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hank you for your purchase of the 382isw, and for the trust that you’ve placed
in BBE. We are committed to bringing you the finest products, with useful
and unique features to serve your audio needs.
The BBE Sonic Maximizer is a two channel signal processor that will benefit any re-
cording or sound reproduction system. Whether you purchased the Sonic Maximizer
for your home studio, P.A., DJ system, or instrument rack, you will find the Sonic
Maximizer’s rugged construction and careful electronic design a welcome addition
to your sonic arsenal.
The BBE Process — “What it Is”
Loudspeakers have difculty working with the electronic signals supplied by an amplier. These difculties
cause such major phase and amplitude distortion that the sound reproduced by a speaker differs signicantly
from the sound produced by the original source.
In the past, these problems proved unsolvable and were thus delegated to a position of secondary
importance in audio system design. However, phase and amplitude integrity is essential to accurate sound
reproduction. Research shows that the information which the listener translates into the recognizable
characteristics of a live performance are intimately tied into complex time and amplitude relationships
between the fundamental and harmonic components of a given musical note or sound. These relationships
dene a sound’s “sound”.
When these complex relationships pass through a speaker, the proper order is lost. The higher frequencies
are delayed. A lower frequency may reach the listener’s ear rst or perhaps simultaneously with that of a
higher frequency. In some cases, the fundamental components may be so time-shifted that they reach the
listener’s ear ahead of some or all of the harmonic components.
This change in the phase and amplitude relationship on the harmonic and fundamental frequencies is
technically called “envelope distortion.” The listener perceives this loss of sound integrity in the reproduced
sound as “muddy” and “smeared.” In the extreme, it can become difcult to tell the difference between
musical instruments, for example, an oboe and a clarinet.
BBE Sound, Inc. conducted extensive studies of numerous speaker systems over a ten year period. With
this knowledge, it became possible to identify the characteristics of an ideal speaker and to distill the
corrections necessary to return the fundamental and harmonic frequency structures to their correct order.
While there are differences among various speaker designs in the magnitude of their correction, the overall
pattern of correction needed is remarkably consistent.
PRODUCT DESCRIPTION
The BBE 382isw is a Sonic Maximizer and sub-woofer lter network combined into one unit. The single
rack space device is for use in -10dBu unbalanced level applications. There are two separate channels that
share the same front panel Lo Contour control and Process control for ganged-stereo operation. A single
function button switches the BBE process on or off in both channels, which is useful for comparing the
processed sound to the unprocessed sound. An LED next to the function button glows green when the BBE
process is on and red when the process is off. The Lo Contour control is for adjusting the level of phase
corrected low frequencies in the program material. The Process control is for adjusting the level of phase
corrected high frequencies in the program material.
The SUB section consists of a FREQUENCY control and a LEVEL control. The phase corrected low
frequency information from both channels is summed together and directed through an 18dB/octave lter