This review has been a long time coming, so my apologies to the owner of the speakers for the delay. A couple months back I took a vacation down to Snowshoe Mountain in West Virginia for some family skiing. As the weather was warm, the conditions poor, and my ski boots unbearably painful, I decided to take a ‘small’ detour to go visit a forum member in Virginia to meet face to face and listen to his home-built speakers. By ‘small’, I mean five hours through twisty mountain roads. Word to the wise: don’t always take the shortest route Google Maps provides. After much fun but exhausting driving, I finally arrived at my destination ready to listen to some music.
I must confess that there was some bias involved. Before I visited, the speakers in question were referred to as teleportation devices. I was quite skeptical of the claim, but I was intrigued to find out just what made the owner make such statements. Upon arrival, I inspected the listening room. The windows had been covered with boards to ensure total light control and acoustic symmetry in the room. The air conditioning unit for the room was located in another part of the house and run through a closet as a baffle. Various mineral wool and acoustic foam treatments were placed precisely about the room. The house is located in a very rural area, so in combination with the treatments and the low-noise electronics, the noise floor in the room was at THX standard levels (20dB). There was no doubt; this was a very serious dedicated listening room.
The electronics stack was interesting. Nestled between more treatments (that I will discuss the significance of later), was an older H&K stereo receiver, an Adcom amplifier, a Behringer DCX2496, and an older Pioneer magazine-based CD-changer.
But what about the speakers?
They’re odd-looking, to say the least. The top-mounted Linaeum tweeter is a very strange looking device, and the large distance on the front baffle between the Focal midrange and Kicker woofer is equally disconcerting after looking at so many ‘conventional’ loudspeakers. The speakers also lack the conventional spikes, instead sitting on custom-made-and-matched isolation stands to mechanically decouple them from the carpeted floor. The knuckle-rap test was the first indication (aside from the odd appearance) that I was in for something special. It was like knocking on a concrete wall. I have never in my life experienced a loudspeaker enclosure as well-damped and dead as this. I can say with confidence that virtually any other speaker on the market is a resonant sound-box compared to these cabinets.
The owner explained to me the purpose of the various design choices. The Linaeum tweeter, although far from perfect, exhibits near-omnipolar response as frequency increases. The woofer was chosen because of its high linearity and low power compression. The midbass unit was chosen because of its lack of resonances, its then-excellent dispersion, and good linearity within the range it was to be used. The midbass is also isolated from the cabinet baffle via an internal suspension system to help combat destructive cabinet resonance. The enclosure was designed to be extremely dead to ensure that no coloration in the midrange could be added by cabinet resonance. In addition, the lower section of the enclosure was designed so the woofer does not operate in a band that coincides with the resonant frequency of any of the speaker panels, thereby eliminating any resonance issues that might occur between the driver and the cabinet. After hearing these speakers, I would say that the effort made on the enclosure was definitely not in vain. It’s amazing just how colored most speakers are.
The speakers, unlike most, utilize and active crossover, meaning that each driver gets its own amplifier channel. Equalization is applied to each driver individually to yield the best sound and desired frequency response. These speakers are designed with a frequency response curve similar to but more aggressive than the Toole curve. This means that they are not flat, but have a gradual roll off in the high frequencies that, as perceptual research by Floyd Toole has shown, is what most people perceive to be flat.
After a dizzying explanation of the internal construction of the speakers, we finally sat down to enjoy some music. After loading some various jazz, Mapleshade classical, and Steely Dan into the magazine, the lights were killed and the ceiling treatments were adjusted (bare for classical, Echobusters at the primary reflection points for studio music), I hit play.
I don’t remember the order in which I listened, nor do I recall all of the material I listened to, but a partial list is below:
Steely Dan – Aja
Donald Fagen – The Nightfly
Ani DiFranco – Reprise
Depeche Mode – Playing the Angel
Various Mapleshade Recordings
Various Jazz Recordings
I was absolutely blown away. I’ve never before heard such realistic speakers. I was transported to the original recording venue on the live recordings. The studio recordings were presented with such detail and depth that it’s hard to convey in words. The backing vocals on Deacon Blues were so full and 3D that I was taken aback. I’ve listened to the Aja recording literally hundreds, if not over a thousand times, and it was the first time I’d ever heard that kind of sound. It was the deepest I’d ever ‘seen’ into the mix on the album. Fagen’s Nightfly album yielded similar results. Depeche Mode created an electronic world that I felt I could reach out and touch. Ani DiFranco was amazing as well; her voice and the instruments were just so real. Every part of the spectrum sounded so right; every driver blended together seamlessly. They really did teleport you to the original recording. I could go on and on throwing out fluffy audiophile terms in an attempt to communicate what I heard, but the best description I can offer is this: simply real.
Such praise creates the need for comparisons, however unscientific. The two closest competitors to these speakers are the Linkwitz Orions and Vandersteen 2CE Signature, in that order. It should be known that the Orions, while good in a traditional sense, are a distant second place. They simply are not as realistic. The same goes for the Vandersteens. I feel that the 2CE signatures present a tremendous value as a loudspeaker, but they still pale in comparison to the speakers I heard in Virginia.
Like any good speakers, these models revealed anomalies in the source material. Mapleshade recordings, while good, sounded very obviously inferior to many high quality digital recordings. The tape hiss was very apparent, as was the incompetence on the part of the engineer. On several classical pieces I could distinctly hear where dynamic peaks caused tape saturation, resulting in a much less realistic experience.
After a few hours of uninterrupted listening, I had to find out just what made these speakers sound so much better than others and why the design was pursued. The designer spent many hours reading the perceptual research of Floyd Toole and other contributors to AES to learn about speaker design characteristics, different acoustical environments, and how different phenomena are audible or inaudible and how they affect the final sound. Through his research he discovered that speakers with flat frequency response (up to about 14 kHz), wide if not omnipolar dispersion, and flat power compression result in superior sound. He learned about the detrimental effects of cabinet resonance and other vibration-based colorations. Using this knowledge and research, he ended up with the present design and room setup and treatment.
Another instrumental part of the design and tweaking process was the use of controlled listening tests. Friends and acquaintances were brought in to evaluate the speakers and give feedback. The listening evaluation sheets were based on Harman perceptual principles so that the data gathered from the tests could be correlated to speaker and acoustical properties that could be modified and improved. Many measurements of the speakers were performed in the room to verify and adjust the performance of the speakers in an objective matter.
The acoustical treatment of the room is also somewhat different than one would normally expect to see. Large bass traps lie on the floor to the sides of the listening position and behind the speakers. Broadband traps are located in the corners behind each speaker, but not directly behind. The primary reflection points on the side walls are not treated. Thick absorbers are also placed around the central equipment stack to both prevent reflections off the electronics and also to eliminate stereo crosstalk behind the speakers (remember, they are partially omnipolar). Lastly, there are two foam absorbers on the primary reflection points on the ceiling that are adjusted depending on the source material. I think the most interesting part of the acoustical treatment setup is the lack of absorption or diffusion at on the walls at the primary reflection point. To demonstrate the reason behind this choice (and the lack of back-wave absorbers), the designer grabbed some extra treatments and used those to absorb those two points. To my amazement, the realism was gone! The depth and fullness of the backup vocalists on Deacon Blues went flat and returned to the “normal” stereo sound. It didn’t sound bad, but it was rather lifeless after the previous experience.
