Art Audiophile specifications

Category : Manufacturer

"Our components do not contain any earth-shattering innovations; the precision in important details brings the result that is audible to you," is how Art & Audio introduced itself at the radio exhibition in 1993.

Art & Audio – Gale rie und HiFi-Geräte was a small company in Berlin-Wedding, in which the owner tried to present high-quality Hi-Fi devices, mainly from Germany and England, in a cultured atmosphere in an environment of art and occasional live music.

Under the brand name Art Audiophile , a number of handmade speaker boxes, amplifiers and turntables of our own production were also released.

In addition to the sale in their own store, the devices were presented at the Berlin Radio Exhibition in 1989, 1991 and 1993, as well as, for their introduction in 1987, at the Swiss High End in Egerkingen.

Art & Audio was founded in October 1986 and closed in early 1998 after several burglaries.

Meanwhile, the then owner has again developed a new box and also a new amplifier, in which he has realized his own ideas. However, it will not be available on the market; instead, circuits with explanations to interested music lovers and self-farmers were published in December 2018 in the diy hifi forum (amplifier [1] and MC preamplifier [2]) and in the forum of the Analogue Audio Association (amplifier [3] and MC preamplifier [4]) (as of autumn 2019).

The developer can be reached by e-mail: artaudiophil -at- googlemail -dot- com.

Art & Audio liked to use type designations with a Francophile ambience for its loudspeaker boxes. They are characterized by a narrow design, which is due to the development goal of minimizing baffle reflections. Art Audiophile is one of the first manufacturers in Germany to use this design. The narrow design is achieved by using "HiFi bass midrange drivers" Monacor SPP110/8 with a small outer diameter, instead of large bass drivers. In order to still gain enough diaphragm area for sufficient air movement to generate bass, the larger models are equipped with several low midrange drivers per box.

The loudspeakers used have been refined in the course of the further development of the speakers, for example by replacing the original membrane supply strands with fine strands. From 1991, the Monacor chassis were equipped with a self-developed membrane as part of empirical tests, which was glued into the chassis with a backing polyester wadding and acts as a mechanical low-pass filter; these chassis can be recognized by the non-curved dust protection hood. For the high-frequency range, partially modified speakers from the manufacturers Dynaudio (D28AF and Esotec) and Matsushita (Tech nics TH400) were used. Connected upstream of the chassis are almost exclusively 6dB switches and often amplitude-defined series bandstocks for phase and impedance correction.

Until 1991, preamplifiers were offered exclusively in transistor technology, then as hybrids with tubes for signal amplification. Downstream Class A impedance converters provide low-impedance outputs of 50 ohms. All inputs and outputs are in phase. The power amplifiers for loudspeakers with good and medium efficiency are built in Class A technology and basically with channel-separated power supplies

The hallmark of the turntables, also called "frontend" in Art & Audio, is the belt drive, the triple decoupling of the motor from the housing and an integrated device for centering the plate. In addition, from 1991 the turntables were mainly sold together with a 3-leg table with spike decoupling.

Brochures of the years 1989, 91 and 93 on Hifi Archive [5]