Sound + Imageの July - August 2022 の目次

Here’s a little tale of two technologies. The first is ‘high-res audio’ or, as it appears on the little gold logo which is a registered trademark of the Japan Audio Society, ‘Hi-Res Audio’. It’s not really a technology in itself, just very big audio files with loads of extra information to go beyond CD quality, much as 8K video pictures have loads more information in them than 1080p videos. With high-res audio this includes frequencies we can’t hear, above those on CDs. But the thing with high-res audio is that it is deliberately overengineered, just so we can be sure we’re not missing anything. The second technology is Bluetooth. By many yardsticks, Bluetooth has been an amazingly successful technology for wireless audio transmission. It’s available on everything, on Apple and…

Here we come to the second of the Australian speaker brands in this round-up, Richter, with this Harlequin one of its longest-running designs. It is the company’s most compact floorstander, the larger ones being the Wizard in this group, and the new range-topping Excalibur revealed in News (p9); as with most other speakers in this group it can be used in stereo, as reviewed here, or at the front of a home cinema set-up, for which Richter has on its books an award-winning Mk V centre-channel speaker, rear-suited standmounts and the legendary Thor 10.6, a Sound+Image award-winning subwoofer. Equipment The first thing notable about the Harlequin is that except for the $15,500 Vivid Kaya 25 (p74) this is the only two-way, two-driver floorstanding loudspeaker in this entire group. That’s unusual…

When California-based Sound United Polk decided to upgrade one of its best-sellers, the outgoing S60 floorstanders, it went all-out with the changes: new bass/midrange drivers, a new crossover, re-vamped internal bracing and a whole new exterior. In fact the only components it has kept in common with the older model are that unusual 25mm Terylene-dome tweeter, a cascading tapered crossover design, and the fact that the cabinet is — despite its newly remodelled exterior — still a bass-reflex floorstanding one. Equipment There are three floorstanders in the Polk Signature Elite range, but this ES60 is the tallest and loudest, and has the most extended bass. The ES50 has only two bass/midrange drivers, both smaller than the three in the ES60, while the ES55 has the same-sized bass/midrange drivers as the…

It’s very lucky that Krix is a privately-owned Australian company; if Krix had been a normal company, the original Neuphonix design might never have seen the light of day, and this MkII would then never have existed. Most loudspeaker companies are market-driven, which means they build what their customers want. And the sad truth is that most people don’t want large, heavy loudspeaker cabinets and might not see the point of having five drivers in each cabinet, and most especially any need for eight bass drivers. But because Krix has Scott Krix at the helm, and he knows that in order to build a great-sounding speaker, it will have to be large, heavy and have four expensive bass drivers in each cabinet, plus a midrange driver and also a tweeter……

If Revel speakers aren’t yet on your radar, well they should be. For starters, they come from a stable which ticks all the boxes for superb speaker design. Revel has a dream team of talented and experienced designers, including three of the world’s most famous: Dr Sean Olive (who started his audio career working with Dr Floyd E. Toole at Canada’s National Research Council), Kevin Voecks (who helped found Mirage before becoming chief engineer at Snell), and Mark Glazer (Jumetite Labs and Infinity Systems, where he worked with Arnie Nudell). As for research and development resources, Revel is owned by Harman International, which has the best acoustic labs and listening rooms in the world, in particular its famous ‘shuffle’ comparator. Manufacturing? This is the company that also builds products for…

Closing off our group of price-ascending floorstanders, then, please welcome the magnificent JBL K2. These are named after the world’s second highest mountain, because yes, the company also has a still higher ‘Everest’ loudspeaker, though they might consider more properly renaming that as Kanchenjunga these days, whereas the Karakorum mountain K2 has so many name variations (Qogir Feng, Mount Godwin, Austen, Dapsang, Chogori) that we’ll not quibble here. Besides, we go all weak-kneed fanboys around the K2. It’s simply one of the best loudspeakers we’ve ever heard. Equipment It’s not, of course, going to be for everyone, even for those who can stretch to its price. Some won’t get on with the retro appearance, the unfashionable non-tower proportions (they are wider than they are deep), even the fact they use…

