A Paradigm of Stellar Sound

An international leading brand in state-of-the-art speaker design and technology, Paradigm has joined forces with Hwee Seng Electronics to launch its Persona™ line of luxury speakers in Singapore.

Persona as Premium Audio Speakers

Persona was developed over a five-year timeline by a team of Paradigm and Anthem engineers, leveraging on 35 years of acoustical development, vertical integrated manufacturing, and state-of-the-art design and engineering.

The stellar line-up is entirely designed, engineered, and hand crafted in Canada. From the wood manufacturing to the electronics, every detail is meticulously hand-worked to ensure an unprecedented level of realism and transparency. Couple this with the right sound system, cables and an aesthetically-pleasing filter, listeners will get to hear actual music and not sound distortions from the speaker.

The Role of Beryllium in Audio Technology

One of the critical factors that defines Persona’s sound quality is the extraordinary and rare element, Beryllium, in the speakers’ midrange and tweeter drivers. Specifically formulated to be exponentially stiffer and significantly lighter than other premium diaphragm materials, beryllium enables superior transient response and virtual transparency, with low audible coloration.

Paradigm’s Persona is the only loudspeaker in its class to achieve this level of performance using Beryllium material for both midrange and tweeter drivers. Every model in the Persona Series features Truextent^® Pure Beryllium driver systems, and each model achieves a truly unexpected level of high-resolution detail, depth and dynamics, thanks to the uniquely marvellous Beryllium. Check out our short clip below to listen to Persona’s pristine clear sound.

Tech Coffee House had the pleasure of speaking to Mr John Soden, Assistant Vice President (International Sales), Paradigm, to find out more on how the craftsmanship and engineering makes Persona a novelty.

We want our readers to understand and appreciate the craftsmanship that goes into the making of Persona. Can you tell us more about how this defines Persona as a luxury range of advanced speakers that will give listeners an enhanced listening experience?

Think about something that is mass production, where you’re producing hundreds of products that are firing off at an assembly line in an automated process, versus handcrafted products. For example, take a well-built car and compare it with a hand-built car like a Ferrari or a Bugatti.

It takes much care and control to select the proper materials to build the product in such a process where every step along the way, there is a high level of quality control involved. So when we build the cabinets, we have a dozen different sets of eyes that are looking at the cabinet from start to finish, all the way towards the final polish.

When you’re building your own handcrafted drivers, you’re winding your own voice coils, you’re attaching your own spider to those voice coils, and you’re then attaching your own leads to the voice coils, which will then be dropped into a basket, which will be hand-glued where it all comes together carefully as a single process. And we take that driver to be tested before it goes to the hand-built cabinet. In the case of the Persona, this is where I love to tell that when you build a speaker — especially an amplified speaker — you have three aspects: the speaker cabinet, which has the required volume; you have a given set of drivers that have a performance target; and then you have an amplifier.

What we are doing at Paradigm is that we design a speaker to have a given volume, and for this, we need a driver that has a particular specification to work within that volume. And for our powered speakers like the subwoofers and the 9H, we then need an amplifier that is designed to work with that driver within the given volume that has also been designed. When all of these come together, that’s where the handcrafted nature comes together perfectly, because it was designed from the ground and every aspect was built with the care and control that it takes to build high quality products. And of course that is also why these speakers cost more, considering the labour and the materials. Hence, the craftsmanship in Canada is very important to us.

Sound has evolved with the emergence of audio technologies, and yet there are some of us listeners who are comfortable with our existing sound systems or home theatre systems. What would you like them to know about Persona so that they would consider making the change to embrace the latest audio systems and enjoy their music environment better than before?

I think more and more of the old school audiophiles; whom I call as the “analogue heads” who do not want to have any digital interruptions in their analogue path. But the school of thought is changing now. There are so many factors that play into how the music environment plays with what you are hearing. So the ability to take a music signal and make it better, and to use the DSP technology to include room correction and better the environment so that the sound comes out better.

We take today’s environment of streaming and hi-res music, well it is not just about playing vinyl anymore but it’s about having music on many mediums. 15 years ago when music downloading first started out, it was all in low-resolution and there was no real standard in what you were hearing. Sometimes, the quality would all right, but some was very bad. Most of us knew this was not the way to listen to music.

