equipment to grace an eardrum. Based in Maintal, in the State of Hesse, German Physiks approaches speaker design by rejecting the accepted solutions. GP’s chief designer Holger Mueller’s goal was to recreate live music by utilizing a driver resembling a point source, with the goal of conveying as much of the signal as possible while avoiding multi-driver incoherence, phase and time misalignment, and crossover issues. In other words, to create a wonderfully complex solution by Keeping It Simple, Stupid! 

A little history is in order. In 1978, purely as an academic exercise as he was not involved in the audio industry at the time, a German engineer named Peter Dicks decided to investigate the Walsh speaker (then being manufactured by Ohm Acoustics). He produced a computer model of the Walsh driver, which enabled him to see how it could be improved. After spending several years refining his model, he produced a series of working prototypes, which  he showed to a number of European loudspeaker makers. None of them displayed any interest. 

In the early 1990s, Peter showed the design to Holger Mueller, who was running a company in Frankfurt, Germany, called Mainhattan Acustik, making loudspeaker systems and also drivers for OEM use. Customers for his drivers included one very well-known U.S. high-end loudspeaker manufacturer and also one of the big German car manufacturers. Mueller had been a fan of the Ohm F and its Walsh driver and saw potential in the design that Peter presented. He then spent two years working together with Peter to produce a commercial product, and this became the Dicks Dipole Driver. The DDD used a cone made from 0.001″ (0.025mm) thick titanium foil. Mueller started a new company to produce loudspeakers using this driver, and in 1992 the firm launched its first product, the German Physiks Borderland Mk I. 

The DDD, used in all German Physiks designs, has been considerably refined over the years, and now uses a cone made from carbon fiber. Sonically the titanium DDD driver was extremely good, but the cone was also extremely fragile and difficult to manufacture. The current carbon-fiber DDD will resist a large amount of physical abuse and offers a wider frequency response than the titanium version.

Interestingly, Maintal is only a 13-minute drive from Hanau, Germany, the birthplace of Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, creators of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales. I’m not sure what they have in the water in this region, but it has clearly resulted in some serious out-of-the-box thinking! 

The DDD resembles a very long pistonic driver mounted vertically. Although it operates pistonically at low frequencies, the majority of its nearly seven-octave range is generated through bending-wave and modal radiation. This is facilitated by the driver’s very low moving mass (less than three grams) and the extreme flexibility of its carbon-fiber cone. The outside of the driver cone is exposed and radiates in 360 degrees, with the magnet (generating around 1.2 Tesla of magnetic induction) housed at the apex, and the cone’s throat playing into a fixed-volume sealed enclosure. This design results in an incredibly wide frequency response of 190Hz to 24kHz from a stunningly small area of radiation, which stays phase-linear throughout its entire operating range. Its engineering complexity belies its simple appearance; the single DDD essentially functions acoustically as a four-driver system. 

As Holger explained it: “The lower-frequency end of the DDD’s operating range can be described with Small/Thiele resonant parameters. In the next frequency band up to the Coincidence Frequency, it works like a pistonic driver. An overlapping band follows, where pistonic movement is progressively replaced by bending waves, until all the radiation is generated purely by bending movement in the cone. (Due to the cone’s special shape, the Coincidence Frequency is spread over an extended frequency band, rather than occurring at a single frequency.) The last mode of operation commences above the bending-wave band at the Dipole Frequency, when the first standing wave occurs and modal breakup begins.” To simplify, the DDD driver looks like a pistonic driver, but waves travel down the cone from magnet to suspension in a way that allows the transducer to reproduce an extremely wide frequency range, which it radiates omnidirectionally due to its shape and orientation.  

The inherent design of the system in conjunction with the lower termination of the cone suppresses ringing and distortion. As a result, a vertically mounted DDD driver is an omnidirectional bending-wave system with near zero ringing, incredibly wide bandwidth, and incredibly compact size. Although not encouraged, kids can push on the DDD carbon-fiber driver with no worry of driver damage. (I cringed when Larry Borden, of Distinctive Stereo in NJ, pushed on the driver with his index finger to prove this to me.) 

The speaker lines offered by German Physiks all utilize one or more DDD drivers. The differences are based on woofer size and woofer enclosures. The systems can be scaled to energize larger room volumes by utilizing one, two, or four DDD drivers per speaker. The Unicorn Mk II is an interesting and unique offering, utilizing a single DDD driver essentially horn-loaded to create a single-driver speaker with frequency extension from 40Hz to 24kHz (original version reviewed in TAS way back in 1999). The other German Physiks speakers are essentially two-way or 2.5-way systems depending on the models. 

