Rockport Technologies Orion

After three years of intense development, and building on 30 years of cutting-edge loudspeaker design, Rockport Technologies is excited to introduce our all-new Orion loudspeaker. In keeping with Rockport’s understated, yet timeless style, the Orion strikes an impeccable balance of elegance and raw performance. Featuring Rockport’s new DAMSTIF II enclosure, the Orion is further testament to Rockport’s tradition of innovation, and again asserts our pioneering role in ultra-high performance loudspeaker development.

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A continued evolution of our composite loudspeaker enclosure development, the ORION’s DAMSTIF II enclosure merges a cast aluminum inner structure with an aerospace carbon fiber outer shell, consolidated via a high mass damping core. Our fabrication process completely eliminates the design constraints imposed by conventional construction methods, and owing to this design freedom, the ORION’s form has been fully optimized for ideal drive unit placement, reduction of internal standing waves, and minimum edge diffraction, ensuring an unhindered, coherent wave launch.

The entire enclosure for the Orion is comprised of just three components; the inner cast aluminum housing, the outer carbon fiber main housing, and the outer carbon fiber baffle shell.

The massive inner aluminum housing is formed as a single, continuous casting, and all of the interior braces and volumes, as well as the unique catenary profile midrange sub- enclosure are cast as an integral part of the housing. The housing’s immense structural rigidity is further enhanced by a series of external stiffening ribs which also serve to dramatically increase the interface area between the aluminum housing and the damping core, maximizing damping performance.

Each of the outer carbon fiber components are formed using a vacuum infusion process to create aerospace grade, continuous carbon fiber structures which are bonded together to create the outer, finished shell of the composite enclosure.

After precise registration and sealing of the outer carbon fiber components to the aluminum housing, the cavity between the aluminum housing and carbon fiber outer shell is completely filled with over 115 pounds of our proprietary, high hysteresis, high mass, structural damping compound. Once cured, this damping core intimately bonds the aluminum housing and carbon fiber shell together, consolidating it into a single, massively stiff, highly damped structure. Even the most minute deflection of the enclosure creates shear in the damping core material, effectively eradicating any vestige of resonant signature from the enclosure. The fundamental absence of any enclosure induced noise has a profound effect on the Orion’s presentation, yielding an incredibly low noise floor, unmatched dynamic contrasts, and astonishing low level information retrieval. Like the Lyra, the Orion’s DAMSTIF II enclosure is unique in that it has no conventional joinery, no fasteners, and simultaneously achieves the multiple goals of maximum damping, stiffness, and mass.

The primary design goal for the Orion was to create the simplest, most pure expression of a truly full-range dynamic loudspeaker in a reasonably sized enclosure, requiring a three driver, three-way design. Essential to the success of the Orion are three newly developed drive units, designed specifically to make the Orion the most dynamic, transparent, and truly full-range loudspeaker of its size.

Bass for the Orion is provided by our new, custom, carbon fiber sandwich cone 13 inch woofer. Capable of delivering authoritative, first octave response with staggering headroom and grip, this driver forms the foundation of the Orion’s effortless, and densely textured sonic pallet. The Orion continues Rockport’s well-established tradition of delivering iron-fisted bass impact with seemingly impossible agility, unimaginable from an enclosure of this size.

The all-new 7 inch carbon fiber sandwich composite midrange for the Orion was developed to be the perfect match at the low end for our 13 inch woofer, with a dynamic ease that provides a seamless continuation of the Orion’s lower registers. A testament to its highly refined motor, suspension, and cutting-edge carbon fiber sandwich composite cone, this new midrange has vanishingly low distortion (-60 dB), coupled with enormous headroom, and conveys stunningly vivid instrumental textures, with densely saturated tonal colors and unmatched transparency.

The Orion’s 31 mm waveguide mounted beryllium tweeter was specifically designed to provide solid, dynamically unrestrained output to well below 2 kHz, enabling a lower crossover point to the Orion’s 7 inch midrange driver. The waveguide mounting improves the acoustic impedance match of the tweeter at the low end of its range, rendering a much more robust output at the crossover frequency. It also results in lower distortion, greater dynamic expression, and improved dispersion characteristics at the midrange/tweeter crossover point. In conjunction with its 40% increased dome diameter, the Orion’s tweeter provides a seamless transition to the 7 inch midrange, as well as a linear dynamic continuum through the crossover region. It’s virtually perfect pistonic behavior also results in ultra-low distortion and extraordinarily transparent, extended, and dynamically realistic high frequencies.

The aesthetic appeal of the Orion is a direct expression of its purpose-suited design, and legendary Rockport performance has been attained by virtue of each design choice. Fluent in every musical language, the Orion is your personal gateway to the vast realm of recorded musical artistry, and destined to become an instant classic.