Rockport Technologies Factory Tour
by Jeff Fritz

There are few obstacles to discovering new audio gear that can't be overcome. My visit to Rockport Technologies is proof.

I was scheduled to leave my hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina at 6:00 AM. and arrive in Portland, Maine at 10:00 AM, with a single stopover at LaGuardia. About noon I was to be in Rockport after a short ride north from the Portland airport. But a thick fog had descended upon the entire East Coast and air travel slowed to a crawl. I ended up leaving from Raleigh, NC -- a two-hour drive from Wilmington -- about midday, and I didn’t arrive in Portland until 9:00 PM. After being rerouted five times in a single day I was just glad to have made it, even if it was 11 hours late. To top off my travel woes, the car-rental agency that I had booked with was closed when I finally made it to Maine.

My trip improved dramatically after that fiasco, however. I found another car-rental agency that was open late, and shortly after 9:30 PM. I was on the road to Rockport. Whew! I knew my luck was changing when I happened upon WCLZ, 98.9 FM, the Portland station that describes its playlist as "quality new music and classic album rock." From new Bob Dylan to classic Joni Mitchell to the latest Norah Jones, the mix was exactly what I needed to refresh myself after a very long day.

I arrived at the Strawberry Hill Motor Inn in Rockport, situated right on the Atlantic Ocean, and was treated to a delightfully quaint room and a good night’s sleep. The next morning I was up bright and early and off looking for breakfast. The only place open in Rockport at 7:00 AM was the Corner Restaurant. It was a good pick. The help-yourself coffee was hot, and it seemed that half of the Rockport brain trust were regulars, so I had some good conversation over my eggs. By 8:30, my belly was full and I was pulling into Andy Payor’s "little shop of horrors," as he calls it, for a half day that I will not soon forget.

I called Andy Payor in mid-November because I’d heard about a new speaker he would soon debut. His flagship, the $145,000-per-pair multi-cabinet Arrakis, was being joined by the single-cabinet Altair ($89,500 per pair). Both speakers utilize Payor’s new composite driver technology and, I found out, would usher in a new level of performance from Rockport speakers. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The Payor approach

Before listening to or looking at anything, Payor and I had a discussion about his philosophy as it applies to product development. I was struck by his exhaustive knowledge of loudspeaker design as well as his overall engineering acumen. The way I stated it to my wife after the visit was, "This guy is smart!"

When it comes to making world-class loudspeakers, Andy Payor takes as comprehensive an approach as anyone I have ever come across: Whether it is smooth on- and off-axis frequency response to eliminating cabinet resonance to optimizing baffle diffraction to developing his own driver cones, Andy Payor has taken seemingly everything into account. As an engineer, he conducts objective measurements for every imaginable parameter, and he has the refreshing ability to translate some very high-level technical jargon into everyday language that an average audio reviewer can comprehend. For instance, Payor explained exactly how constrained-layer damping (used in some of his less-expensive speakers, such as the $13,500-per-pair Mira) works. He not only explained it, but demonstrated it to me via a simple experiment showing how the viscoelastic center layer must be just the right composition and thickness so as not to decouple the cabinet layers (decoupling is not the goal). There’s more science involved in constrained-layer construction than simply gluing several dissimilar materials together in hopes of coming away with a non-resonant hybrid.

Constrained-layer construction is but one example of the science of speaker design that Payor has studied. Using a full MLSSA measurement suite, he conducts exhaustive acoustic measurements of his loudspeakers. Whether frequency-response graphs, waterfall decay charts, or distortion measurements, Payor is a firm believer in verifiable results -- and from what I was able to see on my short visit, his products cross the threshold of technical superiority in a way that scant few high-end companies are able to boast.

But I’d be giving the wrong impression if it sounds as if Rockport Technologies is so steeped in science that Payor and his crew forget the art. Interspersed within the technical regimen he performs, Payor listens exhaustively. I would come to find out that his wife and daughter play the piano, and that instrument’s sound, of which he is intimately familiar, is always a final arbiter in judging the success of his products. They must sound like the real thing, and satisfy his aesthetic sense, before they go into production.

