T/9x Red Design in Mind | REL Acoustics | Sound Insights with John Hunter |
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- Опубліковано 12 вер 2024
- John Hunter explains the design process of the special edition T/9x Red.
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"Hey, John Hunter with REL here. This is the REL T/9x. We were going to call it the Rosso, but in deference to the English speaking world, it's the T/9x red. This paint is derived directly from the most famous Italian sports car manufacturer. This is what is called Rosso Corsa, which is racing red. It is the color that the F1, many years ago, probably back in the thirties, assigned to Italy as their official racing color. It is a paint that is exceedingly expensive. There were 58 samples over a year to get the red exactly right. If you get it wrong, and it gets into a lot of process, we use three different primers underneath it to get it to be actually opaque. People who are around paint all the time understand that paint is sort of semi translucent.
In other words, you can actually see down through the multiple layers of paint and eventually whatever the surface is that's underneath it has an effect on it. So, to work at it, we had to really get it just right because this paint is designed to be laid onto metal, right? It's designed to be sprayed onto aluminum. And MDF, medium density fiber board is completely different characteristics than an opaque metal. So it took three different primers to stop it down and get it to be a true color coat underneath it. Then we did eight coats, each one of which requires hand sanding in between. It's about 12 days to build a cabinet to get this exactly right. So that is just the paint surface. The rest of it is kind of a riot that makes sense if you're into cars, this is triple chrome plated.
Triple plating refers to doing first a bed coat of copper. So you drop it into a copper plating tank, pull it out, let it dry, smooth it all out, drop it in, give it a coat of nickel. That's what gives it the basic color. And the final, after letting it dry for 24 hours and washing it off and letting it dry again, you then drop it into chromium. And that's how you get that really high shine to it. So we do it the old fashioned way. This is the way Real Hot Rodders still do it. It's really expensive, it's really time consuming, but it looks so good. And we kept everything very subtle. You'll see there's a very light gray set of crowns on the bottom of this. On top, we've got a beautiful little carbon fiber bezel with the chrome badge inset into the carbon fiber, so it sinks down.
We've got some really beautiful layering and changes of level here. And then the REL logo inside into the top itself is debossed. It is stamped in, and then we backfill it with high gloss black enamel. A very old technique that goes all the way back to carriage making. It's just a thing we do. Cause we love the process. Do it right if you're going to do it right, we can silk screen anything, but that's a very cool, fun touch. And we're using two 6K carbon fiber for the center cap. The reason for that being, I wanted this to have greater stiffness. We're doing some experiments and things and stiffness and damping is so critical to the voice of a driver. What this results in sonically is there's an explosive character to this that the old aluminum stamped centers couldn't deliver.
And it's about one and a half dB more efficient. So literally, we're getting one and a half dB higher output because we reduce the moving mass of the cone. You want that thing to be a perfect piston, not flex, not twist, not buckle, needs to be a perfect piston for deep bass. With this, we actually drop 10 full grams of mass off of the aluminum cap. Little weird piece of REL trivia, the cone for an S/510, the 10 inch cone only weighs 10 grams to begin with. So in effect, on the T/9x Rosso, the red guy, we have reduced the moving weight by the weight of a full S/510 cone, which is pretty incredible. So it's much faster. It's got greater attack, greater slam. It's very percussive. It's explosive on special effects. It's a really nice upgrade.
And all of this with paint that costs, I want to say the last time I looked at the paint quote, a gallon of red costs is $585 a gallon. These days it's probably $730, something like that because the cost of everything has gone up. With the paint, the carbon fiber, all that, this is going to wind up adding maybe 10% to the cost of the unit. So we've done everything we can to deliver that T/9x value and all these special touches. It's really good. It's really special. I really recommend you take a look. Go out of your way to find these. It's amazing."
Beautifully done.
Thanks John.
Question.
How do I convince my wife that we should have a red subwoofer?
Mine just showed up today. It is gorgeous and so far compliments my music only system wondrously. Now, back to tuning it in. What a fun hobby.
Ten you make an alluminium subwoofer and justify the price ;)