CMC Covers Speaker Design Event at Dreamonoid’s

On July 14th, 2018 joey lopez, co-owner of Dreamonoid’s HiFi hosted a speaker design meet up. Now for those who don’t know, joey, a CMC co founder, has been into audio since he was a young kid and recently along with UIW Convergent Media Gradudate Christian Rios opened Dreamonoid’s HiFi a British centric HiFi store located in the Westside of San Antonio, TX.

Christian and Joey’s Families have a deep roots on the Westside of San Antonio with ancestors who once owned a bakery just blocks away from the shop and have had many generations of families who have lived in the neighborhoods.

Before Dreamonoid’s became a HiFi Shop, Christian briefly ran an Arcade called Dreamonoid’s and it was know for having a great atmosphere and vibe.

As Christian and joey transitioned Dreamonoid’s to becoming an HiFi store they focused on keeping that vibe as well as growing the types of gatherings.

For those new to HiFi, the simplest way to describe it is:

“A turntable, amp and speakers for for the home”

The HiFi systems joey and Christian focus on is called Rega, which is a turnkey from turntable to amp to speakers solution who design and manufacture their equipment in house in the London area in the UK.

As you may notice from the pictures, Dreamonoid’s hosted the 2018 ACTLab Conference’s show and tell night. It has also been known to host artist talks and CMC monthly meetings from time to time.

With our ACTLab motto of “Make Stuff, Take Risks and Be Awesome” joey got to thinking about Audio events that blurred the line between HiFi and audio design. After having attended the River City Audio Society’s meetings since 2010 he felt it might be cool to co-host a technical event where audio enthusiasts geeked out about the art of HiFi design.

Having made many friends and colleagues throughout the years both in person and online he decided to reach out and contact various designers and speaker enthusiasts about giving presentations.

He contacted Scott Hinson, an Austin Audio Society member he met online. Scott is an Audio Engineering Society member and speaker designer. Beyond his qualifications, he is also a great presenter and teacher, which the CMC can always appreciate. Scott agreed to give a presentation on basic two-way speaker design and a demo on crossover networks.

In addition to Scott’s Hinson’s presentation, Brian Salazar, founder of Holt Hill Audio in Andover, Massachusetts agreed to FaceTime on the day of the presentation to talk about a pair of speakers he had sent to Dreamonoid’s in the spring. Mutual friend and noted artist and graphic designer Ernesto Cuevas had put joey in contact with Brian after learning about their shared passion for HiFi.

Dreamonoid’s invited the public to attend the meeting and reached out directly to the River City Audio Society to cosponsor the event, which they were more then happy to do.

The event was amazing, knowing that interest in the principle of speaker design would attract a small group of enthusiasts, Dreamonoid’s setup the event to be very personable and hands on. With 8 attendee’s everyone got to introduce themselves and share their passion for audio. And like any good CMC event, Dreamonoid’s provide cookies and drinks. The first part of meeting was dedicated to speaking with Brian Salazar of Holt Hill Audio through FaceTime. It was so cool to have him give a tour of his space and talk about the unique projects he currently had in his shop. He then gave a nice in-depth talk about his Holt Hill Cionnsaile Monitors (Recently reviewed by Positive Feedback) which we had at the shop. After the interactive FaceTime attendees played some tunes on the speakers and got an idea of what the speakers sounded like.

Then Scott Hinson got setup and he gave an amazing presentation about two speaker design discussing frequency response, impedance charts, crossovers types, etc. In addition to this presentation, he demonstrated his findings by bringing a special set of two way monitors with no built in cross overs and hooked them up to a special box that contained 3 cross over variants that were switching on the fly through LED buttons he had installed. The attendees were amazed at how vastly different each crossover made the same speakers sound. They also loved how they could switch to various crossovers on the fly.

The event concluded with a consensus that a meet up where a full demonstration and tutorial on how to perform speaker measurements would be awesome. Scott offered to give the tutorial, joey is working on lining up a facility. So stay tuned for the next event!

Overall it was great to see the audio community come together and celebrate audio design and HiFi all in one event. And of course some great music was played!