The first speaker designed to the specifications of The Audio Critic led to half a dozen others, plus several dozen rumors and a lot of succes d' estime. Here are the facts, straight from the horse's mouth.

Let us begin at the end, for the sake of clarity. The loudspeaker company introduced in the last full-length issue of The Audio Critic circa December 1980, Fourier Systems, Inc., is no longer in operation. There was no bankruptcy, but the Yonkers, New York factory was shut down as of December 31, 1986, and the small remaining stock of speakers sold out in the first half of 1987. At present the company is a paper entity, without a production facility, without employees, without inventory, without sales and without assets other than its so-called intellectual property.

Your Editor, although still engaged in loudspeaker R and D as a private pursuit, is no longer active in the company in any capacity and is deriving no income from it.

Now we can go back to the beginning. We wrote the original article approximately two months before it actually landed in the hands of our readers. At the time of writing, the Fourier situation was still quite vague. There was a finished speaker design, ready to go into production, with several preproduction samples built and tested; there was a company named Fourier Systems, about to be incorporated over a lawyer's signature; there was a laboratory (ours) but no factory; there was no working capital to speak of and no idea who would end up owning the company by coming up with the capital. Thus the disclosures made in the article regarding the involvement of The Audio Critic and its Editor in the Fourier project were as complete and forthright as the few established facts of the case permitted. A small, and soon insufficient, amount of capital became available in mid-1981, a good many months after we had ceased to publish; the factory was opened a few months after that; your Editor did not derive an income from the company until the last quarter of 1981 and became President of Fourier Systems only in the spring of 1982; more capital was finally obtained in 1983, and after all the shuffling and reshuffling 45.5% of the Fourier stock issued ended up in the name of Peter Aczel, the rest in the hands of various investors.

We are citing this chronology to squelch poisonous and paranoiac rumors, persisting to this very day, that it was our fraudulent scheme from the start to take money from subscribers, leave their subscriptions unfulfilled and use the money to bankroll Fourier. Come on, good people, Eleanor Roosevelt may have been a card-carrying member of the Communist party, and it was probably Lyndon John son (or did you say J. Edgar Hoover?) who had the Kennedy brothers assassinated, but about this one you have your facts all twisted. The facts are that we stopped publishing at a particularly cash-poor point in our subscription renewal cycle; that the first trickle of capital into Fourier's coffers came at a considerably later and unrelated time; that the amount of money divertible at any time from a publication such as ours is pitifully inadequate to finance a manufacturing operation; and that only a simpleton unfamiliar with the elementary realities of business would consider such a scheme to be a viable fraud.

The only factual overlap between The Audio Critic and Fourier Systems was the design of the original, first generation "Fourier 1" loudspeaker, which started out as an editorially conceived engineering exercise to verify certain technical desiderata and complaints we kept bringing up in our reviews. As far as this alleged "conflict of interest" is concerned, we happen to believe in every red-blooded Hungarian-American boy's birthright to critique other people's speakers and at the same time work on the development of better designs. Same subject, same capabilities. Those who had a problem with that philosophy were free to disbelieve the critiques and/or ignore the new designs, since they had been told of the connection. Enough of such nonsense.

The evolution of the Fourier product line.

The Fourier 1, as many of our readers will recall, was a floor-standing three-way design with a 10-inch woofer. Its aforesaid Ur- version came on the market in mid-1981 at the retail price of $1325.00 but was discontinued as of the end of that year. Although it satisfied the basic specifications we had set for it, some driver-related problems that had eluded our attention in the laboratory made its interface with certain rooms unpredictable. Anew midrange driver with an in-house modification and a new off-the-shelf tweeter were substituted; the Fourier-designed woofer, the cabinet and the QB2 crossover network remained the same, as did the price; and in this second-generation version the speaker became the standard Fourier 1, sold throughout 1982 and 1983, with one eventual price increase to $1549.00. Early in 1984 the third-generation Fourier 1L ($1675.00). replaced the plain 1. The L stood for an unprecedentedly sophisticated fourth-order Linkwitz-Riley crossover network that distinguished the new model from its predecessor. The network consisted of 26 specified values of L, C and R, computer optimized to the point where, among other benefits, the summed response of the interacting filters and terminations was dead flat-meaning close to +-0.0 dB. There would have been no way on earth for the classic, cut-and-try loudspeaker designer (with the dangling cigarette and hot soldering iron) to arrive empirically at such a network, which represented Fourier's progress over the years in computer-aided electroacoustic engineering. The seamless crossover, in addition to the computer-optimized 32-Hz vented box common to all Fourier 1's, made the 1L good enough to earn grudging, how-did-you-do-it compliments from rival speaker designers whose names you would recognize and whose products cost a great deal more.

