Involve Audio’s Y4 system brings the holy grail of speakers to your loungeroom
Electrostatic speakers offer a pure listening experience, but they’ve always been big, bulky and awkward. Until now, that is.
He’s an inventor working on the cutting edge of audio innovation … but as a child growing up in the 1960s, Charlie van Dongen was more accustomed to the sound of silence.
The son of a single mother who made ends meet working as a live-in maid, there were two things expected of van Dongen: keep quiet, and keep out of sight. Annoying his rich hosts, after all, might render him homeless … something almost, but not quite as bad, as dealing with the wrath of his hot-tempered mother, Joanna.
“She was difficult … very headstrong,” van Dongen recalls.
“She was a disciplinarian … you had to be punctual and if you were a minute late, that was the death penalty.”
Meeting Charlie van Dongen today – an inventor with more than a dozen patents to his name across audio, power and battery technology – it’s difficult to imagine him as the shy young boy who could barely finish a school term before moving house and enrolling somewhere new. But that was his and his mother’s lot. Their journey through the homes of some of the most well-to-do Melburnians even included a stint in the home of legendary racing driver Stan Jones, whose son Alan would go on to win the Formula 1 world championship in 1980.
“They probably don’t remember me, but I was five years old and Alan was 19. I remember him (Alan) driving me around in his MG,” van Dongen says.
“I was often living in quite well-appointed houses with, shall we say, quite well-off people. But I knew I was just the servant’s boy and it sort of breeds in you what’s known as inspirational dissatisfaction … I suppose that situation fires you up in a way.”
Van Dongen’s first “invention” was a homemade transistor radio that he built from parts salvaged from neighbourhood rubbish bins. Fast forward to 2022, and he is the director and chief technology officer for Involve Audio, which is reimagining sound with groundbreaking products including the Y4. One of the few consumer-targeted audio systems using electrostatic speakers, the Y4 looks nothing like a typical soundbar.
“The guy who designed the ancestor for this technology (electrostatic speakers) describes them as ‘singing flyscreens’ … I think that’s a good summary of it,” van Dongen says. “For your snob-level audiophile, electrostatic speakers were the holy grail of loudspeakers … but the trouble is they are so expensive and they were usually about as big as me, doorway size.
“So my business partner, Dawson Johns, nagged me for years to make them small … bookshelf size. We worked on a whole bunch of things to shrink that size down and we’ve achieved that.”
Those loungeroom-friendly electrostatic speakers come to life when paired with Involve Audio’s patented “sweet spot technology” (SST), which van Dongen has spent years developing.
Using psychoacoustics – “basically how your head works in how you perceive sound”, van Dongen explains – SST separates multiple tracks and delivers them to the speakers in a manner that resembles the direction they were originally recorded from.
“The brain can really only listen to one sound at a time in one direction at a time, so if you’ve got a bunch of simultaneous events happening around you, you can’t tell where the sound’s coming from. That’s basically what we’ve created,” Chavan Dongen says.
Having sampled a range of movies, television shows and music through the Y4, this reporter can verify that it’s a unique listening experience. Watching the recently released The Matrix Resurrections, I caught myself looking over my shoulder at the sound of gunshots and breaking glass in action sequences. It was a similarly ear-opening experience listening to my musical favourites, in which I was able to pick up vocals and backing instruments I never realised were present.
And the futuristic look of the smooth-edged subwoofers combined with the electrostatic speakers certainly give a different look to one’s lounge room.
The Y4 retails for $6600. Visit newsoundtech.com for details.
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