Speak with any recording engineer, and they will express to you the frustration they have with modern music listening habits. Think about the money invested in top-notch gear to maximize the sonic quality of their productions, the effort put into having great sounds on a recording, the care poured into getting just the right mix, and all of the considerations taken when finally mastering their work. And for all of that, most people only listen to it through their phone speakers or with some cheap earbuds. It appears that a significant amount of aural care is often compromised for the sake of convenience over quality.
And yet, there is always a small group of audiophiles who will not accept this sonic mediocrity and continue to seek out a higher standard. For all the attention that goes into the recording end, we, the listeners, should do a better job of trying to hear their hard work. On the rare occasions I have had the opportunity to listen to music on a high- end system, my appreciation and immersion for that work is always far greater.
One individual fighting this battle is Adrian Butts, who has been fascinated by audio equipment since his earliest days. His love and interest in the mechanics of reproducing sound have led him to become President and Head of Design for Tetra Speakers, a company that considers its speakers to be another instrument made for perfecting the listening experience.
About Adrian Butts
Adrian Butts is the founder and chief designer of Tetra Speakers Incorporated in Ottawa, Canada. From an early age, Adrian has been passionate about sound and music. At the age of ten, he took apart his father’s vintage speakers, curious to understand how they worked. As a teen, he owned a mobile disco and DJ’d at the local roller rink. He became an internationally top-ranked salesman for the prestigious speaker brand Bang and Olufsen and owned an audio store before the age of 30. Still unsatisfied in his pursuit of sound excellence, Adrian experimented with his own speaker design. He spent three years testing and understanding speaker components and cabinet design before launching Tetra Speakers in 1998, the culmination of his sound journey. Tetra Speakers creates “listening instruments” that capture the hearts and ears of musicians and music aficionados from around the world.
Adrian attended Trent University for Cultural Studies and spent twenty years in the audio industry searching for sound perfection. He is the founding owner of Tetra Speakers, Inc. and Artet audio cables.
All About Jazz: Tell me about your journey into building speakers.
Adrian Butts: My journey in audio began at the age of two. I was fascinated by the magic of sound reproduction from an early age. My father had three different audio systems scattered around our house. In the basement, he had built a drawer that had a record player with a stacking 45 rpm spindle on it and a small ‘smelly’ tube amp. It was the early ’60s, so transistors and red LEDs were not yet on the market, but more on this later. Beside the electronics drawer, he had made a good-sized speaker that was mounted on the wall. Unlike his iconic, and still prized today, Fisher 500-C amplifier and his Dual turntable, which was secreted away in a living room cabinet high up on the wall, powering his floor-standing Wharfedales, was this small basement system that I could easily access and did so obsessively. Thus began my music-loving and ultimately speaker-designing journey.
As I grew, much to my dad’s chagrin, his big system became accessible to me, and that’s when my ‘hobby’ really took flight. First, I pestered my dad to trade in his ‘smelly’ Fisher 500-C for the new frontier technology of the cool-running transistor amplifier with the high-tech red LEDs. He went along with me and when we brought the Fisher to the audio store and put it on the sales counter and explained what we wanted to do, trade in the Fisher, the store owner quickly disappeared the Fisher into the back and brought forward a brand new in-the-box transistor amp with red LEDs which he put on the counter in its place. Straight trade. Mission accomplished… I thought. Back home now and disappointed with the sound of his Wharfedales, which was now sounding so strident and harsh with the new transistor amp, that at ten years old my brain said to me, ‘Well then…it’s got to be the speakers.’ My next move was to remove the woofers from his Wharfedale speakers, and I began the task of cutting the crossovers apart, trying to get back to where we once belonged with the tube amp. I had no idea what I was doing, uncertain if I was at risk of being shocked, but sadly, my well-intentioned tweaking fixed nothing. It was then that I began ordering speaker building kits with all my available funds at one point, even ordering a KEF kit from England, which included heavy 1″ MDF wood and all the woofers, midranges, and tweeters (drivers). Being out of funds with shipping and duties added to the cost, I passed on purchasing the KEF crossover and opted for an off-the- shelf crossover from a local electronics store. That was another fortunate mistake. My fascination with speaker crossovers and frequency-dividing networks, which I learned was essentially the central nervous system of a speaker, was awakened.
After three years at university, my first job was at an Audio Shop. The store sold all the latest and greatest, including McIntosh, Nakamichi, and Bang & Olufsen. My sales ability was tops, and in several short years, I graduated to owning the store at twenty-nine. One thing that really bothered me about my sales vocation was that, try as I might, I could never make a sale to a professional musician, and that fact made me question my very existence. The economic downturn in the early ’90s saw the store and me go bankrupt. It was a difficult time, but on the last day of store ownership, I remember saying out loud to myself, “It’s ok, Adrian…you’re not doing what you’re supposed to be doing.”
After my bankruptcy, I was approached by an industrial designer named Wayne Prince, who had a Tetrahedron design (an equilateral pyramid) for a speaker cabinet, and he asked me if I could make it work. My response was that my experience in the wonder years had shown me that I didn’t know anything about crossover design. Still, fortunately for Wayne, I had maintained a friendship with a customer from my audio shop who I knew worked at the National Research Council in Ottawa, and perhaps he could help. The friend agreed to give it a go, and he promptly chose the drivers for the cabinets and ordered several speaker crossover design software packages from California. Unfortunately, the software calculations were not capable of designing a crossover that I knew I couldn’t sell for even the parts cost, let alone adding a markup.
