Today starts the initial qualification for the A7-700 contest in which we are giving away ONE A7-700.  This Qualification period runs from July 1st-July 14th 11:59 pm Central time.

As of current there are 5 places to participate for qualification. You may enter each contest to qualify if you’d like or just select one you’d prefer to contribute to :

eD’s Company Forum

Entrants are asked to design their listening room. No need to have a specific set up already in the room. Just use floorplanner and throw up your room to qualify. That’s it

Audioholic’s Forum

Audioholics entrants are asked to describe their acoustic room treatment.If you do not have acoustic room treatment your asked to chime in with your interest level and what you’d like to see and why.

Blu-Ray.com Forum

Entrants on the blu-ray forum contest are asked simply to contribute to a poll regarding your favorite subwoofer (bass) scene on a blu-ray disc. Also serves as a great reference for those of you looking to find some new demo tracks

ICIX Forum

Entrants on the ICIX forum are asked to simply post a picture of your current home audio set up. Massive or non existant.

HighDefDiscNews

HDDN is running a Scavenger hunt for the A7-700 image on their site. Check out the link for more details and goo luck finding it

Final Information

Each forum does have its own rules for their contest, so you’ll want to take a look around and see what contests you are interested in.  Technically you can enter on all five sites if you meet the criteria of the contests they have set up.   Also you’ll find that all of these sites does offer a completely different experience as well, so take a look around and enjoy!

Happy participating, and we look forward to the final drawing.   Tentative Date for the Final Drawing:  July 25th.  This drawing will be held during the ICIX / Elemental Designs meet that is scheduled here in Iowa with many witnesses!  Maybe those that qualify will wind up scheduling to come out for the meet to see if they’ve won?

Good Luck!

Going to try something new starting this week. The newsletter. In the blog

I thought this was a prudent subject for a entry given some recent feedback we got on the forums. This is in no way meant as a attacking thing at all. In fact. It’s meant more as a “sorry” than anything else. It’s become relatively apparent we’re doing a very poor job about sharing our progress and work in the 12v market with our core audience.

Shame on us.

This lack of information has left us tagged as “disheartening” and citing our “lack of ingenuity” to boot. If one person sees us as this. I’m sure others do as well. So. I’m going to take a moment and whether or not we’ve shared it or not share what we are doing and have done in the 12v market over the last 12 months. We work and work and work and work. We do this because to succeed any marketplace. It’s a fact of live. I wanted to share very briefly what we’ve been doing. Shared or not.

Everything shifted to EFS

Better boxes. Why does EFS make better boxes? 1. It’s more dense. 2. In climates with a lot of moisture it does not effect the box. EFS is water resistance. The life span is unknown for a EFS box. It’s easy to say significantly longer than a MDF enclosure.

Better baffles. It’s a lot more common to get condenscation and things like that in your door than in your trunk for a lot of us. Over the years we see repeat orders constantly for new baffles due to damaged or warped items due to miosture. No more. EFS baffles just don’t swarm up like MDF baffles do.

See a comparison here : http://blog.edesignaudio.com/?p=393

Upgraded electronics

We didn’t cut back on aluminum use like many competitors have. If you look at the NINe.X amps while cosmetically they seem the same. Internally they aren’t.

After years of upgrades and updates the model line is essentially at a point where we just don’t get them back due to variance or defects. Sure. We’ve consolidated models but that’s largely because we’ve stuck to what your purchasing and nixed what your not.

Upgraded materials all around on subwoofers

New cone materials.

New suspension modifications.

New cooling integrated on each model. Most new models now shipping.

Full range advancements

New crossover integration in e9 set.

e9 set now shipping. The number of improvements over the 6500s are fairly long and valid. The midrange has more output, more excursion and handles abuse considerably better. The low frequency extension is substaintally improved. Over a set that was so highly praised we also managed to bring the price down around 100 dollars. Not too bad?

e3 set upgraded. Tweeter specifically revamped by popular request. Despite a dozen updates to the e3 price remains the same.

Comex used throughout in e9 / e3 set reducing abuse returns to next to nothing. Brand new xovers rolled out into the mix and shipments remain solid.

New tooling

Cones / baskets/  surrounds / gaskets / etc etc.  Where we find most of our competitors are picking off the shelf parts we’ve continued to tool, tool, tool. This makes things pretty predictable for us when using the tools for new platforms or otherwise just developing the newest generation of speaker.

