THOMAS BAREFOOT: So, I'm Thomas Barefoot, Barefoot Sound, the Micromain 27's. The design is essentially a near-field with integrated subwoofers. It's a three-way system.

It translates like a near-field so essentially we have your typical near-field type of speaker with mid-basses and tweeters. The real differences are that the subs are in the same system, small, lots of power. This whole concept has come out really only, I think sort of been possible in recent years because in order to -- when you build a speaker that has a sealed box, and sealed boxes are really the way to go because it has the best transient response. But the problem is if you try to put a sealed speaker into a small box, it doesn't go very low. The trade-off that you have, in order to make it go low, is either efficiency or power, and nowadays power is almost free. You can get really high-quality power in a small space, excellent linearity, so now what you can do is you can take that, use that power, which is there practically free nowadays, build yourself a small box, very rigid, excellent control, and most of all a sealed box because you're [SOUNDS LIKE] maximizing transient response then you just throw power at it and push it down and let it go really deep in a small near-field size, so you have sort of the best of both worlds. You have something that translates the same way as a near-field, that goes deep like a mastering speaker, so it's really, works just -- it's all in. You can have the equivalent of a mastering speaker sitting on your console.

I had always been building hi-fi speakers for a while. I really only got into recording very recently and started getting on some of the internet forums, and just building speakers kind of in the background, and threw a lot of conversations online and sort of synthesizing what people were saying. This sort of thing didn't really exist before, and I could just sort of sense that people were looking for something almost like a Swiss-Army-Knife approach to a monitor that something that can do it all. They don't have an extra 10 grand to have these huge monitors sitting up in their you know -- main monitors that they might only use every once in a while just to impress clients, but here's a near-field monitor that does everything. It's your daily workhorse, translates perfectly, but then when your clients come in and you want to turn up the volume and it just keeps going and going and going with plenty of power to spare, 500 watts in the subs; that's what I was talking about throwing lots of power at it, 250 watts in the mid-bass, and 100 watts in the tweeters.

Those are the MiniMain 12's. These are the prototypes, not quite yet. The original speaker that I designed was the MiniMain 12, and that was the one that really sort of brought this whole concept of a mixing and near-field monitor with a main monitor and a master monitor, and so now they've been redesigned. They actually take some of the design technology that had developed for the MicroMain 27, dual opposing subs, that sort of thing but just sort of taking it to the nth degree so for people who just want absolutely no-holds-barred performance and probably have money to spare, so.

INTERVIEWER: What kind of amplifier [INAUDIBLE]?

THOMAS BAREFOOT: These are going to be 1,000 watts in the subs, Bryston SST amplifiers driving the mid-bass, and all the tweeter amplifiers I designed and build. So because you have subs on the sides, there's the obvious challenge that if you want to put the speakers -- you want to mount the speakers in their sides, you can't have the sub obviously sitting on the ground, so we basically just designed these sort of legs that you can bolt on to the side of the cabinet and turn the speaker over on the side.