Bitches Brew Open Baffle Speakers by Live Edge Acoustics

The Bitches Brew Open Baffle Live Edge Speakers are Dipoles, crafted from 1.5” slabs of book matched Spalted Sycamore.

John Hilgers in Wisconsin wrote: "I play clarinet. My wife upstairs thought I was practicing when I was playing a clarinet recording. She’s never made that mistake before."

Jay Haider in Illinois posted on AudioScienceReview: "I recently had a chance to hear these... thought they were excellent, with spot-on tonality, very precise imaging in multiple seats, and a better sense of slam than I’d previously heard from an open baffle. They looked great for such large speakers, too."

Jakob Pettersson in Sweden said, “The best speaker I have ever heard. I had a friend over and he said the same thing. I was at a hifishop and listened to the Avantgarde trio system that retails at approx $300k usd here in Sweden but both him and I think this sounds better.”

These large dipole speakers named after the classic Miles Davis 1970 album have the stunning imaging and 120dB dynamic range. Linear phase further contributes to incredible precise and stable stereo imaging. It also delivers incredible slam with percussion because the wavefront is incredibly steep with no phase inversions or delays. This is a huge key to soundstage and it resolves microdetails in recordings that were previously obscure. Constant Directivity means imaging is consistent everywhere in the room. Sound stage is vast with depth and bloom.

These excel with percussion, strings, plucked instruments, horns, and aggressive bass lines, including electronic music. There is no music style that these do not excel at, from Bruckner and Vivaldi to Yello, Hiromi and Porcupine Tree. The resolution is incredible. You hear everything and the stereo image is huge. It fills the room and has a palpable sense of space.

These perform feats no commercial speaker I’ve seen of can do. These put some of the most respected designs in the world to shame.

When I have friends over they are in awe at the transparency, realism, impact and imaging. They have the accuracy of a KEF or B&W, the dynamic range of a Klipsch, the impulse and phase response of a Duntech, the transparency of planars and imaging better than all of the above. Most people have never heard sound like this.

Open Baffle because nearly all “box” designs sound… boxy. Most people have never heard a speaker that doesn’t sound boxy! But once you have, it’s like experiencing “real” Chinese food or Italian food for the first time. After a trip to Shanghai or Milan, you’ll never again be satisfied with Panda Express or Olive Garden. Same thing here: they have a huge sound stage, an open, effortless, spacious image and a palpability that must be experienced.

Ordinary speakers are doomed. When you visit any audio show, 90% of the speakers share the same weary collection of baked-in assumptions:

    -They all have boxes
    -They all sound boxy
    -Wife Appreciation Factor is low or sub-zero
    -Simulated woodgrain finish
    -On-axis frequency response is obsessed about
    -Off-axis response is ignored
    -Radiation pattern is ignored
    -Bass is omnidirectional
    -Drivers interfere with each other
    -They have 1” dome tweeters
    -Crossovers butcher impulse and phase response
    -There is one “center of the will of God” sweet spot
    -The room is ignored (and room acoustics are voodoo)
    -Inefficient: 1 watt / 1 meter is often mid- to low-80s
    -Hard for amps to drive (wild impedance variations)
    -Drivers are small and sound anemic with real (non-audiophile) music

This consigns you to one predictably boring demo room after another. The audio industry is stuck in a deep rut. The Bitches Brews sidestep every pitfall listed above. Giant notes roll out of the speakers. You enjoy a huge sound stage. You are immersed in 3D ambience, clarity and resolution. Dry recordings become spacious. Drums and toms hit with visceral, fist-on-sternum impact.

I don’t believe vocals are the toughest thing to get right in a speaker. Percussion is the hardest! Especially with other instruments. Most speakers fail to excel at percussion because they butcher time response; you can easily measure it.

Have you ever noticed the sidebar that includes Step Response in every Stereophile Magazine review… and witnessed the butchering with your own eyes? Woofers and tweeters fire with opposite polarities on different dates.

Mediocre speaker designers claim you can’t hear the difference. Yes you can. Once you hear the “boxiness” of box speakers, you can’t un-hear it.

With the Bitches Brew design, the most delicate of sounds, the wires and shell of a snare drum, are reproduced the startling precision. When the drummer slams the floor tom (like in “Hatesong” by Porcupine Tree), you feel it in your bones.

