A floor-standing speaker system built for digital audio sources, with advanced materials and patented acoustic design.
Overview
The Denon SC-5000 is a floor-type speaker system. Denon developed it over four years to handle the demands of the new digital audio sources. It cost ¥350,000 per unit at launch and incorporated twelve patents and two utility models. It is a three-way design with a 40 cm cone woofer, a 15 cm mid-range driver and a 5 cm cone-type tweeter, all in a bass reflex enclosure with an 185-liter volume. The construction aims for rigidity and low distortion, using specialized composite diaphragms and advanced magnetic circuitry to get high output and clarity.
Design
The woofer uses a "High-M / P" vibration plate made from ramie fiber blended with wood pulp. Concentric and radial ribs double its rigidity over conventional materials. The center pole has a vented hole and a copper control ring, which reduce air and current distortion by more than 10 dB. The woofer's edge and damper are a phenolic-resin composite with a linear motion corrugate curve, for durability and linearity. The mid-range driver has a "High-M · T" diaphragm of high-elasticity woven fiber with epoxy resin, with three times the Young's modulus of paper. It also has a copper control ring, which reduces harmonic distortion by 12 dB. The tweeter is a semi-dome "High-M / T" design. Its diaphragm is folded at the neck for added rigidity, and the center dome is a 30 μm thick special aluminum alloy filled with ultra-fine glass fibers for vibration damping. The surround is a fixed edge sandwiched in rubber for stability. The crossover network uses a -12 dB/oct slope with large metallized film capacitors - two or more in parallel per stage - and four capacitor types selected by bandwidth. There are no printed circuit boards; the wiring is direct. The cabinet is a sandwich structure with 35 mm side plates, each made from three layers of 10 mm high-density particle board. Two types of sound-absorbing material are placed to suppress standing waves.
Specifications
The SC-5000 has an output sound pressure level of 98 dB and handles an instantaneous maximum input of 1 kW, reaching up to 128 dB peak sound pressure. The woofer uses a large ferrite magnet (4.8×10⁵ maxwell, 11,000 gauss) and a φ100 mm voice coil of polyamide-imide resin-coated ribbon copper wire on a Nomex bobbin. The mid-range has a 140 mm ferrite magnet and a φ40 mm heat-resistant ribbon copper wire voice coil. The tweeter's strontium ferrite magnet has a φ120 mm outer diameter. Its 25 mm bobbin carries copper-coated ribbon-type aluminum wire treated with polyamide-imide resin. The network uses an L-type silicon steel plate coil for the woofer and air-core coils for the mid-range and tweeter. Level controls adjust the middle and high frequencies.
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