"But I'm not an audiophile".
We all have the same image in our heads when we hear audiophile: that stereotypical audiophile. Sitting in his lounge chair, smoking jacket, snifter of brandy in one hand, remote in the other listening with a critic’s ear to pristine recordings of sub-par music.
That image is unappealing to most of us because music appeals to us on an emotional level.
We all attach meaning to our music. Sometimes it's just the goosebumps: The awesome power of a Les Paul through a Marshall stack. Other times, it's a bookmark in our lives. Songs that represent the good times and the bad times, songs that make us feel happy, sad, anything really. Music makes us feel.
Great recordings require a great sound system, great music deserves a great sound system.
Most compact audio systems cannot reproduce the full frequency range of your music. They trick your ears using DSP. They filter out all music below 100hz (because their little boxes can't get down that low) - but all those notes below 100hz get "reproduced" through higher frequency harmonics so you get the impression that those notes are still there- an illusion. A mirage. The same DSP also delays the higher frequencies a bit to create a "bigger sound" - like a reverb. Essentially they are "interpreting" your music to fool your ears.
We do it completely different. We know that extreme dynamics with no distortion requires a tremendous amount of clean power. So we developed a small brick shaped amplifier that delivers 400 watts of amazingly clean power. Then we developed our satellite's broadband speaker drivers capable of reproducing all of the frequencies that we associate with spatiality (from 150hz to over 18khz) all from a single driver - eliminating the listening fatigue commonly associated with multiple drivers and crossover electronics. Each model Aux Out 400 then has a specific shape dedicated to its purpose (3 piece Classic for the desk, one piece Level for the livingroom and bedroom, and the all purpose Box great for moving from place to place, inside and out.) Within each specific shape we've developed a unique subwoofer section that will simply blow you away.
The first generation Aux Out 400 required 3 years of R&D and underwent 2 years of field testing proving best of breed from day one. The three new Aux Out 400 models are even better than the original model that so many music lovers praise - they bring you closer to your music.
Aux Green
Aux products, actually all Outline products for that matter, follow strict European Standards for Environmental Friendliness. We are usually at least 6 months ahead of deadlines for adopting these strict standards.
First and foremost the Aux Out 400 electronics consume practically no electricity at all when in standby (just enough to hear the IR remote wake up) and even more importantly, the Aux Out 400 electronics consume only what is needed to produce the sound pressures you want. This is where switching power supplies are great.
That’s right, you consume only the power the music requires, no more, no less. So we’re Green on the electricity thing.
Our glues are all safe, our paints are water based, we got rid of our black headed screws because they had some trace lead in them. So we’re chemically Green.
Our shipping boxes are made of biodegradable recycled cardboard. We only use cardboard for protection (really well designed cardboard!)– no foams or plastic padding. So we’re Green on the packaging.
No manual required. A very short manual is included, but not really needed because the product is so easy to use, but it is required by law. So we kept it short. Green on the paper thing.
And our European employees wouldn’t even come to work if it weren’t a nice place to work and they weren’t paid well. So Green on the humanity thing too.
We’re Green.
Who is Outline?
Outline (www.outline.it) is one of the world’s leading producers of quality concert sound systems.
Live Music.
World Class Concerts.
Tens of thousands of watts - hundreds of hanging speakers in various shapes and sizes. Serious Stuff. Engineering marvels. Very cool.
Music in it’s purest form.
That’s who Outline is. They’re at the heart of Music. Artists want them and producers love them.
All Aux Audio is designed, engineered, built and maintained by Outline - by the same crew that does all of the other award winning Outline products. These people know music inside out.
Aux Founder, David Kuller, after utilizing Outline as his audio partner in leading edge multimedia convergence installations, knew that these Outline folks were in another league - uniquely capable of true audio innovation.
Long before iPods, Kuller challenged Outline’s founder Guido Noselli to invent a sound system small enough for the desktop yet dynamic enough to make digital music come “alive”.
Outline set off together with Aux to build the definitive “cable radio” based on the internet with intercom like connectivity - “Filo diffusione in chiave internet”.
Guido was hooked, envisioning a future of music direct from artists to consumers, no FM compression, room for pure emotions. Live end to end.
Guido Noselli, founder Outline
He knew that when properly used, the mp3 standard could produce extremely dynamic tracks with no noise – much more dynamic than traditional stereos.
He set out to build something small yet with outrageous dynamics, much like the live dynamics in the other Outline products.
It took Guido and Outline 3 years before they would let the first Aux Out 400 out of their labs - “no systems leave our labs until they can produce goosebumps” – that was Guido’s technical explanation of why they sounded so good.
The Aux “Personal Concert” was born. Guido knew music lovers would savor the Aux Out 400’s musicality, while hi-fi folks would most likely snob them for having no tweeter. He was wrong about the hi-fi folks, they loved it too. The resulting sound stage of this approach is appraised by the hi-est of hi-fi-ers.
Aux brings Outline’s 35 years of live concert expertise right into your home, letting you experience all the dynamics of your great digital music collection (or analog or any other sound source for that matter – the better the source the better they sound).
Outline has been a leading innovator in live sound for decades. Their current line of amplifiers, subs, line array, point source, stage monitors and architectural, cinema and special purpose speaker systems, are all recognized worldwide as some of the finest sounding and easiest to install systems available at any price.
They are also almost always the smallest in each performance class.
That’s what they do - they make great music from small boxes.
World renowned concert producer Britannia Row recently switched over to almost entirely Outline equipment after years of thorough testing. Oasis has their own complete Outline stage setup. The Outline stand at the recent ET Live trade show in Florida won best of show awards for sound and innovation - the technical press is hailing their achievements.