You probably haven’t heard drums until you’ve heard them this way. Bill Duddleston of Legacy Audio says, “If you can see the cone moving, it’s distorting.” With 3 15” cone surfaces, you have to get well past 90dB before the cones move visibly. Distortion is incredibly low at any reasonable volume level so compression is negligible.

Open Baffle speakers have almost no radiation to the side and that gives you many interesting possibilities in room placement. Berwyn Recording Studio in Chicago uses one of my Open Baffle designs as the main monitors in their control room. The recording engineer said, “There’s no ‘corner mud’ with these speakers.”

Most people have never heard a speaker that has “dynamic range to burn” - i.e. can easily exceed 120dB even if you never turn the volume above 90. Most people don’t realize that even the most expensive and reputable speakers put out bucket loads of distortion at many frequencies and really don’t have much dynamic range.

High efficiency: They’ll play as loud as most people want on a flea-watt amps. My amps at 60 watts per channel (4 channels total) don't begin to reach clipping with any of my albums at any sane listening level.

This design simultaneously prioritizes additional things:

Constant Directivity across the entire audio spectrum. The radiation pattern on both sides is like a floodlight whose pattern is consistent from 20-20K. This is not available anywhere else at any price. This provides amazing precise imaging everywhere in the room - even when you’re literally standing right next to one speaker! You can walk all around the room and the stereo image is stable. You’re not confined to one sweet spot, and in fact one of my favorite things is to invite a half dozen friends over, sit them all around the room and listen to an album together. There is not a bad seat in the house.

Most people have never heard a speaker that achieves this. Constant directivity says that the speaker gives flat frequency response on axis but also as you go off axis, the level drops off evenly (and not only at the top of the woofer’s and tweeter’s range) so the response is still smooth everywhere else. When combined with proper speaker positioning it sounds great everywhere. At 45 degrees off axis, the level drops 6dB and at 75 degrees it drops 12dB. 90 degree side radiation is down 15dB or more.

Linear phase further contributes to incredible precise and stable stereo imaging. It also delivers incredible attack and slam with percussion because the wavefront is incredibly steep with no phase inversions or delays. This is a huge key to soundstage and it enables you to resolve very fine details in recordings that were previously obscure.

Specifications -6dB at 19Hz - 19KHz; sensitivity 100 dB, power handling 500 watts per channel; +/-2dB at listener position from 200Hz to 15KHz; +/-45 degree constant directivity; phase +/- 30 degrees from 80Hz to 15KHz.

Sensitivity is 100dB 2.83V/1 meter. Max power is 500 watts. Impedance 4 ohms.

These are bi-amped, 4 channels total. You can use any pair of amps you like. The central controller is a the MiniDSP Flex Eight which has eight analog outputs and inputs for USB, Fiber, SPDIF and Bluetooth. It has both IIR and FIR filters which I implemented specifically for the Bitches Brew design.

You can use these with single ended “flea watt” tube amps (and get all the SPL you want with very little power) or run them with the latest high power Class D offerings from Hypex or Purifi… or classic A / AB amps by Threshold, Krell or Mark Levinson. They sound spectacular with all of the above. They are very easy to drive, as they have impedance compensation on all drivers. The load is even and delightfully non-reactive.

I used to hate horns. The first time I heard popular horns, I thought they had thick, congested bass, ragged midrange, and spitty highs. Yes, I did hear the dynamic range and power, but I couldn’t get past the offensive harsh sound of the horns.

But remember.... that was the 1980's. Many PA systems still sound that way. But horns in the hands of a really good practitioner have a smooth sheen and an effortless immediacy that is arresting. They’re not harsh, and in fact they have much lower distortion than domes and cones. But they are difficult to tame and most designs have compromises.

Once you tame them, which is best done with Digital Signal Processing, you get extraordinary dynamic range, high efficiency, and constant directivity. This achieves feats of stereo imaging that conventional speakers in principle cannot match.

I’ve been designing speakers for almost 40 years, including a three-year stint at Jensen’s automotive division, where I designed OEM drivers professionally for Honda, Mazda, Chrysler, and Acura. I’ve built almost every type of speaker and enclosure type that exists except electrostatics. I'm one of the most talented speaker designers in the business; I work in a range of fields from science and engineering to medicine and business strategy (look me up on Wikipedia) and every design I produce is a unique, one-of-a-kind work of art. This system embodies the very best of what I know. An “ultimate design,” which also aims for simplicity and elegance.

