These are early days for the Atrium. Although the driver and baffle designs are finalised, the company is still experimenting with crossover components – although that’s something that can be easily updated in the field, should the need arise. Likewise, the set-up is still being refined. Yet despite those caveats, the sonic and musical performance is already exceptional.
The first thing you notice about the Atrium is the way it’s not just the speakers but the system and the listening room that disappear – completely. The sense of mechanical or electrical reproduction, the notion that the presentation is compressed or scaled, is completely absent. Play solo piano or small group pieces and the musician(s) and instrument(s) are life-sized, convincingly dimensional and located in a coherent, contiguous and independent acoustic space: an acoustic space that reaches forward to include you, the listener.
Perspective is natural but also positionally responsive. By that, I don’t mean that the speakers produce a ‘head in a vice’ hot seat. Indeed, the listening window is incredibly broad, with three or four listeners able to enjoy the performance at once, without compromise. What I’m referring to when I say that the presentation responds to the seated position is the way it alters with listening distance. Move forward to an almost near-field seat and you get the direct, immediate sound that you’d hear in row E or F. Move back and the balance shifts, to a typical mid-hall seating position (row M) with its increased proportion of reflected energy. Move back again and the balance changes again, with the more distant perspective you hear from the rear stalls or balcony. It’s an affect that is remarkably like life and one that I’ve only experienced once before – in Dave Wilson’s listening room, the first time I heard the WAMM MC. Clearly the Atriums are doing something very right indeed.
The way these speakers handle scale is really, quite remarkable. Amandine Beyer and Gli Incogniti’s ‘one to a part’ recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons (Zig-Zag Territoires/Harmonia Mundi ZZT080803) is played with such energy, verve and attack that it often overpowers systems, leaving you wondering how so few musicians can sound so big. The Atriums (Atria?) do nothing to diminish the enthusiasm in the playing or the energy that it generates, but they also capture the sense of the eight, life-sized musicians, located in the small, church acoustic in which the recording was made. Far from reducing the enjoyment of the recording, it lifts it to a whole new level. At the other end of the scale, listening to the Blade Runner OST on reel-to-reel, the huge, synthetic acoustic, littered with incidental noises and textures, uncompressed vocals and layers of synthesised music is truly cinematic, seamless with immense width, depth and height. The Gravity OST (Silva Screen Records SILCD1441) demonstrated the Atrium’s apparently limitless headroom (you WILL give up before the speakers do) while Patti Smith’s cover of ‘Gimme Shelter’ was delivered with live concert-like drive and momentum.
