AZ Two Deluxe

It is very efficient and offers the amplifier an easy ‘load’, making it highly suitable for our range of superior quality, low powered valve amplifiers.

As a company, our main aim is to design and manufacture equipment that provides the maximum sonic performance for the price, and to achieve this we use many unconventional solutions. In our quest to deliver an affordable, compact, high sensitivity, wide frequency response loudspeaker to suit ‘real world’ rooms, we re-investigated and re-evaluated the main principles of rear loaded horn cabinet design. This research, coupled with our expertise in driver, cabinet and crossover development, has resulted in a loudspeaker that not only redefines the quality / price relationship, but more importantly offers an emotionally engaging performance that is quite in a class of its own.

If you examine the vast majority of conventional loudspeaker designs, you will discover that they have very poor acoustic impedance characteristics, resulting in low efficiency. In contrast, a correctly designed horn loaded system allows the acoustic impedance to be optimised for the driver across several octaves, resulting in higher efficiency and better dynamic power transfer from the amplifier.

However, horn designs are not without their challenges, and one of the greatest problems is physical size. For a simple horn the lower cut-off frequency is directly proportional to the effective diameter of the mouth; a cut-off frequency at - 3dB of 50Hz, would require a horn with a mouth area of 3.8 square meters.

Clearly unsuitable for most domestic purposes!

So, we had to find a method of reducing the size requirement whilst maintaining the low frequency response. By re-configuring the size and shape of the rear horn flare, the (increasingly capacitive) throat impedance is off-set to a point below the cut-off frequency. This, combined with positioning the loudspeaker in close proximity to a corner further reduces the radiation impedance, and effectively increases the bass horn moth area by a factor of around x16 (x8 when placed against a rear wall), which provides a substantial boost at low frequencies.

As with all Audio Note (UK) loudspeakers, no corners have been cut in terms of component and driver quality despite the modest price of the AZ-Two Deluxe. Both the bass driver and tweeter are high quality units (the bass unit being the same as that found in the more affordable AN-J and AN-E; the tweeter is the same as is used in our AN-K models), and are combined with a heavy-duty crossover featuring air core inductors, Audio Note (UK) silver plated speaker terminals and Audio Note (UK) AN-D internal wiring.

Current models

• Paper
• Hemp

Engineered with audiophile-grade components — premium drivers, hand-matched crossovers, and a hardwood enclosure tuned for natural decay. Every cabinet is internally braced and damped to suppress resonance below the threshold of audibility.

• Custom 6.5" mid-bass driver with paper-pulp cone for transient accuracy.
• Soft-dome silk tweeter with neodymium motor for airy, fatigue-free highs.
• Point-to-point hand-wired crossover using silver-foil capacitors.
• Bi-wirable terminals plated in pure copper.

Place each speaker on its dedicated stand, toed-in toward the listening position. The hardwood enclosure resonates in concert with the drivers — a deliberate, musical interaction rather than a flaw to be eliminated.

Connect to a quality amplifier using bi-wired speaker cable for the most transparent presentation. Allow 50–100 hours of break-in for the drivers and crossover capacitors to settle into their final voicing.