Two smaller speaker system were meanwhile introduced in 1983. They were the Fourier 8 ($799.00), a fat bookshelf-size two-way system with 8-inch woofer, and the considerably smaller Fourier 6 ($499.00), also two-way, with 6-inch woofer. Both woofers were Fourier-designed, and the crossover networks, although of slightly earlier vintage and not quite as advanced as that of the 1L, were very elegant computer-aided solutions to the problem of matching fourth-order low-pass and high-pass sections. The Fourier 8 underwent an early crossover update, and in that second-generation version became the monitor speaker of choice for top-of-the-console placement in some of the most prestigious professional recording and mastering studios, as well as the portable monitor speaker preferred by a number of well-known recording engineers and producers. It seems it had the right combination of accuracy, efficiency and bass for the pros. The Fourier 6 was a no-sweat, piece of-cake design that stayed in its first-generation version throughout its life span; it was cordially received by reviewers and sold in fair quantities in audio retail stores. In 1985 the little Fourier 44 ($349.00) was added to the line; it had two 4 1/2-inch almost-full-range drivers, a tiny tweeter to fill in the top octave, a computer-optimized vented box just like the other Fourier speakers-and sound that was a little better than it had the right to be but not much. A few pros found use for it as a minimonitor but it never took off in the stores.

The end was approaching when the company's most advanced product, the Fourier 8e ($1095.00), was introduced in mid-1986. This was a three-way system for which a new and better 8-inch woofer had been designed; the somewhat larger than bookshelf-size cabinet was exceptionally hand some, in rosewood and black lacquer without a grille; the speaker's chief claim to fame, however, was its unique crossover network based on a proprietary design technique called CAMF, the acronym standing for Computer-Aided Matrix Fitting. CAMF comes closer to approximating the appearance of a single-driver crossover-less wave launch out of several drivers than any other method known to us, but the drivers must have extremely well-behaved top-end roll offs to begin with, otherwise the method is not applicable.

In this particular case, CAMF resulted in an output that more nearly resembled the input, over a larger solid angle of radiation, than we had ever measured in our tests of electro dynamic box speakers. How that sounds is known only to a small group of Fourier 8e owners, mostly professionals, who grabbed a pair before it was too late. Let us just say that the speaker redefines the generally assumed quality-to price and performance-to-size ratios, and that a few highly distinguished audio practitioners have chosen it as their reference speaker, regardless of price.

The triumph of market forces over sound quality.

All of the above is strictly of historical interest, of course, since none of the speakers discussed is in production or even available from leftover stock. What happened was a good demonstration of the inadequacy of "We Have the Best Sound" as a marketing plan. Advanced engineering, superior sound and the high opinion of professionals were not enough to obtain for Fourier a retail marketing base of sufficient size and stability to make the company profitable.

Every month, for 66 months in a row, there was a small, one might even say trivial, net operating deficit.

Belts were tightened, waste was eliminated, sales increased, the deficit shrank, but a little bit of red ink always remained on the bottom line. It took only simple arithmetic to figure out that 66 times a small number is a big number, and the moment came when the plug had to be pulled. To be sure, there are other small loudspeaker companies that operate at a steady deficit, but the owners or outside backers keep pouring in new money in hopes of a turnaround. Fourier ran out of such hopes.

In the 1970', the product would probably have drawn to itself an adequate network of dealers without the need for a major marketing effort. In the incomparably more competitive 1980's, the company suffered greatly from the lack of a financially committed marketing partner with heavy experience (or at least great talent) in manufacturer-to-retailer selling. Sales managers on salary and reps on commission turned out to be self-serving and lazy. It takes special skills and determination to persuade a dealer to take on a new line of loudspeakers in a market surfeited by too many brands. A typical reaction by store owners was: "These are great speakers. They're probably better than anything I have in the store. And you know something? I'm not going to carry your line. Why not? Because I have a warehouseful of other stuff I must sell first. And besides, why should I stick my neck out pushing your unknown speakers when people come in here asking for these other speakers by name?" A top-notch retail marketing man might have been able to handle that. Fourier did not have one. The dealer network never became as large as was minimally needed.

And then, in February 1986, a huge fire two floors above the Fourier factory resulted in the loss of the entire inventory through water damage, courtesy of the Yonkers fire department. There was stock insurance but no work stoppage insurance. That was the beginning of the end.

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[adapted from TAC, Issue No. 10]

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Also see:

The Deprogramming and Reformation of Bob Carver (Exact Text of the 1983 Preprint)

Various audio and high-fidelity magazines