Richter Richter Excalibur S6SE & the new black Australia’s Richter has been busy in the design room to celebrate its 35th anniversary, and the results are now announced — two Series 6 ‘Special Editions’, one of which is an entirely new range-topping floorstanding speaker design, the Excalibur. “We’ve had this bigger floorstanding project on the table for a number of years now, ” Richter’s Managing Director Brian Rodgers tells us. “Many times we were asked, is there going to be a larger floorstanding speaker — a Series 6 Dragon? But I wasn’t interested in a Series 6 Dragon, and nor was Martin [Dr Martin Gosnell, chief designer]. In the Mk V Series we’d had too many close floorstanding models, with a Wizard, a Harlequin and a Dragon: they cannibalised each…

Elac might wish to apply a few edits to its Wikipedia page; this accurately dates the German company to 1926 and gives its original name of ‘Electroacustic GmbH’, now abbreviated to the modern brand. But then it expends almost a fifth of the subsequent word count on its early sonar development and research of waterborne signals and sound for Germany’s navy. The company’s achievements in the second half of its near-century deserve to fill many more pages, with innovative turntables and electronics as the mainstay of its post-war decades, until it developed its first loudspeakers in 1984, with a notable early success being an omnidirectional tweeter, the 4Pi. The longevity of this innovation alone is remarkable: audiophiles seeking high-resolution highs can today order themselves an Elac 4Pi Plus.2 super-tweeter, still…

Our abiding memory of Acoustic Energy goes back 28 years, at an interesting time during the company’s history. It was only eight years after the company had been founded by Phil Jones in West London; Jones had grown up sitting in on his father’s big-band rehearsals, and became a bass guitarist himself, as well as an electronics enthusiast, building an AM radio at the aged of nine, and a bass guitar amp at 16. Realising he could do better, he got ever deeper into loudspeaker design, beginning — as did so many speaker designers of that and later eras — with Gilbert Brigg’s classic Loudspeakers: The Why and How of Good Reproduction, first published back in 1948 (and still available on Amazon today!). His preferences in the art of speaker…

We’ve already seen the smaller sibling to this loudspeaker in the Harlequin, an unusual two-way floorstander with usefully compact dimensions. But move up to the larger Wizard from this Australian company’s Series 6, and you gain in a number of ways. The cabinet is larger — only 7cm higher but significantly deeper, so that the overall volume increases by perhaps a third over the more compact Harlequin. And of course the main change is visible on the front baffle, assuming that you’re not going for the sleek grilled look shown opposite: the Wizard has a pair of the 165mm composite paper-cone woofers, rather than just the one. And as we presaged in the previous review, the key result of the driver and cabinet expansion is the ability to deliver more…

This is the largest loudspeaker in DALI’s ‘Oberon’ range, Oberon being king of the fairies – though Shakespeare had promoted him from mere elf. There’s certainly nothing at all elfish about the Oberon 9s, which stand a full 117cm high, with an impressive baffle-wide armada of drivers on display – two bass drivers, a midrange driver and a tweeter. The model number refers to the diameter in inches of the two bass drivers (so that the Oberon 7 has seven-inch bass drivers, the Oberon 5 has five-inch bass drivers; the naming system breaks down with the Oberon 3 and Oberon 1). Equipment A nine-inch (230mm) bass driver is fairly unusual, and it comes about because DALI is one of the few manufacturers that builds its own bass drivers, so it…

RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS Unlimited Love First album in six years, and third turn from guitarist John Frusciante. We yearn to shine a light in the world, to uplift, connect and bring people together, ” said the Chili Peppers in a collective statement heralding their latest album. “Each of the songs on our new album is a facet of us, reflecting our view of the universe. This is our life’s mission.” The Chili Peppers collective is now minus guitarist Josh Klinghoffer, who parted company amicably with the group, with John Frusciante replacing his own replacement to play with the band for the first time since 2006. Rick Rubin, meanwhile, with whom Klinghoffer did not always get along creatively, is reinstalled as producer. And, while the 17 songs of ‘Unlimited Love’…