I don’t think I’ve ever waited this long in a review to introduce the guest of honor, but the particular speaker I reviewed was the Borderland MK IV, a carbon-fiber DDD combined with a down-firing 12″ woofer in a sealed, 16″ wide, 48″ tall, well-braced and -damped, octagonal enclosure. Offering omni-                         directional low-frequency extension to 28Hz (which felt lower in my room) and up to 24kHz extension in the treble, the Borderland is 86.1dB sensitive, a nominal 4-ohm load, weighs 119 pounds, and is quite diminutive for the scale and weight of sonics delivered. GP recommends the Borderland be fed by a minimum of 160Wpc into 4 ohms and is designed for a room between 160 and 950 square feet (mine is about 280 sf). The pair I received came finished in high-polish-polyester black, but is also available in white, carbon-fiber, wood, and a wide variety of custom paint finishes, if requested. The WBT Nextgen binding posts are predictably excellent, and the speaker comes with a small bridge adjustment in the back that allows for –2dB, flat, +2dB, and +4dB adjustments, centered at 8kHz. As mentioned, Larry Borden of Distinctive Stereo, NJ, German Physiks’ authorized dealer, came over to set up the speakers, and we settled on “flat” as the most natural presentation in my room. 

I took the opportunity to ask Larry why he chose to represent the German Physiks line. He responded, “When audiophiles evaluate a loudspeaker, we often go through the audiophile checklist of characteristics. For me, a far more important criterion is to close my eyes and try to imagine that the musicians are in front of me. It is in this regard that German Physiks distinguish themselves.” Clearly not scripted, Larry’s sentiment very closely mimics Holger’s intention to “create an enveloping soundfield that is closer to what you will experience in the concert hall by more closely resembling the wave dispersion of real instruments.”

I must note that setup was a breeze. The Borderland sounded great no matter where we put them. Final placement was determined by tonal and textural changes, and the avoidance of bass nodes. This is a natural advantage for a speaker if you are planning on using them in a more open, shared space and have little control over positioning. For an audiophile, placement to optimize performance is vital. But as a husband, I realize that if the speaker is in a family environment, decor dictates location, and the Borderland is just fine with that. To add to its ease of setup, as is customary for an omnidirectional, the DDD benefits from a remarkably wide and forgiving sweet spot. Meaning that more than one listener can enjoy a natural wide, deep soundfield. Even the poor person banished to the kitchen will get more high fidelity than he or she would with a standard direct-radiating speaker system. Score two for Holger’s KISS. Which brings us to discussing how this speaker speaks. 

I’ll start my listening section by describing the speaker’s sonics succinctly. In this case, the Borderland is wonderfully coherent and natural, with deep bass that provides a solid foundation upon which the DDD driver blooms like Edelweiss in the Bavarian Alps. The presentation of an omnidirectional speaker is quite different than that of a direct-radiating design, and takes some getting used to. The spatial cues and staging are initially aurally incongruous with what our brain expects from a more conventional design. It’s never “wrong”—please don’t misinterpret. In some ways, it’s so much more “right” that it’s perceived as wrong at first. Although I have never driven an electric car, I would imagine listening to the Borderland is similar to driving a Tesla after driving a gasoline-combustion engine your whole life. The perception is that the sound is coming less from a source and more from a region. The imaging is accurate but not pinpoint (which is typical for an omni); the hall presence is palpable, but the expansion of the perceived stage is not as expansive as some direct-radiating speakers I have heard. In my room, the speakers never completely disappeared; yet, I have heard the Borderlands vanish in other, larger-room demonstrations. The soundstage projected easily two to three feet above the DDD, and extended in front and behind the speaker sufficiently to conjure up proper dimensionality. As expected, the sweetspot was large, and there was really nowhere in the room that was a bad place to sit. Its natural presentation yielded a sense of scale that highlighted realism and nuance as opposed to gusto and bravado. To be more specific and more vague simultaneously, the Borderland’s two-way design resulted in a seamless unity of presentation, where everything that was supposed to be there was there without added glamour or bling—a natural portrayal of the recording. Stereo separation just felt more correct when conveyed in 360 degrees.

Aaron Neville’s “Everybody Plays The Fool” (from Warm Your Heart), offers a wonderful opportunity to identify both stage width (between the speakers), height, and depth. His miraculous falsetto starts to the right, hitting high notes no human should be able to hit, and then centers as the lyrics begin. The height rises slightly and the vocals recede to the rear of the stage just a touch. The Borderland presented this effect wonderfully, with proper scale and finesse. 

