Among the many American manufacturers of acoustic systems the company Phase Technology is one of the few that have a vertical production structure, that is those who conduct the whole cycle – from the development and testing of initial ideas to the release of the finished product – with their own resources.
The main credit goes to the founder of Phase Technology, the famous engineer and inventor Bill Hecht, who has been at the head of the company since its foundation until now. Hecht started out in the mid-1950s making one pair of speakers a week, using his own garage as a workshop, and in 1959 his company United Speaker Systems, Inc. was already making 10,000. of loudspeakers per year. Many big-name manufacturers used Hecht’s talent and USS’s capabilities to design and manufacture their speakers incidentally, USS is still building custom speakers for other brands today. During those years, Hecht was bursting with ideas, earning numerous patents for improved voice coils, cones, bass/midrange drivers without cone carriers, clever phase-linear filters. But Hecht’s crowning achievement was the invention of the soft dome tweeter – yes, it was Bill Hecht who created this tweeter design, which today can be found in practically every other speaker in the world!
It is clear that such a prolific developer as Hecht, sooner or later will begin to make speakers under “his name”, so in 1981 a division of the USS appeared – the brand Phase Technology. Today the company successfully manufactures over a dozen lines of speakers of different sizes and classes, ranging from Hi-End to democratic Hi-Fi, built-in and all-weather speakers, equipment for multi-room system, subwoofers and soundbars. Most of the company’s production is still done in the U.S., in Jacksonville, Fla. Among other things, Phase Technology is a part of MSE Audio Group, which also includes, for example, the manufacturer of the original “landscape” speakers made of stone – the company Rockustics.
In 2010, Phase Technology introduced an update to its popular “budget” Velocity series of loudspeakers. The speakers have received a new, attractive design and are sold at a more affordable price without any loss in sound quality. Velocity’s sleek design is accentuated by gently curving cabinet side panels, which also prevent harmful standing waves from building up inside cabinets. The redesigned speakers no longer need the complex manufacturing of common anti-resonance plastic overlays that framed the transducers in the previous generation of Velocity. HF section is voiced by a 25-millimeter silk dome loudspeaker sunk into a shallow horn. VDT Vapor Deposited Titanium Speakers are responsible for the MF/WRF range, made by vacuum deposition of the thinest titanium film on a polypropylene membrane, which gives the cone a bright metallic sheen. Exact Phasing of the drive units is achieved by using an Absolute Phase crossover. The current Velocity lineup includes the floorstanding V626, two V52 and V62 bookshelf speakers, the V5520 “center” and the V-Surround II rear speaker.
Floor-standing “towers” V626 equipped with two tweeters in addition to one-inch tweeter, woofer tweeter with a diameter of 165 mm, have a sensitivity of 92dB and are recommended to work with amplifiers of 15-150 W.
Both midrange speakers in the Velocity series have 2-way crossover configurations, with the ‘older’ V62 featuring a 165mm mid-bass driver and the ‘younger’ V52 featuring a 133mm mid/bass driver. Both shelf speakers have the same sensitivity of 90dB.
“The center of the V5520 is equipped with a one-inch tweeter and two 133-millimeter MF/LF drivers, with a sensitivity of 90dB. The V-Surround II has the same sensitivity, with two omnidirectional tweeters and a 133mm center midrange/midrange driver. A feature of V-Surround II is to switch their emission directionality between two positions – dipole/bipolar, which gives additional opportunities to adjust the sound of the rear channels in the home theater. Velocity’s high 8 ohm rated impedance will not pose much of a problem for most modern amplifiers with moderate power.
All of the updated Velocity lineup comes in a black ash-tone finish, except for the rear speakers, which come in black and white.
74,000 Dollars.