After three years of waiting for the man to come up with a suitable crossover, cabinetmaker Wayne Prince called me and asked me to visit his place in the country. Upon my arrival at Wayne’s, I noticed that he had stacked up his prototype pyramid cabinets in the fire pit. As I approached the pit, I watched Wayne douse them with gasoline and then toss a match on the small mountain of tetrahedron cabinets. I watched the fire lap upwards for a New York minute and then made the fateful decision to grab the top two cabinets from the fire and throw them in my car. I drove away, saying to Wayne I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I guess I’m a crossover designer now.
My foray into making a crossover began with me sitting in the library reading white papers on the dos and don’ts of designing them. The white papers provided me with some tips on what to consider, but they didn’t ignite a spark within me on how to tackle creating a crossover. In the end, it was a small book that I purchased from RadioShack that was the impetus for me moving forward with the design process. The book had one line that stated there are two ways to design a crossover. First, you can either purchase a ton of parts (coils, capacitors and resistors) and listen to them by trial and error but that this method of actually listening as you go takes both time and money and in the end it likely won’t be successful at coming up with a good crossover or second, I could order their software package and make short work of it. And that was it. I was twigged, so I chose the design option one, and I proceeded to order a boatload of parts. I spent the next three years on my hands and knees listening to different part combinations. I was happy that I could even make it work at all, but my long-suffering wife Jena stopped participating in any listening sessions because the sound hurt her ears. Not good. I figured I was 10,000 hours into part listening, and then something magical happened.
I had a dream that I can only describe as a divine intervention. You see, in this realistic dream, I found myself travelling through darkness on the crossover wires, and I could see all the energies flowing and the bottlenecks that I needed to address. I can only describe it as like the movie A Fantastic Voyage. There was even a soundtrack as I travelled. No kidding, it was Peter Gabriel’s song ‘And through the wires.’ I woke from that cosmic dream at 2 a.m. and went immediately downstairs and cobbled a mittful of parts into a crossover. I turned my stereo on and… BAM! There it was, and that ol’ Tetra magic was born.
AAJ: One of your selling points is that your speakers are distortion-free. Explain to a novice like me what that means and why it’s such a breakthrough.
AB: Distortion is defined as a change in the form of an electrical signal. In the case of, let’s say, a bass woofer, its large diameter has a limited higher frequency range, and if you listen to just a woofer without a filter that works to remove the highs from the signal path, then the high frequencies will still enter the woofer. They will end up distorting the woofer and make what I describe as a ‘fuzzy’ sound. The same thing happens when you apply full frequency to a tweeter, because tweeters can distort and even be destroyed by the bass frequencies without a filter that removes the bass from the full-range signal.
A crossover in a two-way speaker (woofer and tweeter) is made up of two filters. One filter limits the high frequencies from going to the woofer, and the other filter limits the low frequencies from going to the tweeter. Therefore, the frequency points I choose for a crossover must be selected to remove all distortion or ‘fuzz’ from each driver used in the speaker design. The trick is to utilize all the frequencies available from the amplifier with the perfect roll-off amount that doesn’t excessively lower the overall efficiency or volume of the speaker.
The fact that Tetra designs don’t have any resistors or ‘volume limiters’ further ensures even less distortion. A good crossover design will make the space between the notes quieter with less overhang or ‘fuzz’ and therefore more of the ambience of the space where the recording was made is apparent. As Tetra owner
Herbie Hancock
piano
b.1940
said about one of his recordings, he thought that a note he knew he had played in the studio was edited out. Still, when he played that same recording on his Tetras, the note was miraculously back in all its glory. Obviously, the entire note gone from a recording is a no-no. Similarly, NAC orchestra concertmaster Walter Prystawski, after listening to a recording he played on through Tetras, remarked, “You can hear everything…even the junk!!” So, yes, distortion kills the sound of recorded music, and it is not welcome in our Tetra designs.
AAJ: Is there still new ground to pioneer when it comes to designing speakers, or is it just a pursuit to improve the existing technology?
AB: That’s an interesting question. For me, I don’t believe that there is anything new under the sun, so I plan to spend my time going forward using the driver technologies that are readily available and applying my crossover design ‘gift’ to create new models that achieve the exact sound of music results. I say this, even though I was involved in a technology company in the early ’90s that developed digital wireless transmission and digital amplification, which we demonstrated at CES. The technology we developed ended up becoming a part of a well-known streaming hardware company. But that’s not for me. I have since designed and manufactured our proprietary Artet (Tetra backwards) distortion-free wires. In my mind, the result of using our proprietary wire with Tetra speakers could never be duplicated by transmitting digital audio signals through the air.
AAJ: You associate yourself, specifically, with a lot of jazz music and jazz musicians. Why is that?
AB: I consider myself lucky for that fact. Meeting the jazz musicians who have ultimately become Tetra listeners (Willard Jenkins calls us Tetrans) and being on the level due to that thing that Tetras do has enriched my life immensely. It was a professor of music at Carleton University who first made the connection between Tetra and jazz. His name is Wayne Eagles, who is a lovely man and Canada’s first to teach rock guitar and fusion ensembles at the university level. Part of Wayne’s tenure sees him bringing in jazz musicians to the university to hold masterclasses and perform shows. It so happened that
