Eden loudspeaker enclosures and amplifiers are unique in the Bass amplification market for a number of reasons. Eden Electronics is able to blend together in our products a unique combination of disciplines and talents in mechanical engineering, applied physics, musical knowledge, nuances, and fine U.S.A. hand made craftsmanship to produce a truly marvelous and extremely musical product. What follows is an overview of some of the things that make our products your best choice for bass amplification.

Many years ago, I investigated this and other psycho-acoustic phenomena with a number of controlled listening tests. We used a wide variety of people - from expert musicians to people that had no knowledge of music. For one test we built two identical speaker systems and tweaked one to be perfectly flat and neutral, with a minimum of dips and peaks. It was a bit louder than the other cabinet (+1 to 2 dB) because of that. The other cabinet we set up as we do most of our cabinets and voiced it to sound good to our ears. The flat cabinet clearly had superior specifications to the second ear-voiced box. After running the listening tests we found, much to our initial surprise, that every one liked the uneven, slightly rougher version because it sounded more interesting.

This is one of those strange psycho-acoustic, human factors that make this business so interesting and challenging. All the current wisdom says that everyone should have liked the flatter speaker, which was, after all, louder. In general listening tests people normally select the loudest speaker as the best sounding. These controlled tests provided an important lesson: it's not what's right about the sound that people like, it's what's not perfect; it's the oddities and the unique colorations, together with the little sonic "mistakes", that give great products their unique and special sound. You need to have the right sonic nuances, or mistakes, if you will. Once you've discovered and created those nuances, you must be able to recreate them in production, time after time, year after year. It is this kind of consistency that is at the very heart of a world-class product like the Eden David Series speakers. Building great loudspeaker systems is much more than just building great drivers, however. You also must have correctly matched high performance enclosures for them to go into. For good quality bass response, you need to do several things with the enclosures.

First of all, you have to use very good materials. AA void-free solid-core plywood is a must. The more common standard C & D cores allow for voids and patches inside the panel and, over time, these can come loose and rattle or just plain delaminate and fall apart. Second, you must also build the enclosure very well. We incorporate precision Dado and Rabbet interlocking joints, special glues and a tremendous amount of bracing to insure that our enclosures are rigid at all of the frequencies of interest. All of that is before you even consider the design type and execution of the enclosure design which must also be very precise. The David Series enclosures are computer designed and then carefully hand tuned for maximum transient response and best overall output and performance.

Eden uses only AA void free solid core plywood. Other manufacturers may use inferior C & D core plywood.

For those interested, here's a table of features we incorporate into our David series speaker cabinets and their attending benefit to the user (that's you, by the way):

We approach the amplifier design from a solid P.A. power amp perspective. We do this by choosing characteristics that give superior performance and great musicality. By designing the amplifiers with proper head room, we get a product with much better performance than what we can get from a guitar amplifier perspective.

Let me give an example: if you design a good guitar amplifier there are certain things you want - good tone (obviously!), solid sustain, good overload and saturation characteristics, careful power supply limitations for tone character as well as a good general tone envelope. In bass amplifier design we come from a different direction. We want lots of headroom, virtually no distortion in the amp, very high instantaneous output current ability, tight control of the speaker by the amplifier, much higher overall power levels, controlled system limiting, as well as very good tone body. In addition, we incorporate redundant safety protection into the amplifier design so that it can take care of itself in even the most abusive situations.

We have chosen to go with a hybrid design style for the Eden products. We typically use a vacuum tube (7025) for the front end followed by solid state signal processing and power outputs. This lets us use the great warmth, natural tone and compression characteristics of the tube preamplifier to define the overall tone characteristics of the amplifier and still deliver the high power, final amplification with highly reliable solid state devices rather than using the more expensive and less reliable hi power tube circuits.

WT550 Back Panel

Our original, 5-band semiparametric EQ system is the industry standard for maximum tonal control. In addition to Bass and Treble controls, it features three bands of semi-parametric tone shaping. With these three control sets, the user can easily boost or cut any frequency to get their unique tone.

