An inside look at Wharfedale's retro Heritage Series speakers

When you listen to music on a stereo hi-fi system, you should thank the Wharfedale speaker company. It's no exaggeration to say that they changed the way we listen to music with innovations still in practice today.

The company pioneered the 2-way woofer/tweeter speaker, and likewise the art of frequency crossover design. They also introduced the use of ceramic magnets and the "roll surround" in driver construction — mainstays in modern speaker fabrication.

With founder Gilbert "G.A." Briggs at the helm, Wharfedale changed the way we listen to music.

The inventor, entreprenuer, and audio enthusiast who in 1932 founded the venerable speaker company was Gilbert Briggs. In the late '40s, he penned his comprehensive work, Loudspeakers: The Why and How of Good Reproduction. It sold through five printings and was later enlarged with additional material and the shortened title Sound Reproduction.

In the 1950s, Briggs and Wharfedale supplied the speakers for a touring series of public "live vs recorded" test concerts at venues including Carnegie Hall in New York and the Royal Festival Hall in London.

The sound from the speakers — powered by amplifiers provided by collegial industry-mates Leak — proved all but indistinguishable from the live performance to audience members.

Interview with Peter Comeau, head of acoustic design at Wharfedale

Peter Comeau, Head of Acoustic Design at IAG, the parent group that owns Wharfedale, has been experimenting with sound reproduction since he was young. As a teenager, he recorded live sound with a succession of ever more advanced reel-to-reel tape recorders and microphones. But he didn't feel like any of the speakers available to him delivered satisfying sound.

So he started building his own. After he'd built a few speakers, he chanced on Wharfedale's Unit 5 kit — fatefully, as it turns out.

The company has offered several different "kits" for the DIY audiophile over the years. Such kits included the drive units, crossovers, and other parts — customers would build their own cabinets from scratch based on a range of parameters included in the directions.

The Unit 5 kit Comeau bought at the end of the '60s used components from their popular Dovedale speakers. He installed the kit into the largest enclosure recommended and finally felt like he'd reached a high point for listening — at least in his own space.

The late '60s/early '70s was a golden age for Wharfedale, providing the blueprint for their present-day Heritage models.

But he continued to explore high-fidelity sound. He studied Electronic Engineering at Plymouth University in the UK, which led to work in hi-fi retail — first in London, then back in Plymouth. Along the way, he wrote reviews for popular UK magazines like Hi-Fi Answers, What Hi-Fi? and Hi-Fi News.

Then a chance meeting with a customer in the late '70s set the course for Comeau's future in speaker design. The customer — Stuart Mee, who would soon become his business partner — was looking for something better than his Celestion Ditton 15s. Those speakers, which included an 8" woofer, an 8" passive radiator, and a 1"soft-dome tweeter, were considered small at the time.

"There was nothing superior I could offer him in the sub-£200 price range," Comeau said. "But I thought, with the help of Gilbert Briggs’ book on Loudspeakers, that we could put something together with the performance we both desired."

In 1978, the pair founded Heybrook speaker company, launching it with their newly designed HB2 speaker, which succeeded in besting the Ditton 15 in their estimation. It was a smaller speaker with one 6-1/2" woofer, but it had something unusual at that time: a rear port. That helped it deliver substantial bass.

The HB2 proved to be highly successful, with sound some called "holographic" at a comfortably attainable price-point.

Comeau said the process — which involved extensive listening tests — helped him realize that his future lay in speaker design.

"We knew we had something special," he said. "I was discovering the art of crossover design and I guess I just fell in love with creating products that made listening to music at home so enjoyable."

After fifteen years with Heybrook, though, he found the pressure of being designer, production manager, and business owner too exhausting and sold his interest in the company. Meanwhile, he continued writing reviews for hi-fi and computer magazines. In 1999, he took a position at Mission, where he designed the multi-award winning 780, the flagship Pilastro, and other popular models.

At Wharfedale, Comeau has overseen development and refinement of notable and award-winning speakers including their Diamond, Elysian, and EVO lines. Their Heritage Series are modernized reprisals of mid-century modern-styled speakers from Wharfedale's golden age — the late '60s and early '70s.

Heritage speakers seem closest to Comeau's preferred listening profile, in part thanks to their physical design: Right-angle construction, with a wide, flat baffle — that's the frame the drivers are mounted in.

I recently spoke to Comeau about speaker design and his latest success, the new Dovedale.

Peter spoke to me across a 12-hour difference from Shenzhen, China, where he lives and works 6 months each year; the rest of the time he’s at Huntingdon in his native Britain.

How do you explain the popularity of retro-looking speakers?

I think people love the visuals of it, but most importantly, they love the bigger sound that these wider-baffle speakers give. And that’s something that when I was young, back in the ‘60s, all speakers had. Back then, a 12-inch bass unit was a small bass unit. An 8-inch unit was a midrange unit. As a designer, it’s nice to go back and reveal that performance again. That’s what Wharfedale’s Heritage Series is all about.

The beginning of all this was actually Wharfedale's 80th anniversary, where we wanted to bring something to market that was different to what we and everybody else was doing at that time: speakers that were getting slimmer and slimmer.

And it was suggested that maybe we should look back into Wharfedale's past and pick up on one of the most important sellers for Wharfdale, the Denton. It was a beautiful cabinet and grille style designed way back in the '60s. In terms of appearance, it fit in very well with the types of living furniture that people were using around that time.

Like all of Wharfedale's Heritage speakers, the Super Denton inherits sonic and cosmetic DNA from vintage ancestors — with technologically modern improvements.

Very interestingly, most of that furniture is also making a comeback. So we thought, "Let's make something that fits in with that period, but acoustically bring it completely up to date." So we launched the Denton, not really knowing whether it would have appeal or not. And we found that it did have a lot of appeal.

