Loudspeakers

With the Vento 100's 25mm ceramic dome tweeter situated below the 174mm 'titanium/graphite' mid driver, most seated listeners will be above the former if not directly in line with the latter. In practice this yields an impressively flat forward response [see Graph 1] albeit with a 2-3dB lift towards the treble at 10kHz which contributes to the mere ±2.1dB response error (200Hz-20kHz). Pair matching is a tight ~0.3dB through much of the bass and treble but widens to 0.95dB between 3-6kHz before the dome tweeter gets into its stride. The magnetically attached grille further suppresses the mild presence/treble lift [blue trace, Graph 1], squeezing the response errors to just ±1.7dB.

The new titanium alloy drivers are stiff and light but the midrange unit still shows a low-level mode above the 3.2kHz crossover at 4.6kHz [CSD waterfall, Graph 2] while the primary breakup of the tweeter can be seen at 25kHz with a harmonic at 40kHz [pink shaded area, Graph 1]. THD also increases from a low ~0.2% at bass frequencies to ~0.5% through the midrange where odd-order harmonics dominate. Sensitivity clocks in at 88.4dB/1kHz (88.2dB from 500Hz-8kHz), an average figure for a three-way bass reflex floorstander, albeit one with generous bass: the 45-145Hz (–6dB) bandwidth of the woofers, and broad 49Hz port tuning, delivers a corrected extension of 36Hz (–6dB re. 200Hz) and a boost in output at ~65Hz [green shaded area, Graph 1]. The speaker load is complex with additional reactive swings between 100Hz-10kHz – the minimum 3.1ohm/41Hz impedance, and modest –54°/20Hz to +23°/810Hz phase angles, contribute to a tough-ish EPDR of 1.38ohm/35Hz. PM