Hearing is subjective Sound is a science

What gets engineered

A speaker is not a speaker system

It takes a great driver. It also takes the enclosure, the low end, the crossover, the placement and the tuning. Get those wrong and a great driver sounds ordinary.

Crafted designs them together, for one space and one piece of content, then measures the result.

The parts of the answer

• Driver — selected or specified to the job
• Enclosure — volume, tuning and damping calculated for that driver
• Low end — subwoofer specification and placement
• Crossover — passive or DSP, set so the handover is inaudible
• Placement and timing — delay and level, so the image lands where the scene puts it
• Tuning — measured on site, then set against what was measured

Recognition

Ten industry awards

Projects Joseph White has led or engineered have taken eight THEA Awards and two IAAPA Brass Ring Awards.

Review the work

Clients

Balanced mode radiators

Why these behave differently

A conventional cone moves as a piston, and beams as frequency rises. A balanced mode radiator does not. Its diaphragm is tuned to bend in controlled modes, so dispersion stays wide and even to the top of the band and phase stays coherent off axis.

The practical result is placement freedom. A listener hears the same voicing whether the loudspeaker faces them or sits above and behind, which is what makes these work in a vehicle, a prop or a scene where the loudspeaker cannot face the listener.

Common to the range

• Wide, even dispersion — effective in locations a cone driver cannot serve
• Coherent phase response — multiple units sum predictably
• Consistent voicing across sizes, so a system can mix them
• Shallow depth and a flat front, which simplifies baffles and grilles
• Weatherized options for damp and outdoor-adjacent installation
• Stocked for spares — buy once, then buy ones and twos for a decade

Custom

Not in the catalogue?

Most of what Crafted has built was drawn for one project. The catalogue is the part that generalised.

Enclosures shaped to a cavity. Assemblies harnessed to a connector already on the vehicle. Drive units specified to a brief rather than picked from a page. One unit or a fleet.

Send the constraints

Built to order

• Enclosure design — drawn to the space that exists, not the space a catalogue assumes
• Drive unit specification — selected or specified against the acoustic and mechanical brief
• Drop-in assemblies — loudspeaker, bracket, harness and connector as one part number
• Variants of stock parts — weatherized, high-temperature, alternate impedance, alternate mounting
• Tooling and first article — moulds owned and retained, so replenishment stays quick
• OEM and private label — supplied as a component into someone else's product

Description

The FOUR.2 delivers full-range output from an enclosure 101 mm on a side. Wide, consistent dispersion allows placement to follow the scene rather than the coverage plot, and the moulded body is lighter and quieter to rig than the original aluminium extrusion.

The drive unit is the NHF3-dsw4, whose steel basket holds the motor located under impact and handling loads.

Features

• Moulded body — lighter than the original extrusion
• NHF3-dsw4 steel-basket drive unit
• Infinitely adjustable stainless U-bracket, 16 ga
• 1/4-20 bracket thread, which accepts standard tripod and clamp hardware
• Two M5 T-nuts retained, so existing FOUR mounting hardware still fits
• Cable gland fitted, tail exits the rear face

Specifications

Documentation

Description

The FOUR.2e places the amplifier and the network interface inside the enclosure. Power and audio arrive on a single Cat cable, so a channel requires nothing in the rack beyond a switch port.

Deployment costs less than powering a FOUR.2 from a networked amplifier channel, and the amplifier leaves the rack room entirely.

Features

• Power over Ethernet — one cable carries audio and power
• Dante and AES67 transport
• IP64 ingress protection
• Moulded body and NHF3-dsw4 drive unit, as the FOUR.2
• Deliberately simple — no remote volume, no EQ, no firmware campaign to run

Specifications

Documentation

Description

The NHF3-dsw4 is the drive unit developed for the FOUR.2 and sold as a component in its own right. Its steel basket replaces the moulded basket of earlier three inch units, which resolves a failure mode where sudden impact could separate the magnet assembly even when the impact fell elsewhere on the structure.

Model designation reads: Nearfield, High Fidelity, 3 inch, driver, steel basket, weatherized, 4 ohm.

Construction

• Steel basket — retains motor location under impact and handling loads
• Weatherized for damp and outdoor-adjacent installation
• High-temperature neodymium motor with full magnetic shielding
• Flat front, square frame — drops into a three inch square aperture

Specifications

Documentation

Loudspeakers

Drive units

Build

Custom loudspeakers

Most Crafted speakers were drawn for a single space, vehicle or prop. That is still the usual way it works.

Acoustic design, mechanical design and manufacture happen in one place, so a hard cavity gets a part rather than a compromise. Tooling is owned and retained, so replenishment stays quick years later.

Send the constraints

What that covers

• Acoustic design — driver selection, enclosure volume, tuning and voicing to match an existing range
• System design — subwoofer, crossover and amplification specified as one system rather than assembled from parts
• Alignment — delay, level and EQ set so the image lands where the scene puts it
• Mechanical design — enclosure, bracketry and mounting drawn to the space that exists
• Harnessing — terminated to the connector already on the vehicle or in the rack
• Design for manufacture — tooling, first article, inspection criteria
• Documentation — 3D models, mounting details, installation and test guidelines
• Quantities — one-off show device through to a production fleet

Where it gets hardest

Onboard is a separate discipline

Making a vehicle sound like a well-tuned room is the hardest version of this work. The space changes constantly, the power is noisy, and the result still has to image correctly from every seat.

The mechanical and electrical problems sit on top of the acoustic one. Enclosures take vibration and cleaning chemicals. Harnessing tolerates a slip ring. Synchronisation holds across a train of vehicles. Crafted has done this for fifteen years.

Typical scope

• Loudspeaker systems — placement, enclosure design, amplification, harnessing
• Synchronisation — distributed audio locked to show timecode
• Show control — architecture, programming, monitoring
• Networked media — Dante and AES67 design, switch and VLAN architecture
• Video & projection — signal distribution and playback
• Reliability — redundancy, criticality, lifecycle cost

Selected engineering

Representative scope

• Custom loudspeaker packages — drop-in assemblies and adapter hardware retrofitted across a global attraction fleet
• 500+ channel show environments — architecture and show control for exhibitions running more than a hundred networked devices
• 119-channel immersive venues — audio, lidar tracking, haptics and large-scale real-time rendering
• Interactive platforms — a unified system connecting interactive props, storytelling tools and guest experiences into one updatable narrative
• Custom electronic props — one-off show devices engineered to a scenic brief

Clients