With the Linton, you are entering a speaker design which is not only a classic, but also has a very wide baffle. And this is important because we had been going for slimmer speakers [in our present-day lineup], which the audiophile thought gave better imaging — I think wrongly.

I don't think it does give better imaging, but that was the consensus of opinion on the forums and so on. And the problem it gives me as a speaker designer — and any speaker designers — is that we encounter something called the baffle step. That’s when the wavelength of sound becomes wider than the baffle.

In fact, the calculation is for half-wavelengths — but it doesn't matter. When the wavelength of sound becomes so wide that the sound is no longer directed completely at you, the listener, it starts to bleed around the side of the cabinet, and we lose power. The mid-range dips down because the baffle width is no longer supporting the power output coming to you.

And we lose — theoretically — 6dB. In fact, because of room gain and reflections from floors, walls, and ceilings, the loss is usually around 4dB. But that's still significant. If you consider that 3dB equals twice the power when you're looking at amplifiers, it's a significant loss of power.

A wide, flat baffle physically helps a speaker deliver more powerful sound.

More importantly, even though we compensate for it as best we can in the crossover, I maintain that you can still hear it — that discontinuity is right bang in the upper mid-range, around the 600-800 Hz area. It's very audibly obvious, even though we try and hide it in the crossover.

Now when you go to something like the Linton, the baffle step is down in the 300-400 Hz area. And by getting it down that low, we are then using room gain — reflections from the walls, ceilings, and floors — to [compensate for] it. And it starts occurring at about 400 Hz and [drops] rapidly below 300 Hz. So we don't have to compensate for that baffle step in the Linton. And I think that is something that people respond to.

We don’t always publish crossover points, but for the Dovedale, we do. What can we learn from those numbers?

This is my bugbear, if you like: no specification tells you — the consumer, the listener — what a speaker sounds like.

The reason I point this out is because we get a lot of customers who fuss over the specifications and they worry themselves to death over things like sensitivity and impedance and bass performance and frequency response and crossover points.

We have to list those specifications — I'd rather not, quite frankly — but if we don't list them we get asked for them all the time. But please don't look at the specifications and try and decide what the speaker sounds like on the basis of it.

The other aspect to this is we're now seeing a lot of reviews on YouTube and so on, which use the Klippel near field system of measurement. Right. Fair enough. But again, those measurements do not tell you what the speaker sounds like. They only tell you if you like the goodness of a speaker, whether it's been designed well or badly.

Obviously, people want some point of reference when they’re buying speakers. But really, those measurements are for the designer.

Comeau reminds us that specs cannot convey the full, brilliant sound the new Dovedale delivers.

How do those measurements inform your speaker design?

Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, before we had the sophisticated measuring systems we have now, it would take me a long time to come up with a design which even started to sound good.

Everybody was doing it by trial and error. Drive unit manufacturers were making cones of different shapes and sizes, gluing bits together until they got something that sounded good. Modern measurements get us more quickly to the first reasonable sounding prototype.

Beyond that, we use our ears.

What does “using your ears” entail?

When I’m designing, I use music of all types and genres, and I manipulate the components of the speaker to try and make the whole thing perform what I call coherently.

I have the crossover external, so I can get in with my soldering iron and quickly change from one component to another. When we get the transient response (the timing) right, we get a silence from the cabinets, which gives you the silence between the notes — then music starts to sound exciting.

If I can make a speaker that sounds coherent from top to bottom, from left to right, then you won't hear that speaker, you will just hear the music. So that when you play a piece of music which has a good beat, it makes you want to dance around the room. When you play a string quartet which draws you into the intricacies of, say, Beethoven or Bach, then you're completely aware of performers playing their instruments in the room and it really envelops you in the music emotionally and gets across what the composer was aiming for.

I don't know whether you noticed this when you were trying out the EVO 4.2s, but the sound seems to disassociate itself from the speakers [author's note: I did]. You can't hear a treble unit, a mid-range unit, and a bass unit working. So that seamless, coherent performance is what I'm aiming for.

Speaker stands are sometimes an afterthought for customers. Can you talk about these?

When the cones in the drive units move and the domes in the drive units move, you don’t want the speakers moving — that messes with your timing calculation. The stands not only stop the speakers rocking backwards and forward but are also torsionally rigid. With the Linton and the Dovedale, they’re part of the acoustic performance of the speaker — the speaker on the stand performs as one mechanical whole.

Stands position speakers at proper ear level, reduce unwanted vibration, and generally enhance performance.

What sets the Dovedale apart from other Wharfedale Heritage speakers?

Outwardly, Dovedale may look similar to Linton, but the motor systems for the Dovedale’s drive units are way more advanced. It has an unbelievably powerful motor system in the bass unit. The treble unit has a special rear chamber to absorb the output, so we can give that treble unit much more detail, clarity, and focus. The midrange unit has a very long chamber behind it, and we use special long-fiber wool insulation to absorb the radiation from that.

The new Dovedale drive units are significantly more sophisticated and powerful than the originals.

And then the cabinet is really a work of art. We use two layers of wood material specially sourced in Europe to give us the performance we need. Then we bond that together with a special damping glue, which is formulated in Scandinavia. That gives us a strong but also very low-resonance cabinet. And it’s made in the UK with the highest precision that we can muster — I think it outperforms anything that anybody does in the rest of the world.

What speakers do you listen to at home?

I take every speaker I'm working on home. I have to know whether my customer is going to be happy listening to the speakers in a typical domestic environment. So it's part of the fine-tuning process.

And my wife is a great listener — that's a big help, having another opinion. She can pick up on when things are right and things are wrong. And she can comment on the looks as well. And that's important.