A handsome design with some likeable characteristics
If you ask me, the bow-fronted Aviano 8 succeeds in looking modern while retaining a certain British reserve. Certainly it’s a notable contrast to the rather garish Teufel, and not just in the looks department.
A four-driver two-and-a-half-way, the Aviano 8 has three 6. 5in drivers featuring M-S’s dished CPC (Continuous Profile Cone) aluminium diaphragms and a 25mm aluminium dome tweeter, nestled behind a protective grille.
A sophisticated design making use of some interesting technologies
As befits the product carrying the largest price tag here, the Paradigm Studio 60, now in version 5 guise, looks the classiest of the bunch. A four-driver, two-and-a-half-way design, it is visually most notable for the side and back panels of its enclosure being transformed into a single, continuous curve, the inherent stiffness of which bodes well for low levels of cabinet talk. Also distinctive is its 25mm gold anodised aluminium dome tweeter whose diecast mounting protrudes from the top of the cabinet to reduce diffraction effects and is compliantly decoupled from the baffle to isolate it from vibration.
The 140mm bass-midrange driver, with its satin anodised aluminium cone and large phase plug, is decoupled too, as are the twin 140mm bass drivers with mineral-filled polypropylene cones.
Following the success of its keenly-priced Studio 1 models, JBL ups the ante with a no less distinctive Studio 5 range
The company’s marketing philosophy is pretty simple: if you’ve got it, flaunt it, ‘it’ being JBL’s long and distinguished history in professional audio. Think PA speakers and you’ll probably envisage direct radiating bass drivers coupled with hornloaded midrange and treble units – exactly the image JBL wishes you to have and echoes in many of its domestic speakers which, fl ying in the face of fashion, continue to feature horns. Cue the new Studio 580, middle of the company’s new Studio 5 range which looks to build on the reception accorded JBL’s lesser Studio 1 series, which included bagging the recent EISA European Loudspeaker 2011-2012 Award for the high-value Studio 190 [see HFN Oct ’11, page 11].
Compared to the 190 [HFN May ’11] the costlier 580 might appear to be a retrograde step.
The high-end hi-fi industry is perhaps unique – certainly unusual – in that it continually holds the present to account, against its past. Many audiophiles, often not with nostalgia foremost among their motivations, wilfully divest themselves of the ‘benefi ts’ of modern technology, preferring vinyl to digital, vacuum electronics to solid state and full-range drive units to the meticulously developed multidriver speakers that purport to represent the state of the art.
If we think of this as a spectrum of design approaches rather than Montagues versus Capulets, the Aurousal VSx – the new, improved version of the VS that won our group test in HFN Aug ’10 – is certainly not at the extreme occupied by single-ended triodes and re-entrant horns. Although the VSx does turn the clock backwards somewhat: in eschewing multiple drivers knitted together with a crossover network in favour of a pair of full-range drivers supplemented by a dome tweeter.
It might look like more of the same, yet this Q series loudspeaker boasts some new features at front and back
The Q900 may be top of KEF’s brand, spanking new Q series – the meat and potatoes of its range – but to look at, inside and out, it appears in some ways to represent a step backwards, certainly in respect of KEF’s rich technological history.
The Q900 effectively replaces the previous iQ90, a speaker which bowled me over when winning a group test just over a year ago [HFN Mar ’10]. One of the notable aspects of the iQ90 was its curved cabinet, a feature of more than aesthetic significance since it stiffens the enclosure, whereas the large side panels of a conventional box cabinet are prone to resonance. It was a surprise, then, to find the Q900 has what KEF rather grandly terms a ‘rectilinear’ cabinet – what you and I would call a standard, slab-sided box.
This innovative Dutch company provides an active audiophile speaker which is unusually styled and also features sophisticated onboard Digital Signal Processing
So, Grimm Audio is not the most propitious name, in English, for a hi-fi manufacturer. But once the schoolboy giggles have subsided, there are two very good reasons to take this Dutch company, and its new LS1 loudspeaker, seriously.
Firstly, there are the people involved. The second reason is the LS1 itself, because run-of-the-mill it is not.
The use of ceramic materials in loudspeaker diaphragms can’t be described as novel because every anodised aluminium cone or dome has a surface layer of alumina (aluminium oxide), allowing it to be described as a ceramic-metal sandwich or similar – as at least one speaker manufacturer has indeed done. But pure ceramic diaphragms are a rarity, and loudspeakers that use them exclusively, as the Lumen White Silver Flame does, are rarer still. All five drivers in this arresting-looking three-way design have white ceramic diaphragms in the form of everted (concave) domes. As explained in the box-out, the attraction of a ceramic diaphragm material is that it can be lighter and stiffer than common metal equivalents, which promises higher bending wave velocity and hence higher breakup frequency for a given diaphragm size and shape.
Not having had a Tannoy sub for review before, I was surprised to learn that the new, inexpensive TS range – of which this is the top model – is the first from this famous marque to include high-level inputs, which allow connection to the speaker terminals of a power amplifier. Of course, line-level inputs are also provided for direct connection to processors or multichannel disc players.
What this means is that Tannoy’s latest trouser flappers – the 801 with an 8in driver, 1001 with a 10in driver and, you guessed it, 1201 with a 12in driver – are easier to dovetail into a wide variety of audio systems. In a home theatre context you will generally use the LFE output from the AV amplifier or processor, whereas in a conventional music replay system, where line-level outputs downstream of the volume control are often not available, the speaker-level inputs will be a boon.
Not many audio companies, to my recollection, have made the transition from manufacturing speaker stands to making the boxes atop them, but that’s the journey undergone by Kudos Audio. Its stands are still winning awards but today the marque is as well known for the five-model range of Cardea loudspeakers, ranging from the compact C1 – joint winner of our group test last year (HFN Nov ’08) – to the recently introduced, top-of-the-range C30.
Slotted beneath the latter and previous alpha male is the C20, a two-way floorstander that uses the same cabinet and bass-mid driver as the lesser C2 but is equipped with a superior SEAS Crescendo tweeter and higher-grade crossover components. Included in the latter are the bespoke silver-wired capacitors that also feature in the C10 – the cut-above version of the C1.
Gamut by name, gamut by nature. Danish audio company Gamut (it writes it GamuT), not content with offering eight models of loudspeaker, of which the Phi7 is top of the four-model Phi range, also manufactures a CD player, preamplifier, two integrated amps and four power amps plus interconnect and speaker cables. So it can supply you with an entire hi-fi system, wires included.
Phi in the context of this Gamut speaker and its siblings is the golden ratio, 1:1.
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