Siegfried publicly announced the details of the change from Orion+ (2.0) to Revision 3.0 at the end of July. By mid September, he released the details for 3.2 and then posted a minor change affecting the bass response in October, leaving us at 3.2.1.

At the Burning Amp Festival in San Francisco on October 30, 2010, I was surprised and gratified to learn that I had had some effect on this step in the evolution of the Orions. During his presentation there, Siegfried said that several people had “approved” 3.0 before he made it public, and that “some people” weren’t happy with the results, causing him to continue development until 3.2 was done. He gave me a shout out as someone who thought 3.0 wasn’t quite right.

I mentioned my surprise about this to Siegfried’s wife Eike after the talk and she confirmed that I was the only holdout. The weeks between 3.0 and 3.2 were a time of great difficulty for me, since my Orions never sounded right as I struggled between tuning the levels to get the proper harmonic structure by balancing the levels of the drivers’ ranges, changing the filters many times based on Siegfried’s and Don Lancaster’s Barringer’s interim recommendations, and also throwing a few of my own experiments into the mix.

Eike made an audio recording of Siegfried’s talk which is available as an mp3 file from his website. The recording is an hour and a half long.

Here is a transcription of part of his talk starting at 41:39 in the recording:

So we played around with this, this turned out to be version 2 [referring to a label on a graph] and since all this stuff that I’m doing is DIY so people are out there, I said “Okay” and we came up with this equalization, and people built it and so we were pretty excited.

And then some people in here, I think some are in the audience here…yes, there’s someone [SL looks around for me, I wave, he waves back], Eric out there said, “This is not [laughs], this is not right!”  [laughs] He gave it one of these. [Siegfried pantomimes my disapproval]

As a matter of fact before we even published it on the web I asked several people, to say, “Try this out, to see what you think.” You know, there were reports came back positive. His didn’t come back positive [motions to me, laughs] but by that time I think we had it already on the web site, and so we said, we better do some more working on there.

And so we continue working, and then the next version was this one, the straight line. I thought it worked pretty good, but Don had problems here at the low end…