The adjustable treble system permitted fine-tuning the Borderland to my room. High frequencies were so well integrated as to make them almost a contiguous whole with the midrange and midbass. The higher frequencies were fast, wide, and spacious, though sometimes sounding a bit rolled off at the very top, lacking some of the sizzle that gives a presentation life. Absolutely never bright or shouty, the Borderland highlighted resolution without becoming overly detailed. With that said, I found myself spending more time critically listening, and less time lost in the moment. I think this was a result of the subtle shift to a slightly firmer tonal character as opposed to a softer and more organic one. I noted during listening, “texture is layered, not organic. More like geologic layers and less like cake.” Certainly in no way hard, but also never soft and forgiving., mids were meticulous and resolute, with air, weight, presence, and impact, while unforgiving and intolerant of poor recordings. The DDD delivers great transient response, which is much appreciated when combined with a near-perfect timbral presentation overall (which is quite a statement), but some might feel a lack of midrange warmth and emotion. On the infrequent moment when there was an identifiable frequency transition from DDD to woofer, I was aware of it happening simply because I was listening for it. I actually think that’s a compliment to the uniformity of the reproduction of the entire frequency spectrum. Everything comes from one point so continuously, that when it actually doesn’t, I was more aware of it. The sealed 12″ woofer never struggled to properly and sufficiently energize the entire room. As is customary with the design, the output is fast, clean, and tight—surprisingly fast for a 12″ driver. I used the word “surprisingly” several times in my notes… Surprisingly fast, surprising heft, surprisingly palpable. Not because I had low expectations, but because the low-frequency reproduction consistently exceeded my expectations. The Borderland’s low-frequency output never called attention to itself, other than to not infrequently put a smile on my face. 

Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade drew me in almost instantly with its soulful and mellifluous melody. The tonal structure was spot on and textural cues allowed each instrument to breathe and flow with their own natural voices. True to the recording, the Borderland painted an image of grainless resolution, complexity, and depth, while lacking that subtle sense of sentimentality that this piece sometimes evokes. It’s not that the Borderland is passionless by any stretch of the imagination; it is designed to accurately reproduce without being analytical. But it also makes great efforts to never be overly warm or sweet. At times, this may be perceived as less involving to some, while simply remaining truer to the source for others.

Returning now to its overall presentation, I want to highlight a few points. The size of the stage is limited by the width between the speakers and the size of the room. The Borderland can scale up and down incredibly well. Placement is forgiving, but efforts at fine-tuning yielded expected rewards. Larry really knows the speakers, and I believe the effort invested in placement was a good part of what I appreciated in the Borderland’s timbral and harmonic capabilities. With omnis I have learned that placement affects the speaker’s tone and timbre much more dramatically than it does its spatial presentation. Also, the Borderland requires a good amount of power to shine; this is not a speaker to match with a 60Wpc push-pull tube integrated. It takes significant power to get the DDD and 12″ woofer to deliver the goods, and top-tier equipment will allow the GP speaker to truly shine. Holger’s KISS is more of an accurate transducer of music, and less of a conventional loudspeaker. It grows on you over time, as you become accustomed to its different and wonderfully natural presentation. 

Built to very high standards and offering an impressive array of sonic attributes that will satisfy both the ardent audiophile and the music lover, the Borderland’s unique styling and omnidirectional sound place this German delight on the must-audition pedestal. Remember during your audition that, like a fine Riesling or Schnapps, with time your appreciation of the Borderland’s unique attributes will grow. 

Specs & Pricing

Operating principle: Two-way loudspeaker with 360° surround radiation using the German Physiks DDD driver
Drivers: 1x carbon-fiber DDD driver; 1x 12″ woofer
Frequency response: 28Hz–24kHz
Impedance: 4 ohms
Sensitivity: 86.1dB/1W/1m
Power handling: Nominal 300W, short-term 600W
Amplification required: Minimum 160Wpc, 4 ohms
Crossover frequency: 190Hz
Crossover slopes: DDD section:12dB/octave electronic, and 18dB/octave acoustic; woofer section: 12dB/octave electronic, and 18dB/octave acoustic
High-frequency adjustment: -2dB; flat; +2dB; and +4dB starting at 8kHz
Recommended room size: 15–90 square meters (160–950 square feet)
Dimensions: 15.9″ x 48.4″ x 15.9″
Weight: 119 lbs.
Price: Satin color or veneer, $34,000/pr.; high-gloss color or veneer, $39,000/pr.; carbon, $45,000/pr. 

Red Leaf Audio (North American Distributor)
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
sales@redleafaudio.com
(905) 746-9333
german-physiks.com

Tags: FLOOR-STANDING LOUDSPEAKER

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