Our unique Enhance control (often called the Magic Knob) allows many users to quickly dial in their basic tone - without ever needing to touch the other EQ controls! This leaves the rest of the EQ available to create special sounds, or to compensate for room characteristics.

The funny thing (interesting funny, not funny funny) is that many of our long-term users tell us that we've designed the best tone control system in the industry, but designed the rest of the amplifier so as to make the EQ almost unnecessary. All they do to get their tone is to set the Input Gain and dial in a little Enhance. And, Bingo! Instant great tone. That will come as a relief to any of you who have repeatedly twiddled knobs but never gotten anything but passable tone out of other systems.

On some of our newer heads, we went in a new direction. We replaced the tube with a solid state chip and simplified the EQ section. This is definitely NOT a step backwards. Rather, it is a step forward in that we now offer two distinct types of amplifier. Even though I, along with our team of designers, still prefer the use of a tube in the front end, there are users out there who prefer a solid state front end. Still others couldn't care less as long as the amp sounds great. There are also users that prefer a simpler tone control section. One long-term user even told us he would glue the tone knobs down if he could get away with it!

For those reasons, we developed a new design for our Time Traveler heads (WT330, WT390 and WT405). This design features the Golden Ear chip, a very high-end solid state chip originally designed for top-of-the-line recording consoles, such as the Neve and Harris units. It brings to our TT heads warmth that is unmatched by the chips used by most other manufacturers. While the cost is far greater than other chips, we feel the resulting tone is more than worth it. A second bonus to the Golden Ear chip is the Warmth circuit, which adds some tube-style grit to your sound. This feature is set by the user so they can tailor the Time Traveler heads to get their ultimate tone.

The EQ section of the Time Travler heads is a simplified 3-band system. The Mid control can be set at 550Hz (add a little here for great fretless tone) or 2.2KHz, which is very useful for getting an edgy rock tone (add a little) or to get a smooth, old-school R&B tone (cut a little). The Enhance control has been recalibrated to provide greater fine-tuning in the usable range.

By the way, our new WT1205 design is a combination of our two main designs. It features a tube front end on both channels but has a simplified EQ section. On Channel One, we use a 4-band system - Bass, Low Mid (550Hz), High Mid (2.2KHz) and Treble. Channel Two features a 3-band system, but the Mids are sweepable through a broad frequency spectrum. This allows the user to quickly and easily cut a frequency that is causing resonant feedback, such as that created by some Electric/Acoustic basses or Upright basses.

Below is a table showing many of the features (and benefits) built into our World Tour amplifiers:

Eden amplifiers have many unique features that allow them to stand out far above the rest of the products offered in the market place. We offer upgrades for most older product designs so that our products are never obsolete. We use very heavy duty special output devices that are extremely tough and handle abuse well. Overall, the World Tour Amplifiers are designed to be rock solid, reliable and simple to use and repair, while delivering killer tone and years of trouble free service.

Here's a great example: This amp came in for repair last week with the knobs melted to the front panel and the output jacks melted down. It was the sole survivor of a home studio house fire. The guitars burned away to ash. Even after being burned in a full building fire and having additional water damage, this WT800 still works perfectly to full specifications. The owner was still gigging with the amp a couple months after the fire due to having to deal with the cost of the fire. He wanted us to spruce up the unit and get it looking good again.

Sent in for repair, this bad puppy fell off a semi and was then run over by it. Other than a few broken knobs, it worked perfectly. Ironically, the model is The Highwayman! Now you know what we mean when we say "Built Eden Tough". It's not just a boastful advertising statement. For us, it's a way of life. You see, we know you're obsessed with great tone. So are we. We know you don't just want an amp that's reliable - you need it. We need to build them that way. We're just as obsessed with building great amps as you are with wanting one. We live, breathe, eat and sleep this stuff. Well, we do eat a lot of cheese puffs, but only because it helps us concentrate. And coffee. Got to have coffee. But you get the idea.

Just as a master craftsman needs the proper tools to do their best work, you need quality tools to give your best performance. We are confident that you'll love the tools we've built for you. And we're confident that, when you plug into an Eden rig, you're going to hear - perhaps for the very first time - what you sound like. And that's a beautiful thing.