The one saving grace for Clarisys? Nothing I heard at this show from arch-rival Alsyvox impressed me either. I’m still struggling to understand what justifies the reverence afforded these speakers, or the prices asked for them. Having said that, I’ve never had them at home, so judgement remains suspended. What I do know is that both the Clarisys Auditorium and the Minuet absolutely stormed it in my listening room – which made the brand’s showing in Vienna all the more of a disappointment, at least on a personal level.
The Apertura Kalibrator Evo Loudspeaker
By Roy Gregory
I first encountered Apertura’s Kalibrator Evo project in prototype form, yo many years ago: way back pre-Covid in fact, on a visit to the company’s factory near Rennes. I remember thinking at the time, “What a great name for a monitor speaker.” I haven’t changed my mind.
In fact, the name (as the Evo suffix suggests) belongs to a similar, earlier model, a design that established many of the brand’s techno logical and engineering innovations. The Evo adds 25-years of further experience to that mix. The two-way design pairs a Mundorf AMT tweeter with a 22cm isotactic polypropylene mid-bass unit, a cone material which allows significant mechanical tuning of the driver’s output and mechanical behavior. They are paired with Apertura’s proprietary DRIM crossover topology, with its strict control of out-of-band behavior and phase coherence. The hard-wired crossovers are hand-built, paired and tuned to each other and the selected drivers chosen for each cabinet.
Talking of cabinets, the Kalibrator Evo’s reflex loaded enclosure is heavily braced, employs differential wall thicknesses, multi-layer/multi-material internal damping and careful siting of the reflex port. The matching, machined aluminium stand is included in the price and incorporates the company’s trade-mark mechanical grounding point, a cone sat immediately under the system’s centre of gravity: the four peripheral ‘spikes’ only provide stability and attitude adjustment.
Price for the Kalibrator Evo is €15,000/pr. Apertura claim a bandwidth of 37Hz to 30kHz, ±3dB, 89dB sensitivity and an easy 8Ω load. The 20kg weight of the speaker alone gives you some idea of just how solidly constructed it is and, as an acknowledged fan of smallish two-ways with larger than average bass-mid drivers (the Reference 3A Da Capo and Wilson Duette spring to mind) this is certainly an intriguing offering from the long-established French manufacturer.
The Kroma Atelier Callas loudspeaker (with Wadax, Thales and Engstrom)
By Roy Gregory
Does history repeat itself? In the case of Kroma Atelier, Wadax and Engstrom the answer is no – it just gets better. Last year in Munich, the same speakers, fronted by a TechDas turntable, Wadax Studio Player and driven by the flagship Eric amplifiers delivered one of the most promising sounds at the show. This year, like a team coming out for the second half with substitutions made, the system up the ante – both in terms of hardware and musical performance. The Studio Player gained a clock and power supply, while the turntable had shape-shifted into a Thales Reference carrying a DS Audio Grand Master cartridge, feeding Engstrom’s new M-Optic phono-stage. But perhaps most significantly, the Erics (never my favourite amplifiers) had been replaced by the Lars (which definitely are amongst my favourites). Cabled throughout with Argento and supported throughout by Artesania, this system also paid attention to the rules of good audio housekeeping, investing in quality and consistency when it came to infrastructure – and it showed…