Production? Maybe that’s stretching it a bit. I’ve visited enough equipment manufacturers to know that to one degree or another each is concerned with manufacturing efficiency. They have to be able to make what they sell in reasonable quantities and in a somewhat cost-effective manner. However, a Rockport speaker is not something that can be mass produced. In fact, I was blown away by how involved the actual manufacturing is. For instance, the monocoque enclosures that the upper-end Rockports possess are unlike anything I’ve ever seen. The polyurethane mock-up of an Altair enclosure, used just to make the mold that will eventually be used to make the speaker, is a complex piece of work in itself. This exact mock-up of the speaker’s cabinet will be used to create a female mold in which either a fiberglass or carbon-fiber shell will be set. A second slightly smaller shell will comprise the inner wall of the cabinet. These materials utilized in this specific geometry exploit, according to Payor, the tensile properties of the shells to achieve stiffness in the composite construction. In between these inner and outer shells is poured a proprietary damping compound that forms the inner core of the enclosure. The combination of the two materials accomplishes the opposing goals of exceptional mass and damping along with stiffness. Payor contends that no single enclosure material has the same unique properties as his composite design.

Building a Rockport enclosure is time and labor intensive, and requires quite specialized manufacturing skill. Although this aspect of the loudspeaker construction is done off-site, and I was unable to see the actual production of the cabinets due to my travel delays, I was able to see several cross sections of various speakers, and I can tell you that these are the most impressively built loudspeaker cabinets I’ve ever seen. Measurements that Payor showed me indicate that his cabinets store and release virtually no energy. He calls them an "inertial reference."

This fanatical cabinet construction has been a hallmark of Rockport speakers for some time, but the drive units in the latest models, the Arrakis and Altair, are brand new to the line. The motor structures are still sourced from the Danish firm Audiotechnology, but the cones are Rockport originals. Payor designed the composite-sandwich cone construction that he says all but eliminates cone resonance; the cones are also reportedly light and incredibly stiff. He has the cones made on tooling he designed and then ships them to Denmark for final assembly at Audiotechnology. The result, according to Payor, is just the type of performance advancement over polypropylene that he was hoping for.

If it sounds as if attention to detail is important to Andy Payor, you don’t know the half of it. The execution of all this high-tech design work is done to almost impossibly tight tolerances. The build quality of a Rockport Technologies product is as good as I have ever seen in this industry -- heck, any industry. When you buy a Rockport, you’re getting an heirloom-quality piece of kit that you will be able to hand down to your kids’ kids.

The Rockport sound

It’s when Payor’s art is pressed into motion that the true value of his designs is revealed. I was able to listen to Rockport’s newest creation, the Altair, at length. This 515-pound speaker is a four-way design incorporating a 5 1/4" midrange, an 8" midbass driver, and a 15" woofer -- all Rockport composite-cone designs -- along with Scan-Speak’s newest Ring Radiator tweeter. This model is situated above the Antares ($46,500 per pair) -- although it has a number of advances over that somewhat older, much-heralded design. To say that I was stunned by the sound of the Altair is an understatement: I simply could not believe the clarity and freedom from untoward sonic artifacts in the music I heard. I played an Eva Cassidy cut that I’ve heard hundreds of times -- literally over every component I have received for review. It was so right, so musically relevant in every way, that I found myself wanting to laugh out loud. Wow kept repeating itself over and over in my head.

I was also able to hear the Arrakis in Payor’s larger reference room. Although the soundstage of this beast was deeper and wider than the Altair’s, perhaps due to the characteristics of the D’Appolito driver layout along with the much larger acoustic space, the sound was similar to that of its smaller sibling. Both speakers were astounding in their ability to disappear, a characteristic that was coupled with an uncanny clarity that let me hear further into the recording. The Arrakis is a monster of a speaker, weighing in at 900 pounds, but it can reproduce the most minute levels of detail with fascinating composure and agility. It is truly a reference speaker.

A list of associated electronics at the Rockport facility reads like a who’s who of the best component manufacturers in the world. Whether it is the new Reference CD7 CD player from Audio Research, the huge Gryphon Antileon Signature mono amps, the equally massive Boulder 2060 stereo amp, or tube amps from the likes of Conrad-Johnson and several other companies, you can be assured that Rockport speakers are tested with the best ancillary gear available. The Arrakis, for instance, was anchored by the best Gryphon electronics along with Rockport’s System III Sirius turntable, so it was fed some of the purest signal money can buy. The proud new owner of the pair of Arrakis I heard (they were getting ready to be shipped out) must be having the time of his audiophile life right about now.

A happy ending

Although my trip began in a most irritating way, it ended spectacularly. I have deep respect and admiration for Andy Payor, his designs, his knowledge, and his commitment to building some of the finest audio products in the world. They are expensive, but in many ways they seem like bargains. They are last-purchase items, and in my experience high-end audio doesn’t get any better.

Oh, and lest I forget, I think I heard something about a System V coming sometime soon, whatever that might be.

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To find out more about Rockport Technologies, visit www.RockportTechnologies.com.