 John DeVore is a relatively young guy, at least young enough that he hasn't lost his passion for life and what he does with his. He started DeVore Fidelity in 2000, and has been designing and producing loudspeakers that have garnered unanimous approval since the 90's. John isn't trying to reinvent the wheel, just produce loudspeakers that are truthful windows to the source material. DeVore Fidelity's product line isn't that deep, and he doesn't follow trends. John just makes good loudspeakers and let's them speak for themselves.
It's telling that John is a musician. Not that non-musicians should somehow be excluded from loudspeaker design, but for those of us who were driven from an early age to express ourselves through music, an ear for aural detail seems to be a common trait. His loudspeakers have a well-deserved reputation for reproducing that detail.
John's also a really nice guy and consented to do this interview some time ago when I contacted him out of the blue. He had a couple of hi-fi shows on his schedule, and I have had my hands full with things away from AV Enthusiast, but we finally reconnected. John was gracious enough to spend some time with us, and here is the result:
AV Enthusiast: First of all, thanks very much for giving us some of your time. How long have you been involved in loudspeaker design?
John DeVore: I built my first pair of speakers back in college, in 1986. I read everything I could find on the subject, made friends with several Hi-Fi sales guys in town and spent hours in their shops listening, and came up with these crazy-ambitious speakers that incorporated as much cutting-edge mid-80’s tech as possible: Dual, isobaric sealed woofers in a cylindrical enclosure; isolated Kevlar sandwich mid in it’s own “spherical” enclosure (this was before Gallo and B&W did it) a crazy, high-order crossover with a full set of compensation networks in it’s own chamber. They inhaled current but could really breathe fire.
AVE: Did you work for anyone else prior to establishing DeVore Fidelity?
JD: No other manufacturers, but I worked in the New York Hi-Fi retail world for years. After college I snagged a job at Stereo Exchange. This was in the days before Audiogon, when real brick-and-mortar shops dealt in used gear and “The Exchange” was the global Mecca for really high-end used equipment. Hog Heaven for a dork like me. I got to play around with everything, from every brand—Levinson ML-2s, ARC D-150s, CJ Premier 3s, Apogees, Duntechs, Altecs, Infinity IRS, even a full HQD system. AVE: Is your educational background related to this field, or did you go to school to learn something altogether different?
JD: I went to the Rhode Island School of Design and studied fine arts and illustration. They have an incredible range of courses though, and I was all over the place, soaking everything up like a sponge. I managed to get credit for that first pair of speakers.
AVE: Are there any designers that you particluarly admire or whose work inspired you when you decided to start designing loudspeakers?
JD: Absolutely. Having been in the industry for a couple of decades I’ve accumulated a pretty long list of designers I admire for various reasons, here’s a very incomplete list: John Bau, Joachim Gerhardt, James Lansing, Ed Meitner, Nelson Pass, Franco Serblin, Peter Snell, Bruce Thigpen, and Peter Walker.  AVE: I have to ask about the inverted driver arrangement. There have been other designs throughout the years that have employed it, but as far as I know only DeVore Fidelity and Mission have made it synonymous with their designs.
JD: A few reasons actually. The first, which I think I share with Mission and a few others, is response. Making sure the polar tilt of the system is aligned to where the listener is going to put his or her ears is one of the most important things a speaker designer must consider.
My version of the inverted layout (I use the term ”inverted” under mild protest, as far as I’m concerned, everyone else is inverted) gets the tilt so that, with proper speaker position, the correct listening axis is just above the cabinet height, allowing a nice, small cabinet that works well in almost any setting (the lower cabinet height is another related reason.) The layout also has to do with woofer loading. The loading I’ve come up with works best when the woofer is at one end of the internal volume. It simplifies the acoustic madness that occurs in speaker cabinets significantly, and allows for a much more targeted approach to internal treatments. And it just sounds better to me. AVE: I have always found the conventional loudspeakers that pleased me the most situated the tweeters near ear level, approximately 37-40 inches in my listening room. Explain to me why I'm wrong and what the inverted driver geometry does to the sound waves and the way I perceive the frequency response at my listening position.
JD: Most designers (and design software, not coincidentally) will optimize a driver layout and crossover for the tweeter axis. That’s why they sound best that way. I don’t because of the reasons above. Also our tweeters have about half the radiating diameter of most, giving our speakers an additional octave of good dispersion above what most designs can achieve, so we’re not forced to put tweeters up at ear height. In addition, the rake-angle adjustment of gibbons and Silverbacks will put the listener’s ears closer to the tweeter axis than you might think. AVE: Your loudspeakers do not provide a second set of binding posts for biamping/biwiring, which answers the question of which side of that fence you sit on...
