The Dock E30 is a truly remarkable audio platform. The original concept was to produce a loudspeaker that has a ‘full’ response but is as small and compact as possible. The starting point was the driver and passive radiator design, as our target acoustic was not a ‘hyped’ sound, rather one that was naturally full. We settled on 3 custom neodymium speakers with passive radiators at the proper ratio of size, and around 1.2 litres of air volume. This gave us a superbly flat and sufficient response in our acoustic models.
The electronic platform I designed based around 3 separate audio channels that use the ‘Halo’ Airsound variant. This delivers low frequencies to all three channels in mono, and implements a ‘spatial crossover’ to allow stereo reproduction at higher frequencies. Sophisticated DSP keeps everything well in check, even when abused!
The speaker platform and electronics were not the end of the story. The 3D design had to take shape to work acoustically. The internal design was carefully shaped to eliminate resonances, and we actually achieved a remarkably flat responding internal acoustic enclosure.
The DOCK E30 was 3 years of focused effort from a small and dedicated team. Special thanks to Barnaby for the 3D work, Matthew Vowels for driver and passive design, Ted Fletcher for work on the analogue electronic optimisation, and the team in China for prototyping and manufacturing support.