Today, you can get the best of both worlds. One can have high-resolution music that can be streamed or stored on a hard drive, and you can still play your vinyl. For this reason, we have forwarded our Anthem technology into a high-end 2-channel integrated amplifier that utilises the best of old school, which is the connection for vinyl, with new school, which is the DSP technology to then use room correction to make the sound the best.

Persona comprises seven models:

The entire Persona Series is now available in Singapore, at all authorised dealers stores, and comes in four premium automotive finishes: Vanta High Gloss Black, Harmony High Gloss White, Aria Metallic Blue, and Sonic Metallic Silver.

Advanced Technology (All Models)

• Truextent^® Pure Beryllium Driver Material – The 1-inch tweeter domes and 7-inch¹ midrange driver cones of the Persona Loudspeaker line are made of 99.9 per cent pure Truextent Beryllium, an ultra-high performance material found in no other speaker at this price level. Truextent Beryllium cones are lightweight and stiff, with instant, detailed dynamic response, vanishingly low distortion and no coloration.
• Perforated Phase-Aligning (PPA™) Driver Lenses – A patent pending technology for Beryllium tweeter and mid-range drivers, this exclusive design actively blocks out-of-phase frequencies to smooth output without coloring the sound.
• Ultra-High-Excursion X-PAL™ Woofer Drivers – Mounted in a dual-directional array within isolated chambers, efficiently damped to eliminate internal standing waves. Differential Drive motors exhibit more efficient heat dissipation for extreme power handling. The unique low-profile two-part construction, with I-beam cross-sectional support arms that lock the flat outer cone to the voice-coil, and overmoulded ART Surrounds, bonded to the outer cone, produce truly huge bass with no threat of flexing or distortion.
• Paradigm’s patented² Active Ridge Technology (ART™) Surrounds – Crafted in-house using audiophile-grade injection-moulded thermoplastic elastomer, and then overmoulded directly onto driver cones, the exclusive ART Surround design achieves greater excursion than any standard surround. With ART Surrounds, Persona drivers generate a 3dB gain in distortion-free output (50 per cent greater output).
• Elegantly Curved Waveguide Cabinet – Designed, engineered and Crafted in Canada, this heavy duty, non-resonant cabinet is an intricate system of rigid enclosures, braced and damped to defeat vibrations and internal standing waves. Offered in a variety of beautiful finishes, its presence makes a forceful statement, but its performance remains utterly transparent.

¹ Persona C includes a 4-inch midrange driver, while the other models all include 7-inch midrange drivers.

² US patents: D654,479S and 8,340,340B2.

Hybrid Technology (exclusive to Persona 9H)

• Dual 700W Ultra-Class D Amplifiers – Two powerful onboard amplifiers deliver an astonishing 1400W RMS of clean, continuous power even at lifelike performance levels. Adaptive PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) optimises amplifier efficiency and smoothens supply variations, for instantaneous reactions and reference-quality performance with bulletproof reliability.
• ARC™ (Anthem Room Correction) – The powered woofer section of the Persona 9H Hybrid includes exclusive Anthem Room Correction (ARC) Technology. ARC measures low-frequency sound output in your room and compares it to optimal response curves that account for spatial anomalies. The advanced algorithms of ARC then effectively remove these anomalies, leaving only the ideal standard: realistically blended, natural-sounding bass performance, in any listening space.
• Inverse Differential Mid-Range Drive Unit – This exclusive design utilises a compact voice coil and powerful dual magnets to achieve exponential levels of output with vanishingly low distortion.
• Advanced Dual Voice Coil Systems – The Persona 9H Hybrid features dual voice coil systems with high-temp wire (tolerances to 600°F) wound on resilient Kapton formers, supported by high-excursion Nomex spiders. This 1.5-inch motor design packs the effects of a super-extended throw into a compact enclosure. In addition, the die-cast woofer baskets feature integrated heat sinks and AVS™ Airflow Ventilation System Cooling, for higher power handling with less power compression.

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