Ferguson Hill Studios opened shop in England as a maker of high-end speakers about two years ago, and has just started selling its products in Canada. The arrival of its main system, the FH007 speakers and FH008 sub-woofer, reveal a lot about the state of sound engineering.
Most improvements in sound have concentrated on such things as compression algorithms, iPods, cellphones with music storage and computer sound cards. Speakers, however, have taken a much different road. Aside from new ear buds, headphones and the tiny computer speakers, speakers have not really kept pace with the quality of sound we now reproduce. There has been some development of speakers for home-theatre buffs, but few new speakers can match the quality of sound we have become capable of putting on discs.
The Ferguson-Hill FH007 is a large system — it's a pair of loudspeakers with horns made from transparent cast acrylic, two spherical bass speakers made from the same clear acrylic material, and a 16-watt amplifier, a bookshelf-sized aluminum cube with a cyclopean design featuring a volume control in the middle under a bright white LED light.
Ferguson Hill speakers
Fergusonhill.ca
FH007 tweeter and base units ($649)
FH008 sub-woofer ($349)
Because the FH007 speakers are intended to deliver precise, distortion-free sound, they are at their best amplifying MP3 players, which are hilariously tiny in comparison. And because the speakers are expensive — $649 — it seems silly to invest in them if they are so much bigger and more expensive than MP3 players.
Ferguson-Hill speakers are not designed to attract the local authorities the next time you throw a dance party, but for listening to quality music, TV or playing console games. If you want to be buffeted by heavy metal thunder or test your sanity by pumping up the volume on The Great Kat's shred guitar solos, go elsewhere.
Still, the Ferguson Hill system can approximate thunder well enough with the matching sub-woofer, the FH008, sold separately at $349. And since the sound of the system really needs the sub-woofer to carry it properly, you're in for a $1,000 purchase for the whole system.
The clear acrylic horns and spheres are not merely nice design elements, their transparency makes them appear to take up a lot less visual room than they would had they been opaque; the horns are 27 cm along the length of their ovals, and the bass speakers are about the size of volleyballs. Let these float on their thin tubular aluminum stands and they pretty much disappear.
Except for the sub-woofer, that is. This unit is slightly smaller than a sophomore's beer fridge and requires some thought about placing it without smothering the sound or hiding its volume controls.
Together, the design and sound have a high-octane wow factor. The speakers differ from their bookshelf or free-standing cousins, whose tweeters are usually confined for high frequencies above 2 kHz; in comparison, the FH horns start at about 340 Hz before progressing to 20 kHz. The spherical bass speakers cover a range between 75Hz and 350Hz. This is a tremendous range, but still doesn't deliver that deep bass rumble we all seem to crave. That's where the sub-woofer comes in, with a range between 50 Hz and 150 Hz, adjustable by two knobs on the back.
The optimum position for this system is sitting on a couch with the speakers positioned just so to deliver precise sound — so they are ideally suited to watching TV in bed, or to enjoy multimedia experiences in the home theatre room.
Globetechnology.com setup ended coincidentally with the TV was tuned to PBS, featuring a concert by Ladysmith Black Mombazo on Austin City Limits. The octet's a cappella vocal range and tonal subtlety couldn't be better suited to testing these speakers. The result was so mesmerizing it was impossible to change the channel.