These speakers are made from book matched slabs of spalted birch. Spalting is when fungi has grown in the wood, and in right proportions dramatically emphasizes the grain. I hand selected the wood at Schroeder Hardwoods in Harvey, Illinois.

It is not possible to buy anything comparable to these at any hifi store. Open Baffle / Dipole designs are cherished for their room-filling sound and lack of boxiness, but are extremely rare. Live edge real wood is equally rare. And Constant Directivity from both front and back sides, which makes the spatial depth so incredible, unheard of. No manufacturer worldwide combines all three in one speaker.

They have a HUGE "Wife Appreciation Factor" - spouses love the natural hardwood.

I hosted the Chicago Audio Society on a Sunday afternoon. A half dozen members stayed for hours, asking me to play one track after another - every kind of music and audiophile selection imaginable. Listeners were consistently impressed not only with rock and jazz but string quartets and large orchestral works. One listener said they combine the open, room-filling sound of Magnepans with the slam and dynamics of a JBL. Soundstage is huge.

These exact speakers were featured in AudioXpress Magazine October 2023. (See photos.)

Impulse and step responses shown in the photos are excellent. There is no overhang. Paying attention to the “time domain” does pay off in speaker design.

These have the most seamless driver-to-driver integration you have ever heard. Painstakingly integrated from top to bottom… not even full range drivers are this cohesive. Crossover is at 100Hz (first order filter) and 1200Hz (second order filter) with digital phase correction. All four radiating surfaces - the two subwoofers, the 15” mid and the concentric compression tweeter - have the same surface area, 13.5” diameter. It is impossible to detect the transition from one driver to another and the “signature sound” of the pressed cones is the same. Arrival of signals from the drivers is tuned to 0.01 millisecond.

With dome tweeters it is not possible to control directivity without a waveguide. Plus, domes produce high distortion even at modest sound pressure levels. Horns in the hands of a skilled practitioner sound marvelous and have far lower distortion than domes. When you tame horns, best done with DSP, you enjoy exemplary dynamic range, high efficiency, and constant directivity.

When you play the song “My Bass” by Brian Bromberg, a gorgeous multitrack bass solo, the lowest pulses have a depth and transparency that ported and sealed speakers do not replicate. The mid bass and midrange exude a huge room-filling sense of air; high-end transients deliver speed and alacrity. There is never any sense that the speakers are straining to keep up.

“Flight of the Cosmic Hippo” by Bela Fleck shows off the sweet spot of these speakers, plucked strings: Fleck’s banjo sounds like it’s under a microscope, every incisive detail magnified to sound 10’ wide. The low-bass solo in the middle of the song shakes the room and your chest without any compromise in musicality.

My brother-in-law Alan Pieratt, who’s been an avid audiophile for 40 years, stopped by and listened. He owns 18” Velodyne subwoofers. He said to me, “Most subs have great specs but somehow sound like well-controlled thumps. Your open baffle woofers have such an open and natural sounding timbre, it’s the best bass I’ve heard in the business.”

Snare drums possess both explosive power and exquisite delicacy. On good jazz recordings you should be able to discern microdetail of quiet “ghost notes” on the snare drum including the shell and hardware; on loud whacks the speaker should explode with full energy without flinching. A slam on a floor tom should punch you in the gut without the slightest apology.

On Gavin Harrison’s “Hatesong,” you hear every articulation of the snare including the wires and the drumheads. The brass shines through with extreme resolution and microdynamics. The Bitches Brews also excel with choral music. Massed voices in “Silent Night” (Stille Nacht) by Oscars Motettkor shimmer with palpable, organic, human believability and goosebumps.

5 year warranty, parts and labor. Dimensions 52" H x 26.0" D x 21.0" W. 110.0 lbs each.

Will ship anywhere in the United States. Purchase includes on site installation and EQ in your room done by me personally, also anywhere in the United States. For an installation date, message me to coordinate schedules.

You are invited to come to Chicago and hear these speakers for yourself. Contact me for an appointment.

Perry Marshall
Founder, Live Edge Acoustics