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About the "Heavenly Soundworks Demo Tracks" Playlist:

A selection of great, well-recorded music compiled by the Heavenly Soundworks team.

Whether at home or in the studio, our loudspeakers are designed to elevate the music experience. Bringing the sound back to life as if the artists were sitting in your listening room.

These tracks have been selected because of three things:

1. The quality of their recordings

2. The diverse range of genres, styles, and sounds that truly test a system's capabilities

3. Because we like them... :)

An excellent system will play all of these tracks with clarity, definition, and realism, immersing you in the music as if that artists were in the room.

Happy listening!

This is it, folks! The big winner! What can I say? When my wife and I heard the first few bars of Brubeck’s Take Five, we just looked at each other. Not a word needed to be spoken between us to convey what was going through our minds. Even without a subwoofer, the bass in this room was the deepest I’d ever heard in any room, ever, which doesn’t mean the system’s balance was leaning to dark. Quite the opposite. It was… illuminated. The Heavenly Soundworks system also struck me as providing the most faithful and realistic reproductions of the music on my three very familiar test CDs of any system I’d heard at the show.

    Even as I’m writing this, I’m still trying to come to terms with how huge yet detailed the sound was. This dichotomy between bigness and refinement was the musical equivalent of watching a sumo wrestler knitting the daintiest lace-embroidered tablecloth.

    Here’s something else that’s interesting: The Heavenly Soundworks system is almost just speakers — there was no outboard DAC, preamp, power amp, nothing but a $500 Bluesound Node 2i music streamer feeding the FIVE17 active, DAC-integrated speakers. A digital file containing music ripped from my CDs was used for playback.

These extraordinary speakers were created by a father-and-son team, Kevin and Jonathan Couch. As I was speaking to them, the word synergy came to my mind. They seemed so attuned to each other and single-minded in their vision that I imagined there’d be no need between them for endless meetings, constant back-and-forth emails, or trying to get their point across to each other in a screaming match. It reminded me of the synergistic-like sound I heard in their room.

    After 17 pairs of speakers and 20 amplifiers, I am still looking for that sort of magic chemistry in my system. But in that room devoid of electronics and cables, I couldn’t help think that people like the Couches, and the designers of some other active speakers and integrated systems, know better than I do when it comes to component-matching.

    Oh, and the Heavenly Soundworks room was also my wife’s first pick of the show.

- Jonson Lee (PMA Magazine)

Did either of you play music, either in school/church, or in bands?

Jonathan: I played guitar starting when I was around 8 years old and continued through high school.

Kevin: I was the first kid to bring a boom box to high school. I was introducing my high school to new music. Over the summer I would visit my cousin in Chicago, they would play rock music over the radio before it made it to the St. Louis market. I would bring it home and introduce it to everyone. That was the extent of my music playing.

What was it that moved you from a music listening enthusiast to becoming an "audiophile"?

Jonathan: We just love music. I don't think we've made that transition. It's always been more about the music listening experience than about the gear. When we started building speakers the end goal was always that experience. We've gotten more into "critical" listening on our journey as loudspeaker manufacturers. Our goal has always been to create the best loudspeaker we possibly can. Because of the active design of our speakers, and the fine tuning that we are capable of with DSP, that has made us more critical as well.

Kevin, where you started with speaker design?

Kevin: The interest for me started back at 13, wanting to achieve the performance that matched my cousins component system. At that time and into my early 20s, I couldn't afford the high end equipment, which got me into DIY. I bought every loudspeaker design and building book I could find. This was before speaker design computer programs were around, so you had to do all the math on paper. I spent years designing speakers on paper, but I enjoyed it. Fast forward, about 10 years ago we both started getting more serious about building our own speakers. One of the things that we started finding out was that speaker driver specs were not always accurate.

About 3 years ago, we decided to start Heavenly Soundworks and develop the best loudspeaker we could. Not too long into that journey we decided to investigate an active speaker system. We invested in some equipment to better measure the speaker drivers so we had a better understanding of what we were building around. It all starts at the drivers.

What was it that moved you toward an active design?

Jonathan: That was my fault. Basically, the level of perfection that we were after was not possible using traditional passive crossovers technology. I brought up the idea that we should investigate going with an active system and, from there, the research and learning started over.

Kevin: ...or where the madness began. There was a significant learning curve. We tested quite a number of amplifiers and DSP systems. We landed on a great system by Hypex, out of the Netherlands. Once we got past the learning curve and were comfortable in the active environment, we're not going back! The design freedom afforded by an active system allows us to fix so many tiny little irregularities in drivers. No driver is perfect but, through the DSP, we can make it very close.

What does the DSP system do, exactly?

Kevin: We take great drivers and make them even better. The DSP system basically makes little tweaks, every little anomaly in a driver's output can be fixed. We should note that we start with the best drivers that we can source. That way, there are less things that we need to fix through the DSP. In a perfect world, a driver would output its frequency range in a consistent manner, but no driver does that perfectly. With DSP we can get them very close.

Qausi-Anechoic Frequency Response Chart

Ground Plane Measurement capturing bass extension 

Thanks to the kind folks at “SoundStage!”, here is the frequency response chart of that same FIVE17 Loudspeaker captured from the anechoic chamber in Canada’s National Research Council. 

The difference between these charts is quite substantial.

Armed with this new information we’ve gone back to the lab and fine-tuned our measurement system.

Using the NRC’s Anechoic measurements as a baseline, we are now able to perfect our in-house equipment/setup to duplicate those results as close as we can. While we don’t have a chamber, we do have other means of measuring and achieving similar results.

Here is the NRC’s measurement when scaled to properly overlay with our in-house measurements.

As you can see in the below chart we can achieve a very close correlation with our In-House measurements to the NRC’s.