 JD: Correct. All our speakers are completely star-grounded. You can’t do that with a standard biwire input. The vast majority of dual binding post designs are purely marketing hype.
Back when Jacques Mahul was still in charge of design at JM Labs, the cheaper speaker models came biwire capable, but his signature line, the Utopia series were mostly single wire. Wilson, Thiel and many others feel the same way. There are real, legitimate designs out there that should be biwired, like Vandersteen and a few others, but if a speaker system is designed to be single-wire, it will sound best that way.
I’m sure I’m going to get blasted by people who have done tests. Of course if you test on a speaker that has multiple inputs, it will always sound best biwired. But if you took that same speaker and redesigned it with all the same drivers and crossover components, but optimized for a single-wire input the results would be different. AVE: Interconnects and speaker cable are big business, with speaker cables being sold in hi-fi boutiques that eclipse the cost of some people's entire systems. There are hi-fi accessories on the market that I can only qualify as snake oil.
In your opinion is a 12ga. wire a 12ga. wire, or do you fall into the camp that believes interconnects and cables are as important as the components?
JD: Well, there’s no getting around the fact that different cables do sound different. There was a test recently where a panel of “audiophiles” preferred a coat hanger to a set of expensive cables. Whatever else, it does prove there is an audible difference. AVE: I have heard loudspeakers that are impartial transducers. I have heard loudspeakers that impart "warmth" and "body" to everything they reproduce, as well as loudspeakers that etch everything in icy, in your face detail. I happen to think that pursuing transparency or a pleasing house sound are both viable design goals, and will appeal to different listeners.
What has your goal been when you sat down to create a new design: picture window to the source material, or do you take artistic liberty with the frequency response to achieve a sound that is pleasing to you?
 JD: This is tricky one. All my designs are conceived as purely transparent windows to the musical event, and the higher up in the line you go, the clearer and larger that window gets. The problem here is the definition of transparency.
Most of the speakers that are referred to as “impartial” or “revealing” are actually not. Everything imparts some of its character on the audio chain, and speakers that are described using the terms above do too. Often a speaker deemed revealing of the source or transparent is actually just filtering out certain elements such as warmth, midrange weight or microdynamics, imparting a cool, “detailed” sound that is just as colored as a speaker that errs in the other direction. There’s something transparent about a single-driver speaker with no crossover components, even though it might be horribly bandwidth-limited or colored. Some other massive design in which every possible correction network and damping method has been utilized to give the flattest possible anechoic response might seem to be a transparent window, but it has such complexity and reactance that an amplifier must work overtime to simply drive it in a linear fashion. This is not real transparency either.
The speaker is a part of the whole system. If the speaker forces an amp to struggle outside of it’s comfort-zone, it doesn’t matter how transparent it claims to be—something in the system is not optimized. A speaker can’t be anything unless it’s part of an audio system. AVE: Is multichannel a consideration for you? Do you feel that a loudspeaker needs to be designed with different criteria in mind for multichannel use, or do you subscribe to the school that believes if a loudspeaker excels for two channel, it will also follow that it's multichannel performance will be exemplary?
JD:I think a speaker with no weaknesses in audio reproduction is going to be a great choice for a home theater as well. If a speaker has some weakness in either a music system or a movie system, it really has a weakness in both. A great speaker should be great with Bach, Basie or the Beastie Boys. If it can handle that, it can handle Bertolucci. AVE: You have established a small line of very well regarded loudspeakers. Has there been a time when you asked yourself what the hell you'd gotten yourself into, or has it been pretty smooth sailing for DeVore Fidelity?
JD: I love what I do. Sometimes I feel like the luckiest guy on earth on my way to work (especially if I’ve missed rush hour.) Of course it’s not easy running a business, but I’ve been lucky and my designs have been embraced by reviewers, retailers and customers right from the start.
Lucky indeed. John has established his own company, doing something he loves, and the accolades have been universal for the products of his labor. While I would argue that fellow New Yorker Anthony Bourdain is the luckiest guy on earth, the rest of us are doing pretty good if we can sustain ourselves by doing something we enjoy. John has a pretty impressive list of accomplishments under his belt at this early point in his career.
Thanks again to John DeVore for giving us some of his time. For more on DeVore Fidelity, head over to their official website. Also, be sure to give John's loudspeakers an audition the next time you are in the market for a really good loudspeaker.
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