That's not the official tag line of Haliaetus, a website reader Angelo hipped me to. It was my instinctual uneducated reaction of ridicule and an ex-marketeer's expert marksmanship before I dove deeper into the accompanying text that explains the rationale for exhausts on speakers. In brief, it's got to do with eliminating turbulences in conventional ports and how improving aerodynamic flow via this firm's acoustic nozzle technology is claimed to improve measurable and audible performance. The HA-325 Firebird depicted is currently the top-line concept implementation of this technology which seems backed by many Audio Engineering Society white papers. Before you thus laugh and write off the above speaker due to its unusual appearance, it might behoove you to investigate this website further. Haliaetus claims improved time-domain performance and elimination of parasitic aerodynamic noise components from conventional port loading which are claimed to extend up to 1kHz, particularly at high playback levels when port loading goes nonlinear.


This isn't quite as bizarre as it may seem. Zu Cable's Griewe loading too is based on motorcyle exhaust theory and according to Zu's engineers, the current implementation in their Druid is a very basic and simplified form of the fully optimized solution which requires a discrete and complex internal airflow cartridge. Such a fully realized Griewe loading could one day appear in a costlier Zu model but would remain hidden inside the loudspeaker chassis rather than be proudly visible as in Haliaetus' proposed realization.