The Aux Project inside Outline is managed by Guido's son Stefano Noselli who, after 15 years of managing production, clearly shows Guido’s deep understanding of music and what it takes to reproduce it.
Outline owners Michele, Giorgio and Stefano
The entire Outline team has continued Guido’s expertise as one of the industry’s leading innovators.
Each and every one of Outline’s staff has had their part in the evolution of the Aux line of sound solutions and each takes great pride with their individual and collective accomplishment.
They are all great at what they do, and they’ve been a team for decades. They’ve dedicated much of their lab space and resources to academic research, with a big project on acoustics for incubators currently underway, amongst others.
Outline Design, Prototyping, Engineering, Production, Sales, Support
While Outline and its’ team get the credit for the design and quality of the product, Aux gets the credit for convincing them to make the Aux Products in the first place!
Birth of an Aux
Aux Founder David Kuller is simply a volcano of ideas.
Outline’s Aux Boss Stefano Noselli periodically takes Kuller’s calls.
Stefano is clearly the holistic brain in the chain of Aux development – the filter through which Kuller’s most outlandish requests get tabled for future consideration.
The ideas that do pass, however, together with those Stefano convinces Kuller of, receive all of Stefano's wise and trusted attention as they get sent through prototyping and into production.
Stefano has a complete team of designers, engineers and tuners capable of inventing really advanced sound components on a daily basis. That’s what they do. They talk to each other about a new product idea for a while, see if anyone has any inspiration, see if they already did something similar. Then they set off to rethink it from scratch.
A new idea will send Stefano to brain storm with Francesco Simeoni and Ferdinando Vezzoli, both speaker designers, to try to invent a “break through” solution.
At some point they explain it all to Alberto Simeoni, Mr. Cad 3d, Mr. Project Coordinator, the guy who converts the idea into a series of drawings and maps for the suppliers. Alberto is the organized guy.
Alberto does a mock up in 3d, an extremely useful thing to do to see if all the pieces the others wanted will actually fit together. Alberto has designed lots and lots of speakers and related things in 3d. He lives in 3d space. He also loves music and is a real fan of the Aux idea.
Once Alberto and Stefano and David agree on a “look” from Alberto’s renderings, the 3d gets handed over to the carpentry lab where Mimmo Zambara puts in his 2 cents worth and whips off a computer cut and hand glued wooden box as solid as can be.
This prototype gets fitted by Giancarlo Puzzi, the man who designed the electronics, and with all of it’s electronics and speaker drivers and various acoustic foams in place the bench testing begins to tune the active crossover network and fine tune the max subwoofer power range in the Aux Out 400 2.1 amplifier’s setup.
Giancarlo, Francesco and Ferdinando are real fanatics. If they don’t like the way it sounds, they will try for days to get it to work. If it doesn't impress them though, they will send it back to Stefano saying why it was a bad idea to begin with, and what they think we should do to try to make it better. Much better.
Francesco and Ferdinando then transform themselves into the mythical NumberMen and get cooking on mathematical abstractions, which almost always lead to some fine tuning of the internal volumetrix, air pathways, speaker cone stiffness parameters and even external box shape. In other words they build a mathematical model and start tweaking it to improve the theoretical performance.
After days of calculations and “negotiations” with Kuller to modify his original idea, their ideas are revealed and incorporated in 3d. This team is the first to say, however, that great speaker design is more about listening and tweaking than about math - though both help!
They are usually right. The cycle between new 3d, wooden box, build and testing, can take as little as a week when you’re in a hurry, or forever when you’re not.
With every new box shape, Outline has several different speaker drivers prepared by specialized labs that build speaker drivers to Outline spec. Giancarlo, Ferdinando and Francesco will then test each variant until the right combination is finally locked in.
The Lab is then ready to let you hear them. The product moves to the Demo room.
Chances are you are going to love them from the very first moment. You want them now. The public wants them now. (Ok, we had to send back the Level that shot puffs of air clear across the room, but the others were all great - and anyway, by rejecting the puffing level, we did come up with an even better, way better design!)
We decide to produce the product.
Stefano figures out how to adopt the new lab and mathematically based improvements into a production version, then sets the whole supply chain in motion and voila! (which is code name for “if you don’t have the patience you shouldn’t be in this game”) – out comes a new Aux product.
Oh right, the painter comes back and tells you to use a different wood to obtain a much nicer glossy finish. Redesign everything. But it's worth it.
Stefano has a special cardboard shipping box designed to solve the Aux transportation needs. Outline works with a great environmentally conscious box maker who makes amazingly clever protective containers out of biodegradeable cardboard. Way cool. No foam. Nice Values.
The guy who runs shipping knows more about boxes and wrapping than any person alive. You want him involved, because when he is, the products always arrive unscathed.
Oh and the switching power supply, that is a completely different guy named Michele Brognoli, coordinated by Stefano but driven by gods not all of us understand. Or rather lets just say he is way out there. Good for us, it facilitates the kind of open minded simplicity and power that lies at the root of the Aux Out 400’s incredibly low consumption high power solution.
Compact and Powerful.
Not only do we have one of the most powerful digital amps available (4x100w <1%thd, 4x90w <0.1%thd) but we also have one of the most efficient switching power supplies ever made – it only consumes what it needs, and at most, even when totally cranking the music, it consumes less than a 100w light bulb.
Many thanks as well to Claudio Casassa, our friend and frequent helper, one who helps with the prototyping phase of Aux products as well as the development of very innovative Aux electronics, including the digital faders and the new Aux In 4x1 semi automatic line level source switch.