Ambience Speaker Systems was founded by audio "lifer" Tony Moore as the creative consummation of a career steeped in both music and electronics.

Tony, like most of audio designers, was obsessed with electronics from childhood, building radios and speakers at the age of nine. Back in the days before FM, Tony's best music source was the family's old Kriesler Multisonic TV. "It had a superb sound and we used to sit and listen to the ABC test pattern music every Sunday, a great mixture of classical and popular and in good-sounding FM.
My tastes were quite broad, even then."


MATHS, PHYSICS & WOODWORK
Tony's family migrated from the UK in the 1960s when Tony was five years old. Technically oriented, he attended Melbourne's Aspendale Technical School, but returned to UK with his homesick parents in 1971, where he matriculated, majoring (prophetically?) in maths, physics, chemistry and woodwork. Disappointed with England, Tony's parents spent two years saving the fare and re-emigrated. Said Tony, "I was very glad to be back. I had a hell of a time, especially once I was old enough to get my motorcycle licence!"


TONY THE TECH
Back in Australia, Tony completed a Radio Trades course at RMIT. Finishing his course while working for Natsound in Melbourne city, he went on to work for Channel Nine as a technician in charge of professional broadcast equipment, and then for AWA Professional, working with Hitachi cameras and installations for big companies. "We did some pretty major installations, including the security cameras for CHOGM meetings," Tony recalls, "and we fitted out the test cell for TAA's new wide-bodied plane."

After years of working for others, Tony decided, in 1981, to launch out on his own as a TV, radio and amplifier service technician. He soon found himself worked off his feet. "That's what finally drove me to the bush," he told Australian Hi Fi. "I got peeved off that people just wouldn't allow me any free time. They'd found out where I lived, and I'd have to move TVs and videos out of my driveway just to get the car in. So, in 1989, we sold up and moved out here to Newmerella, with plans to do something different." 'Here', is five acres near the small seaside town of Newmerella in Gippsland, Victoria.


BOUND FOR THE BUSH
Tony didn't just move himself to Newmerella. The whole Moore family went along, including Tony's wife, Barbara, and their first son, Darren, then two years old. "There was not much in the way of employment up here," said Tony," and I'm not a person who can stand to be doing nothing. I certainly didn't want to go fishing every day of the week. So I decided to take what had always been my hobby-building loudspeakers- and turn it into a business. I'd been building speakers since I was nine or ten, from drivers I'd scavenged from old radios at the tip. By the '70s, I was making transmission line speakers, and selling them to friends and friends of friends. They were quarter-wave designs the size of a small fridge. They sounded great, and were very successful. But what I didn't like was their 1imitations in the midrange and the treble. When I started designing speakers, there were only normal cone drivers available. Then they developed soft-dome tweeters and dome midrange drivers, which were a great improvement. But even after making about 10 or 12 pairs over a dozen or so years, I still felt that they could be better."


DRAWN TO RIBBONS
To overcome the limitations of cone drivers, Tony decided to investigate ribbon technology "Ribbon speakers have been around since the 1920s, but it was the American Apogee Scintilla ribbon speaker that inspired me. I found, however, that the bass was some what limited in extension and power handling. And the bass speaker being set off to one side made the sound seem to come from two separate sources"

Tony was aware that ribbons, like electrostatics, don't go down very low "Some will only go down to 80 Hz, depending on the width of the panel," he says.
Like others before him, he decided to overcome the ribbon's frequency limitations by combining it with a conventional bass driver, initially using his favourite transmission line design for the bass section. Tony also felt that the Apogees presented problems of amplifier compatibility "Their impedance can go down to half an ohm, so you need virtually a $50,000 amplifier to run them. The 1920s idea was also very low impedance, with matching transformers that tended to interfere with the frequency response and add to manufacturing costs and problems. As an engineer, I was aware of the need to make a speaker that could be driven by normal domestic equipment. Our ribbon speakers will run on a $400 Pioneer amp; in fact, we're running a home theatre system with little $30 Silicon Chip amplifiers from Jaycar and they sound very nice. Not as nice as my big room with the Macintosh tube amplifiers and Electra power amplifiers, of course, but for home theatre…."

Not wanting to breach, or even be thought to have breached, anybody's copyright, Tony went right back to the 1920's textbook on ribbon technology which was not subject to copyright "The essence of the approach was a thin ribbon of foil in the middle of the magnets. The load was extremely low, but back in the '20s, using tube amplifiers, you could match the transformer to the load. Certainly no transistor amplifier could run it. Our solution was to use a ribbon made up of 15 segments hooked up in series. This gave us the phenomenal impedance of around four ohms, which 99 per cent of amplifiers will be able to handle"


NIGHTMARE MAGNETS
Tony's investigations also included magnetic formulations. "We decided, in the end, to use ferrite magnets. We did make up a prototype with neodymium magnets, which gave us another 3dB sensitivity. But neodymium makes the manufacturing process an absolute nightmare. They're ten times stronger than ferrite and they almost ripped our fingers off while we were handling them. The magnets are very small, and so is their charger, so we couldn't assemble all 15 in their uncharged state and then put them in the charger. We made prototypes, but it was too much of a problem for a 3dB sensitivity gain.
For the ribbons, Tony looked at a range of non-ferrous metals and settled on good quality aluminium foil supplied to a special thickness. Luckily, there were several suppliers who could supply to his fine-tolerance specifications. In exploring ribbon performance, Tony found that, though the ribbon section could go down to around 40Hz, a 200Hz crossover point to the dynamic woofer made for even better power handling.