Here’s the first of five Australian loudspeaker designs in our round-up, all of which highlight the potential benefits of buying a local brand. With global supply chain issues and shipping costs through the roof since Covid, local production brings even greater cost advantages, while the lack of a third-party distributor potentially removes a profit stage from the purchase. It all makes for better value. Krix certainly shows the goods on offer with its entry-level Phoenix Mk2, which is made in its South Australian headquarters and priced at $1995 a pair in black woodgrain or $2495 in the stunning Blackwood shown left, or dark Atlantic Jarrah (see below right). Although titled as a Mk2 design, it was far more than a simple update, introducing new drivers and also altering the whole…

Our next floorstander is a French design, from a company which has been making solid and sometimes radical speaker designs for more than 40 years. And if you’re thinking that ‘Triangle’ is a strange choice of name for a company making rectangular boxes, that’s because their debut model back in 1980 was a tower with a distinctive triangular upper enclosure — or a square-based pyramidal frustum if you want to be entirely geometrically accurate, but where’s the brand name in that? Triangle’s Borea range is its entry-level offering, yet is wide in what it offers, with two standmounts, a centre-channel speaker, Atmos-enabled modules and three floorstanders in the range, of which these Borea BR08s are the middle of the three. Clearly floorstanders either side of $2k (these are $2250) face…

Here we have the second pair of floorstanders available from South Australia’s Krix. Compared with the Phoenix Mk2 models we heard earlier, these Harmonix Mk2 add a fairly minimal 9cm to the height, yet the overall increase in volume adds nearly 50% increase in volume; likewise the weight of each speaker rises from 18kg to 28kg. So this is a far more substantial pair of floorstanders. Equipment The Harmonix also come equipped with plenty of firepower, in the form of dual bass drivers, a separate midrange driver and a dual-concentric tweeter. It’s a reflex design, so that Krix is harnessing the energy from the rear of the bass drivers that would be wasted in an infinite baffle design. It’s also a true three-way design, with all of that design type’s…

You don’t need too close a look at the Paradigm Premier 800F floorstanders to realise that they have some pretty unusual technology — one look at the midrange driver shows that. If you do look closer, you’ll find even more unusual technology. The famous Canadian manufacturer has really thrown all its recent technological breakthroughs into this four-driver, three-way range-topper. Equipment The most obvious technology sits in front of the Premier 800F’s 165mm midrange driver. This is a carbon-infused polypropylene cone, but in front is what Paradigm calls a patented ‘Perforated Phase-Aligning’ (PPA) lens, which it says “increases and smooths its output without colouring the sound”. The idea of a dispersion/phase-alignment device in front of a driver is not a new idea — loudspeaker manufacturers have been putting them in front…

When we spoke recently with Philip Swift, the wise and enthusiastic owner of Spendor loudspeakers, he explained to us how the company’s three ranges of loudspeakers have each been developed with a particular type of customer in mind. The divisions between the A-Line, the D-Line and the Classics are more about sound character and style than technology or performance, he told us. “A few years back we asked ourselves, ‘How do we communicate who we are and what we do on a consistent global basis to our increasingly diverse but ever more discerning and aware – via the internet – target audience’, ” Swift says. “We identified three groups, which internally we refer to as making up our ‘Music Lover’s Universe’ – our audience, in other words. We identified Music…

A BRIEF TIMELINE 1962: AT-1, Audio-Technica’s debut cartridge 1966: Moving Pulse test record 1967: AT-35X, the first ‘VM’ type stereo cartridge 1975: AT-701 headphones 1986: The Sound Burger, also known as MisterDisc 1996: ATH-W10LTD luxury headphones with real wood cups 2019: The Shibata-profiled OC9XSH from the latest OC9X range We’re working up a piece on Audio-Technica’s 60 years for the upcoming issue of Audio Esoterica, and although we anticipated a history of cartridges, headphones and pro audio gear, it was soon clear that the development of that equipment has been driven by Audio-Technica’s ongoing innovation in technologies. Working out how to implant a diamond needle without crushing the tip of the pipe cantilever was key to its initial success in cartridges, while later in the 1980s the company’s commercialisation of…