Australian HiFi November - December 2020

I am a great fan of active subwoofers. That in itself is a curious sentence, because many years ago, I would have started this column with the sentence ‘I am a great fan of active and passive subwoofers’ or just, perhaps, ‘I am a great fan of subwoofers.’ I say this because back in the day before digital signal processing was easily available, the performance of active and passive subwoofers was identical, assuming all components were equal. The only difference was that an active subwoofer had the amplifier inside the cabinet, while a passive subwoofer meant you had to provide an external amplifier. DSP moved the goalposts because subwoofer designers could use electronic equalisation to modify the performance of the driving amplifier to extract maximum possible performance from the driver,…

WILSON AUDIO SABRINA UPGRADED Wilson Audio has upgraded its smallest floor-standing loudspeaker, the Sabrina. “The new Wilson Audio SabrinaX is a ground-up rethinking of the universally loved, small, floor-standing Sabrina that combines traditional Wilson hallmark attributes such as bass authority, dynamic resolution, midrange beauty and integrity, and a sense of inherent musical rightness,” said Nigel Ng, of Advance Audio, which distributes Wilson Audio in Australia. Whereas the original Sabrina used Wilson’s famous ‘X-Material’ only for its baffle and lower spike plate, the entire outer enclosure is now constructed from it. “The SabrinaX cabinet comes that much closer to the near-silent ideal Wilson has relentlessly pursued for decades,” said Ng. “Music emerges through SabrinaX from a blacker background. Bass transient performance and clarity are vastly improved. Listeners will hear superior silence between the…

You now own one of the most revered and highly acclaimed loudspeakers in the history of high fidelity audio. That sentence is on the certificate you get when you purchase a pair of Klipsch Heresy IV loudspeakers. They also have a very good claim to being the only loudspeakers that have been in continuous production for more than 50 years, because Paul Klipsch, who founded the company that still bears his name, built his first pair of Heresy speakers ‘way back in 1947. It’s the reason the Heresy model and its near relation, the Cornwall, are part of the Klipsch ‘Heritage’ Series. Oddly enough, the model name wasn’t ‘Heresy’ back in ‘47. Neither were the speakers sold as pairs. The original ‘Model H’ as it was called, was designed as a centre-channel…

Klipsch Heresy IV Loudspeakers Graph 1 shows the in-room frequency response of the Klipsch Heresy IV that was measured by Newport Test Labs and you can see that it’s very linear, such that across the frequencies encompassed by the graph, the trace is within ±3dB from 70Hz right up to the graphing limit (10kHz for this graph). The high-frequency response of the Klipsch Heresy IV is shown in detail in Graph 2, with the detail provided thanks to the gated measurement technique used by Newport Test Labs, which delivers the exact response that would be obtained if the speaker had been measured in an anechoic chamber (i.e., no room effects). The first thing to note is that the response is almost identical no matter whether the grille is fitted or not, so…

LOUDSPEAKERS If you’re a small, boutique hi-fi manufacturar that wants to save money on something that has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the products you’re making, one way to do this is by cutting down on your photography costs, because professional photo shoots are expensive. And one way to do this is to build products that look identical, so you can get a profes- sional photographer to shoot one model, then use the same photographs for all your other models. Now I am not saying that this is the reason that Chario’s Constellation II Lynx looks identical to the Chario Constellation II Delphinus, but there’s no doubt that- in photographs at least-the two appear to be absolutely identical. However, just as the mother of identical twins can tell them…

You can see from the in-room on-axis frequency response measured by Newport Test Labs (Graph 1) that the Chario Con- stellation MkII Lynx has a response that’s clearly a little elevated at high frequen- cies plus it has a minor ‘kick’ upwards at around 150Hz, but overall, the response is very flat and linear, extending from 79Hz to 40kHz ±3dB. Graph 2 shows the high-frequency performance in greater detail, using a gating measurement technique that elim- inates room effects and therefore shows the ‘true’ response above 800Hz. You can see that the response is almost ruler-flat out to 6.5kHz, where there’s a minor dip followed by a 5dB rise that peaks at 8kHz after which it shelves out to 10kHz before rolling off slightly to 13kHz, after which it rises once…