THE FOUR-PIECE SUITE
The first Ambience prototype was a ribbon with transmission line box, in a four-piece configuration with the ribbon and woofer sections separate. "It was awesome," Tony recalls, "but it was pretty big and cumbersome, and not an easy product to market. When we took the prototype around various stores and colleagues within the industry, they agreed that they sounded superb, but feared that, as a large, wide, four-piece, they would be hard to sell. We then looked at putting them in the one package, and abandoning the large transmission line enclosure for a smaller bass-reflex environment." Here began Tony's search for bass drivers to match up to the ribbon section. "This was another nightmare," said Tony, "the hardest part of the exercise. We looked at good quality manufacturers such as Dynaudio, Peerless and Vifa, and found some off-the-shelf models that came pretty close, but we still weren't entirely happy."Eventually, I had a chat with Ralph Waters, then with Richter, who suggested that I give the Norwegian company SEAS a call. I did, and within a month they'd flown a guy out from Norway to see us. We've been with them ever since; they're a totally magic company.

They developed a driver for us around the specs that we wanted, and within about three months they'd air-freighted us this little woofer that was better than anything else we'd looked at. They weren't concerned with our scale of manufacture; even now, we only buy in small quantities - small by their standards anyway. They became quite enthusiastic about our project and now, after exhibiting in the Vegas and UK shows, I have now met all their technical people. It's a top company. Their very first sample was very close to what we were looking for, so we knew they understood what we were aiming for. And with each generation, they have gradually improved the drivers' mechanical power handling."The version driver we now use is virtually indestructible, and it's only a seven-incher. We took the sample of the latest modification they flew out to us, hung it from the ceiling on little chains and hooked it to the most powerful amplifier we had lying around at the time, a 300-watter from Redgum. We then chose the lowest frequency I could generate with my signal generator,12Hz -300watts of power at 12Hz, with no enclosure! Watching the little white dots we'd painted on the cone, we could see we were getting around one inch of travel. We came back half an hour later and they were still going. Those two original sample drivers are still in my own personal pair, which I also use for hi-fi shows. After eighteen months of shows, where they've been subjected with up to 600 watts of power, they've really taken a pounding, yet are still going strong.
Tony sees SEAS as a partner in his project. "These drivers are not catalogue speakers-nobody else can get them. A designer in the UK has asked to use them, but SEAS asked our permission first."


LOSING WEIGHT
It took almost five years to develop the first commercial Ambience models and to establish reliable suppliers for a whole range of high-quality components but eventually, the first two-piece Ambience ribbon/bass-reflex loudspeaker speaker was released in early 1994. "It was still very big," Tony admits. "They were 1.6 metres tall and 490 millimetres wide. And it was this sheer size that tended to lose us the female acceptance factor. So we trimmed them back to around 450mm wide, tidied up the look a bit and sold quite a few. We acted as our own distributor, but we didn't retail them. Our main Sydney dealer in the early days was Len Wallis, and in Melbourne, Carlton Audio Visual was our biggest player."

Next came the Ambience Slimline model. "It was the same width as the original but a bit tidier looking, " Tony explained."
When we got them down to a third of that width, in August 1996, we called them the Superslim series. We achieved this by putting the ribbon speaker in-line on top of the bass speaker instead of having them side by side.
Now we get full female acceptance; in fact they actually like the look of them. The old 1800's were taller but one-third the width, and we found that the height just didn't create an acceptance problem. And a sense of height does wonderful things to a sound stage.
The new model is even narrower again, but the 1800 is still one of our best sellers and is the one reaping high praise from overseas reviewers."


QUOTABLE QUOTES
Ambience speakers are receiving very favourable comments in the US audio press. "We've had a review in Secrets of Home Theatre," Tony told us," and we've had snippets in a magazine called Bound for Sound. I have just received an e-mail from Bound for Sound reviewer Rick Weiner, who has the product and is about to do a full review. He has e-mailed me his extremely flattering initial impressions. [The writer has sighted the e-mail and it includes the unambiguous statement, 'The sense of space, and the liveliness of the speaker is better than anything I've heard with the exception of the Quads.... I'm convinced you've assembled one of the best speakers available today.') "Audio magazine also wants to do a review," Tony enthused," and since these early notices, our US representative has been flooded with enquiries, mainly from dealers. There's a Catch 22 operating here; you can't get a review in Stereophile unless you have five or ten US dealers, but the dealers won't touch you unless you get the reviews! We have plenty of stock available for consumers in the US and now we've had comments from Absolute Sound."

