"The Symposium" - 1994
| Designer Peter Bizlewicz with the ancestor of the Panorama in Los Angeles in 1994. This loudspeaker was originally called The Symposium, and was originally intended to be Symposium's debut product. The platforms were in existence in their seminal form at this time; if you look carefully, you will see the very first Symposium Super platforms, in use under the electronics on the floor between the speakers.
The Symposium consisted of a line source of 8 midrange/high frequency drivers per side which were the direct ancestors of the current Panorama's UM-1 upper midrange planar drivers. These were mounted in a narrow, opened-back cabinet on 6061 aircraft-aluminum grounding rails and terminating spikes. At the sides of the HF towers were the planar bass panels, each with 2 stacked dipole bass drivers. The Symposium, in this first incarnation, was bi-amplified, employing an active/passive crossover network system with separate amplifiers for midrange/tweeter and bass sections, but later versions eschewed the active crossover and bi-amping scheme for a passive crossover that only needed one stereo amplifier to drive the entire system, similar in principle to the current Panorama. While bi-amping certainly has its benefits, employing the same amplifier for the entire range with a minimum of active electronics has demonstrated overall benefits of superior musical coherency, greater simplicity and lower cost. Associated equipment used with this first official demo included an Audio Research SP-10 Mk II preamplifier, SOTA Cosmos turntable, and VTL monoblock and Audio Research D-70 amplifiers. The bass panels (at the outside edges of the picture) were driven by a solid state amplifier, crossed over with a modified Dahlquist DQ-LP1 active/passive crossover. |
