“There is a song we always used to hear…”
By Roy Gregory
Comparing high-quality stand-mounted speakers to double-decker buses might seem like a stretch – one’s minimising volume, while the other’s maximising accommodation – but they certainly have one thing in common: you wait for ages and then two arrive at once! First there was the Vienna Acoustics Haydn Signature, latest in a long line of excellent stand-mounted designs, but a speaker that, even by the standards of its impressive predecessors, was a conspicuous over-achiever. Now, we have the Neodio Lilli, first speaker from iconoclastic audio designer Stephane Even. When Stéphane speaks it’s normally worth listening. When he produces a new product, it’s generally worth listening to that too. His designs are seldom anything other than challenging and often fly in the face of both fashion and conventional wisdom. But they also, invariably, deliver on a musical level. All of those comments apply to Lilli – with a vengeance!
A compact, two-way, stand-mount speaker: there are few things as well sorted in the audio world. Most people agree on what matters and most of them manage to get most of those things near enough right – meaning that the world is full of modestly priced two-way stand-mounted boxes that outperform their bigger, floor-standing brethren. It’s an inconvenient fact that the market persists in ignoring. Customers want those slim, floor-standing columns and they don’t want ugly metal speaker stands. No matter that the small boxes sound better. They don’t sound as big or look as pretty, which is why the two-way stand-mount has all but disappeared – taking the more expensive, higher-quality ‘mini-monitor’ with it. And therein lies the problem. You’ve got to spend a considerable sum of money on a speaker cabinet before you start to make any real in-roads into removing it from the sonic and musical equation. Which means that sub-20K (insert currency of choice) stand-mounts still enjoy significant, inherent mechanical advantages over their equivalently priced, floor-standing competition, with their larger, harder to control cabinet panels. Yes, the floor-stander can offer more bandwidth and/or sensitivity, but more isn’t necessarily better, especially if the quality suffers.
Which brings us to the Lilli, a speaker which is small in every conceivable sense – except price. If you thought the Haydn was a small speaker, the Lilli will make you think again. With roughly the same footprint as the Haydn, it is only half as tall! At 154mm wide and only 210mmhigh, it is fully 270mm deep, giving it a small frontal aspect and considerable depth – an extremely unusual and visually arresting combination. It combines a large, 28mm soft-dome tweeter with a 4”/100mm bass driver, equipped with a massive roll surround that makes the driver appear even smaller than it is. The rear panel offers a narrow (40mm diameter) reflex port and a pair of simple 4mm/banana sockets: and that’s your lot. Which might seem a bit limited given the €4,500/pr asking price. But as with many things audio (and all things Neodio) there’s more here than meets the eye. Lilli might be a genuine miniature, but she’s also hiding a multitude of sins hidden features.
