One of the ongoing quests in the speaker design arena is the pursuit of the perfect cone material. In 1996, Sony introduced an entirely new material to the speaker manufacturing industry. Dubbed "HOP", Highly Oriented Polyolefine has several properties that make it a superior material for moving coil speaker cones.To properly perform its function, a speaker diaphragm must carefully balance between three fundamental properties. The material used must be as strong as possible, to resist flexing while moving air and to avoid creating harmonics caused by cone flex. It must be well-damped, so it doesn't produce any sounds of its own, outside those sent to it from the amplifier for reproduction. And it must be relatively light, so it can move quickly enough to accurately reproduce sound waves and transients. Weight is particularly important when reproducing small, quick wave forms, such as midrange and high frequencies. HOP is perfectly balanced between being strong and well-damped.

So how does HOP do it? It starts with Polyolefine, a plastic-based material. In the process of forming it into a cone shape, it's put through an extremely high pressure, high temperature injection-molding process that actually realigns the crystalline strands that make up the material. They go from a fairly random arrangement to an almost perfectly parallel orientation. This is the "Highly Oriented" part of HOP. It allows HOP to be Strong, Well-Damped and Light.

And because HOP is a relatively inexpensive material, this breakthrough technology has enabled us to incorporate this revolutionary material in our conventional lines of 2-way, 3-way and 4-way speakers. There are several immediate benefits of a speaker cone utilizing HOP material versus conventional PP. Over a given audio bandwidth, the HOP cone not only exhibits greater linearity, but does so even within the upper midrange and extending into the high frequency audio ranges than the PP cone.

This breakthrough technology allows for many more benefits over conventional speaker cone materials, including superior overall efficiency and the ability to handle more power.

In using a HOP woofer cone as part of a two-way or three-way speaker, the woofer can play through extended frequency ranges. As a result, we can raise the crossover points of the midrange and tweeter assemblies so their delicate voice coils and smaller diameter cones can handle more power at the frequencies for which tweeters and midrange drivers were designed. This means that you will hear more of your music through a cone that can vibrate air substantially better than a conventional tweeter. So, how does all of this come together in an actual speaker? Here, the three main benefits of HOP material used in conventional speaker cones are summarized.

1. The high modulus characteristic of HOP enables the speaker cone to play at extended frequency ranges. This simply means that the composition of HOP allows it to modulate audible frequencies at a higher rate, well within the high frequency range.

2. The low density of the material enables the diaphragm to play at higher sound pressure levels. The lighter the overall weight of the moving mass (the cone), the more efficiently the cone will operate. That means that every Sony speaker which utilizes HOP technology will need less power to produce the same level of sound pressure than a speaker designed with less efficient cone materials.

3. The high internal loss is what accounts for the overall flat frequency response. High internal loss is what gives a material the ability to dampen or absorb unwanted frequencies. Because HOP material has a high absorption coefficient, the speaker cone can immediately dampen secondary and tertiary harmonics. This means that the speaker cone material can quickly recover from reproducing one frequency and be immediately ready for the next. A speaker's ability to perform this task is what makes the overall imaging and soundstage of the music appear seamless.

Another important change in the speaker design is the shape of the cone. The concave parabolic shape produces a speaker that is more efficient in the midrange area than in previous designs. As a result, these speakers image very well. In fact, when compared to other speakers in their price range, they really jump off the board, not because they are unnaturally bright, like some speakers, but because they sound so good, it's readily apparent. The vocal images are very well placed, the high frequency transients are clear and natural and the lows are nice and tight. It's a sound that's unmatched in other speakers anywhere near their price range.