Welcome to BBE Sound

Residential Systems
February 2006

Faithful Reproduction

How BBE Technology Helps Deliver Improved Home Audio Performance

By Scott Sylvester

It’s been described by professional audio journals as the “most hearable advance in audio technology since high fidelity itself.” Music celebrities such as Aerosmith, Jackson Brown and Joe Santriani have heralded BBE sound processing as a must-have tool in the recording studio and on stage. However, how it works and its intended purpose makes this well-established pro audio technology ideal for use in distributed audio systems as well.

To understand how BBE works, remember that all reproduced music suffers from subtle distortions caused by the inherent characteristics of loudspeakers. The BBE system addresses this problem by compensating for these phase and amplitude distortions, delivering the signal to the speaker in a form that allows it to reproduce the original live performance more fully and more faithfully.

The BBE sound processing system dates back to the mid-1970s when inventor Bob Crooks began researching the technology after joining Barcus-Berry Electronics¬—the source of the sound enhancement’s acronym. By 1985, BBE Sound Inc. was formed.

Crooks discovered that—because of the electrical inductance inherent in speaker voice coils—the high frequencies exit the speaker (and arrive at the listener’s ear) later than lower frequencies. This phase shift is the reason that audio tracks containing sharp transients—such as vocals, drums and guitar strums—can sound muddy and unfocused when heard through speakers.

What Crooks did was create a sound processing system that added a graduated time delay to lower frequencies, neutralizing the loudspeaker’s inherent phase distortion. This increases the music’s presence and makes everything sound tighter and punchier. Think of it as auto-focus for your speakers.

The difference BBE makes can be heard best at lower volumes where the higher frequencies aren’t loud enough to overcome the effects of the phase shift. This makes it a sensible and logical addition to any distributed audio system where music is played at lower, background levels.

The vitality of BBE technology lies in its versatility. Not only is it compatible with other sound-enhancement technologies, such as reverb and surround sound, but it actually makes them sound better. It also improves compressed-audio formats such as MP3—a growing concern among sound purists as iPods and other MP3 players are increasingly being used as sources in home audio systems. Its crisp and clear sound is one fo the reasons BBE can also be found in more and more televisions each year, especially in households in high-density living areas such as apartment buildings. It’s also why BBE is being used in public announcement installations where vocal intelligibility is imperative.

From recording studios to concert halls to radio stations, BBE made its mark in the professional audio world because of its ability to deliver music with more live presence. But its true benefit may lie in applications only the distributed audio market can truly realize.