As for the rest of the world, Tony is cautious about revealing his plan (if any) for world domination. "We have no UK or European agents yet, and think it will be quite hard to compete with the cheap freight and free movement between EC countries. Because of this, we think we'd do better to set up America first"
Although Tony has, staff building the speakers, he insists on inspecting and listening to every pair made, so he is personally responsible for all production "If I think it's wrong, it goes back. We test everything and there are so many checking stages to pass through as the speakers are being assembled that if anything has not been connected properly, it'll be found out. We try to run them in for as long as we can. We try for seven days, but this is not always possible
We just leave them playing music all day, every day. We tried using a sine wave, but I can't see the point. During the running-in period, the bass drivers cone suspension softens up to where the specification says they should be for the rest of their lives. This takes about seven days for the cones, but for the ribbons it's a longer process. Initally, the ribbons sound a little bit sharp…a little bit grainy…a little bit metallic, but after about 150 hours, they sweeten up and sound magic, so that 'metallic' is the last thing you think of when you hear them"


LOCAL HERO
"On the Australian side of things, we have a great team of dealers, with only Darwin yet to be covered. We have three dealers in Sydney; two in Melbourne, and we're looking at a third, but we don't want one on every street corner. And we don't want to end up with a mass-produced product either. We have already automated what we can; the timber frame is partly mass-produced, but the trims depend on which plantation timber is available-there are no significant acoustic differences between Grey Gum, Blue Gum, Mahogany or Rosewood: they're all solid, dense hardwoods.
With the panels that we manufacture, each pair is unique. We cut the four sides from one plank, but the next pair is from the next plank. We don't use veneer at all, just solid Australian hardwoods."

The Ambience ribbon is also manufactured on the premises; as is everything but the woofer. Tony even looked at Australian companies for his woofer. "They wouldn't (or couldn't) break their rules especially to suit us. With our SEAS drivers, the only failures we've had have been caused by amplifier failure, such as an amp burning out and sending 45-volts of d.c. down the line. The poor old voice coil doesn't like that. We're very flexible with our warranties. The normal standard in the industry is five years, but we're so confident in our product that we'll look at failures beyond that. We get so few failures that it's worth our while to replace a component, just so we can get the old one back to see what's happened." After initially telling us there'd been had no ribbon failures, Tony recalled two: one that was clawed by a cat and one that was subjected to the output of an unstable amp. Tony explained, "The guy had pulled an interconnect out of his 400watt amp while it was playing, and the amp went into radio frequency transmission, went up in smoke and curled the ribbons up. We replaced them anyway." Feedback from dealers and customers is deeply appreciated at Ambience, and regarded as a valuable resource for future R&D. "We regularly get lovely letters and e-mails from people who have bought our speakers and are totally and utterly rapt."

Tony is excited about the internet's capacity to spread the word. "On the internet, you just type in 'Tony Moore', ' Anthony Moore', or just 'ribbons', and you'll find us. If an inquiry comes in from somewhere we have a distributor, we'll refer the customer to them. If we haven't got representation there, we send the speakers direct, for full Australian retail price. But it's not a big part of our market. You can't compete with your dealers; it's cutting your own throat."
Ambience also has a policy that, if a customer has something against dealing with one of Tony's local retailers, Ambience will sell the speakers direct, at full retail, and divide the commission among all Ambience dealers in that city. "We want everything to be totally fair to everyone," explained Tony. "It can be a really bitchy industry. People are still slagging off each other's product. I think amplifiers would be the bitchiest area. I'm lucky, because I am out on my own with ribbon speakers. There are so few direct competitors."


THEATRICAL RIBBONS
Like many a hi-fi "lifer", Tony was initially less than excited about home theatre and its implications for Ambience. "I am still deeply into music and I didn't believe that this kind of ribbon speaker required a home theatre set-up, because they image so well in stereo. Being dipolar, too, they create a sort of surround sound of their own. But we got so many requests from customers and dealers for a matching centre speaker that we've now built one. Unfortunately, it's very big and very long. It's a panel lying down flat, shaped a bit like a three-sided boomerang. It's really meant for a projection system as there's no magnetic shielding. If we'd used magnetic shielding, we'd have spoiled the dipolar effect of the open back. But the total effect is magic, and it has changed my outlook, somewhat, towards home theatre."

Ambience now fields a range of seven speaker Ambience models: 1400, 1600 and 1700 versions of the Superslim Ultra; 1400, 1600 and 1800 versions of the Superslim; and the Ribbon Centre, which comes in both Dolby Digital and Pro-Logic/THX variants. There are also three option packages: a 3rd-order crossover, bi-wiring terminals, and solid timber edges.

"We've just finished developing the Ultra series," said Tony. "We call them Superslim Ultras, or Ultras, to avoid any confusion with cigarettes or feminine hygiene products. Of our six stereo models, the difference between them is that the bigger models work best in big open rooms, whereas the smaller models work well in big or small rooms. But you can't put the 1800s in a tiny room. The sound stage is so massive, it swamps you. But the 1400s were designed for people with tiny rooms - three metres by three metres - and you can push them up to the wall, though the depth dimension won't be so big."