The Dayton Wright Hommage Speaker Project

In 1998, I could not have known that listening to a 15-watt OTL amplifier prototype would deeply move me and lead me to found Tenor Audio. The result of a completely novel approach developed by Michel Van den Broeck over the years, the amplifiers and preamplifiers remain unmatched and available worldwide to this day.

Since my retirement from Tenor Audio in 2009, I have embarked on the search for the ideal speaker. 7000 hours have been devoted to rigorously comparing the best representatives of all technologies: multi-way, line source, electrostatics, ribbons, and conventional wideband or excited. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each is essential, and I concluded that the ideal would be to combine the qualities of a large electrostatic panel with those of a wideband without a filter. The fundamental obstacle remained that a large straight multicell panel is never temporally aligned. The top cells always have a gap of several centimeters compared to the center one in both axes.

I could not have known five years ago that listening to a restored Dayton Wright XG-10 would shake me as much as it did 50 years ago during my first listening.

But I wanted better I had to attempt the marriage. The great specialist in the restoration and re-engineering of Acoustat electrostatic panels, Jocelyn Jeanson, converted to the superior Dayton Wrights. We patiently developed a structure of 9 cells perfectly aligned in time, and above all, we succeeded in recreating the real point-source effect without tonal imbalance.

What remained was to refine this revolutionary recipe Michel Vanden Broeck designed an innovative bias supply that transforms the listening experience compared to the original.

The elimination of all sources of parasitic vibrations was completed by adding Modulum bases calibrated for this speaker by Jean-François Michaud.

Finally, the industrial designer Patrice Guillemin took care of refining the shapes and finishing. A team effort of professionals totaling 3000 exciting hours.

Because we use the rare cells and the brilliantly developed original transformers by Michael Wright and because I discovered the extent of his multiple talents, only one name imposed itself for this limited series of 10 pairs: Hommage.