Our
goal at DeVORE FIDELITY is to
create products that communicate the
life-breath of music. We believe that
the best means to this end combines the
art of aesthetics with the science of
physics in such a way that each
complements the other, and together
yield a product far greater than the sum
of its parts.
Founded by president
and chief designer John DeVore in 2000,
DeVORE FIDELITY has gone on to receive
universal acclaim for every one if its
products, and John continues to push the
state of the art in speaker design. John
brought his 30 years of experience as a
musician, 20 years of designing speakers
and 18 years of Hi-Fi industry
experience to his company, and, as the
Stereophile Newsletter put it in 2005,
"DeVore Fidelity is a young company, but
at Home Entertainment Shows and CESes
over the last half decade, its products
have pulled down critical kudos and
consumer raves that more established
companies would kill for."
John DeVore:
When I first came to New York, at the
end of the 80s, I was a musician who
also worked as a high-end audio
salesman. During that time I realized
that so many components that measure
well and sound impressive at first,
disappoint the listener in the long run
because they fail to convey those
ephemeral and fragile elements of music
through which the artists express their
intent. Although such qualities are
difficult to describe, they are
instantly recognizable when heard. For
example, it's easy to fool the ear into
perceiving a stereo image between a pair
of speakers, but to go beyond that and
convince the heart and mind that a
living, breathing soloist or ensemble
occupies the space between those
speakers represents the ultimate
challenge to the high-end audio
designer. The quest to recreate these
delicate emotional and visceral
subtleties of music - qualities I felt
were missing from most playback
equipment - ultimately led me to start
DeVORE FIDELITY.
I was into hi-fi
as early as 6th grade--I was fascinated
by the idea of recreating musical
performances in my room anytime I
wished. By the time I went to college, I
had begun to understand that you could
get really good sound out of a stereo
system. I started spending some time in
hi-fi shops where I came to two
realizations: 1) I could never afford
the stuff that came close to sounding
like live, and 2) that even the stuff
that came close didn't come that close.
I built my first
pair of speakers back in the mid-80's
when I was still an undergrad at the
Rhode Island School Of Design. Over the
course of a decade of hobbyist
experimentation, I began to zero in on
those design elements that allowed my
playback system to communicate more than
just the notes of a performance. I come
from a family of musicians. I grew up
listening to live chamber music in my
own house, and what I've always found
most lacking in recorded music playback
is the emotional content. I know
playback will never approach the live
experience, but it became my goal to
create audio equipment that brought the
listener into the listening experience,
and then held their interest there like
a live performance.
In 1995, I built a
speaker that encapsulated all the work
that had come before it. It was a small
two-way, but it was the first design to
use a new crossover circuit that I had
been evolving along with new approaches
to cabinet and driver integration.
Everything was designed together, as a
whole, with each element complimenting
the others. I recognized immediately
that it was something quite different
from all of the speakers I had
previously heard. That was the original
Gibbon speaker, and that same holistic
gibbon design methodology is at the
heart of every speaker I've designed
since. The concept of harmony is very
important to me. Not just in Hi-Fi but
as a world view. I guess that influences
my approach to design.
I believe that for
every problem there is one sublime
solution that encompasses both outward
and inward perfection. Pursuing designs
that embody both engineering and
artistic integrity holds the most reward
for me. A perfect design is not one
where form follows function, but rather
one where form and function are
developed as equals to form a unified
whole. Understanding all the design
elements of an audio component and
balancing these in a way that extracts
the optimal contribution of each is the
key to creating a design that conveys
the true emotional content of a recorded
musical performance. It is my belief
that DeVORE FIDELITY speakers have the
ability to involve the listener in his
or her music collection more intimately
than any other similarly priced
products. For those select listeners
capable of discerning the differences
between Hi-Fi and reality, I am proud to
offer the Silverback and Gibbon series
loudspeakers: nothing can bring you
closer to the music.
John DeVore
President and chief designer |