New R&D / continued R&D in shrinking electronics sizes

Amplifiers mostly. You’ve seen tidbits of this for years now. Our quantities still can’t hang with the likes of Alpine and JL but that doesn’t mean we aren’t constantly working on these things.

eDead improved and expanded

Thicker eDead 80 introduced at a better value than previous eDead v1SE2. eDead 45,80,120 have all seen rolling updates. Just like it has been for years it’s all butyl based and still by far the best value on the market. We saw the highest shipments of eDead in the past 12 months we’ve ever seen. This tells us one gigantic thing. eDead doesn’t suck. We knew that a lot time ago though didn’t we?

A new ceramic based eDead sits on the horizon. We value your feedback.

We’ve worked a long time on solidifying our 12v offerings and while the lack of major overhuals to the line might not be popping up every 5 weeks. There are a lot of rolling changes that continually happen to increase performance, reduce returns, and poise us to follow customer demand. Hopefully a few of you will make it to the ICIX meet to have fun with a few new toys

And those fabled tshirts. Finally.

Some men go to great lengths to get their new subwoofer home. We’ve seen this time and time again.

Other more fortunate men (who most of us are quite jealous of) have wives who do things like help them move their brand new A7-900 into the listening position.

Today. We would like to return the thumbs up.

Mrs. FLPat.

From everyone here and men around the world looking for a glowing example of a understanding wife. We salute you!

After what I can only describe as a typical morning it’s about time for a entry at the Elemental Designs blog.

Things this week are pretty solid. We had our banker through this morning and did a lot of cleaning obviously yesterday to prepare. No secrets here. Shipments are good this. 2 containers this week in. Lots of pallets out. Lots of wood in. Lots of HT boxes out.

It’s like this whole odd business idea. We get some parts and things. We do some stuff with that stuff and ship it out.

I’ve cut back my caffeine intake ever so slightly. If this reads odd I blame myself.

I’ll do my best to recap a few things from this week.

A few recent pickups

An A2-300 nicely fits in a Scion tC

And while some guys go to great lengths to get their HT gear. Some guys just borrow the van to pick up a pair of A5-350’s

Monday

e3.12’s in stock. With e3.12’s came tons of parts. This makes us very happy as we can begin another round of raw driver production. Monday for us was a pretty big sales day. Set a new domestic record for sales. I’d say this is a positive.This is a very welcome view.

Tuesday

Just lots of testing. Lots of testing in between phone calls and other things. Brett’s 13Av.2 project on the forums has finally gotten finished and is now in the listening room. Compared to a lot of the recent projects it’s like handle a baby speaker. As long as I can make that parallel without you pointing out that despite being half the size of a A7-700 it still weighs almost as much.

The thread for this guy is here : http://forum.edesignaudio.com/showthread.php/13av-2-finding-new-home-71367.html

The fitment in this thing is exceptionally tight.

A few concerns about the need for more power were quickly put to rest after a few modifications to the electronics and a few other tweeks. Go go gadget excursion!

Alex has been staring at boards a lot lately

It’s kind of cool when you think about it. 3~4 years ago we had no idea how electronics really worked. Now we just open it up and change stuff. I’m having a good time with it. How about you?

Wednesday

Listening room got rearranged.

Some speakers got thrown on a switch so we can finally stop swapping wires when doing listening and demo’s. We need more connections on the switch I think though…..

I say the above is small because our most recent custom project is not small. Not even a little. Not even at all.

I’m starting to believe we need a photo wall for stuff this big. It’s too big to pull up front for photos easily and it’s too massive to move quickly. Either way 110dB full range in room is pretty fun. My ears certainly ran out of room well before the speakers.

What this breaks down to is custom 3 way L/C/R speakers with a pretty monstrous output capability and 2 passive new style A7-700’s powered by a crown Xti-4000. It could get interesting in that theater. I hope to hear it installed one day.

Randoms

New FEDEX printer is lightning fast in comparison to the old hunker. Upgrade time! The obnoxious 3~5 second lag between labels is officially gone. Oddly this actually does mean we can ship more in a day.

Lastly. Hey CP. Tell your lady friend thanks for the bread! Crazy good.

The new A7-900’s are done. The web site and images are updated. Which means the ones on order initially are all shipped. Now that there are more on order. We are building them A brace pre clean up.

Now that we’ve got more than 1 guy on staff trained to build these. We can kick them out just a tad faster