This is a speaker where you don’t just hear and feel bass, you can clearly hear beneath the bass notes, giving low frequencies pitch definition, texture, articulation and agility that normally escapes audio systems. Upright bass on jazz recordings is joyously audible and distinct, stepping into its rhythm section role just as it does live. Off-beat, back of a bar bass-lines on rock and pop never drag. The juddering, sawed and bounced double-bass so beloved of Sibelius sounds just as distinctive and unreal as it does live and the monster drum on The Thin Red Line OST certainly deserves that description. Believe me, if the composer or the musicians want you hit, this is one speaker that makes sure you stay that way.
But the real trick with any monster speaker system is not to do big, it’s to do small. The final track on Anastasia Kobekina’s album Ellipses (Mirare MIR604) is – as is her want – a piece written for the young cellist by her father, Vladimir Kobekin. In this case, it is a Gallardo, a ‘renaissance’ dance arranged for cello and tambourine. The Atriums don’t just do the life-size imagery thing, they capture the essence of the performer, the energy she’s putting into her instrument, the variations in pace and bow pressure, the texture of bow on strings As the dance accelerates towards its emphatic conclusion the intensity in the playing rises, the tambourine gets louder and more insistent. The hand-strikes on the skin are explosive and uncompressed, with an utterly natural tonality and texture. The individual rattles are distinct and crisply defined, as is the shape and angle of the instrument. It’s an almost preternatural rendition and one that leaves you with an almost ghostly impression as the final notes decay and fade. Turning back to piano, the speakers captured Clifford Curzon’s deft subtlety, the woody, vibrant complexity of his instrument just as readily as they traversed between the delicate, fluid grace and the power and impact of the towering crescendos on the Trifonov/Babayan Symphonic Dances (Rachmaninoff For Two, DGG 4864805).
Like any (even the best) hi-fi system, the Atrium isn’t going to fool you into thinking that there are live musicians, right there in front of you. But what you can’t miss is the sense of focussed energy, presence and the emotional connection within and to their performance. With even more time expended on fine-tuning their set up I’d expect the performance of these speakers to achieve an even more impressive level of intimacy and communication – whether the programme material is small and acoustic, vast and explosive or thunderously electronic. More importantly, tinkering with the angular and positional settings suggested just how tuneable the presentation is to an individual listener’s preferences.
How far can the Clarysis Atrium go? That remains to be seen. Its price is high – although far from the highest price being asked. It also includes shipping to the customer’s location and installation, off-setting the company’s more limited distribution network, when compared to the competition. Recent trends have seen the ‘ultimate speaker’ category moving in the direction of horns or box speakers. In the shape of the Clarisys Atrium, panels are definitely back and one thing is unequivocally clear: that top-table where super-speakers sit definitely needs another chair.
