The M1 is Michael Børresen’s most ambitious loudspeaker project to date. The development approach and design philosophy for the M1 was to create a loudspeaker without any economic and technological constraints and with an absolutely unrivalled sound potential.
For the M1 project, Børresen applied some of the most innovative technologies from premium Ansuz, Aavik and Børresen products – all these technologies are the result of a long and intensive research and development process. However, the crucial technologies and most critical features of the M1 are new and unique to this model.
The M1 bass/midrange unit
The basket is topology-optimized 3D-printed zirconium, which ensures maximum rigidity and thus minimum vibration and resonance. The basket is not just a placeholder for the membrane. The energy generated by the membrane is also held by the structure behind it. The goal was therefore to eliminate the noise of the basket by designing a basket with maximum stiffness.
Thanks to the 3D printing process, the cavities are filled with zirconium powder, which gives the basket additional damping properties. Zirconium is by far the best choice of material, since it allows the basket to generate an “inconceivable quality of natural sound”.
The membrane is designed to achieve maximum stiffness with minimum noise. The membrane for the M1 is “the most advanced and sophisticated speaker membrane on the market with the highest stiffness and the lowest membrane resonance”. Designed, developed and assembled in-house, Michael Børresen and his team had to construct a large number of different variants and models until they accomplished their goal. The result is a membrane that consists of four skins laminated into a single unit: two layers of spread tow carbon fibre, a layer of aramid honeycomb spacers and a titanium skin with Ansuz Supreme coating.
Iron-free magnet system
Børresen’s iron-free drivers have an inductance that is about twelve times lower than conventional drivers. Silver has much better conductivity than iron or even copper. For this reason, we replaced the copper pole rings with in-house manufactured, handcrafted silver rings.
It was important to use only the very best both in terms of technologies, but also in terms of production processes. For this reason, as with the Børresen Silver Supreme 0 series, all metal components in the M1 undergo cryogenic treatment, which reduces inductance by an additional 6-8%. Cryogenic treatment of all metal components of the loudspeaker results in a further significant improvement in conductivity.
Ribbon tweeter
Another fundamental element of the Børresen DNA, and thus a natural addition in the M1, is the Børresen ribbon tweeter. The efficiency of this closed ribbon tweeter is a high 94dB and operates from about 2.5 kHz upwards. The moving mass is extremely low at 0.01 grams. The fully concealed tweeter has the ability to operate at incredible speed, which is an absolute prerequisite for unlocking the subtlest and finest sonic details of any type of music. The tremendous robustness of this tweeter allows it to handle extremely high transient peaks without any breakup.
Crossover
The M1 is fitted with a serial crossover. The reason for this is that the drivers have the same current flow in the area of the crossover. As a result, the electrical current is phase-locked across the crossover area. Unlike conventional parallel filtering, where each driver receives its own frequency and phase content, the serial filters work by diverting out-of-band currents around the current flows, creating a much more coherent system.
Tesla coil technology
When Børresen designs new audio equipment, one of the main tasks is always to eliminate as much unwanted noise as possible. This is of course also the case with the M1, to provide such uncompromising musical authenticity. In the pursuit of this benchmark, Audio Group Denmark have learned that many of the technological pioneering advancements and innovations in the product development of each of their three individual brands, Ansuz, Aavik and Børresen, can often be leveraged across brands. The knowledge and technology exchange that takes place among the three brands has turned out to be extremely insightful and valuable. Therefore, they have integrated their most effective Tesla coil technologies from the most advanced existing products from their three brands into the M1. For instance, the active Tesla coil technology, which is designed to be supplied with external clean low voltage from the Ansuz PowerBox and by far the most effective Ansuz noise reduction technology.
The principle of the Tesla coil is to have two coils wound in each direction: one coil and one counter coil. In Ansuz’s words, ‘a double inverted coil’ – the two coils both carry voltage – and when the Tesla coil encounters a voltage spike, a counter coil is activated to eliminate the noise. Since noise spikes are pure voltage and carry virtually no charge, cancellation is quite good, but still not 100%. Adding more P-TC coils in parallel, however, enhances their capacity to eliminate noise and brings the noise level further down to unprecedentedly low levels. This significantly improves the perceived blackness in the music.
A 3rd generation of the Ansuz analogue dither technology has been developed for the M1. The active Tesla coils send pulsating signals at precisely defined frequencies. These signals are sent in anti-phase. This significantly amplifies the musical signal and eliminates the background noise floor.
Crossover with Tesla coils in PCB to the right
Ansuz Darkz Z2S
The M1 features built-in Ansuz Darkz Z2S resonance control decouplers mounted between the speaker and the bottom cross plate. These “provide much better mechanical grounding of the speaker cabinet to the stand, respectively, the floor. They absorb vibrations that are not directly related to the signal path. The absorption prompts a vibration feedback that audibly purifies the sound quality. It is this natural and authentic sound that Ansuz Darkz devices are designed to preserve”.
Cabinet
The design is an evolution of the Børresen 01 cabinet. To ensure even higher performance, the M1 cabinet is constructed with additional 5mm braced, block-milled, pressed wood structures. In addition, braces are built into the sides of the speaker to give the cabinet even more rigidity and mechanical stability. The tweeter and woofer sections are fitted with matched terminals to ensure highest efficiency. The cabinet is finished in black piano lacquer.
Internal wiring
The internal wiring of the M1 speaker consists of Ansuz’s flagship cables, the Ansuz Gold Signature series. These feature ”by far the most innovative and most advanced audio cable technology, literally paving the way to an extremely clear, natural, and authentic sonic reproduction”.
When designing the M1 loudspeaker, Børresen’s overriding goal was to challenge existing technological constraints and pioneer into new and unorthodox realms of audio technology. The M1 is the absolute high-end version of a loudspeaker that incorporates all the premium elements of the most innovative and advanced audio technologies that Ansuz, Aavik and Børresen stand for. Price: $100,000/€94,000