The AXjet Pro loudspeaker
By Roy Gregory
With apologies to The Sound Of Music, how do you classify a loudspeaker like the AXjet Pro? Is it a full-range horn; a high-end domestic speaker system; a design statement; a weather-proof, portable PA; a technological and developmental tour de force or an audio De Lorean – a Back To The Future moment, complete with eccentric hair? In truth – it’s all of the above: and more! Not since B&W launched the ‘son of Michelin Man’ Blue Room House Pods has there been a speaker that looks this unusual, with an aesthetic that is at once utterly Bauhaus and ‘counter hi-fi’. But then few speakers are this dynamic, responsive to input, articulate, communicative and musically truthful. Many a high-end speaker at way higher prices would sell its designer’s soul, liver and kidneys to be this seamlessly integrated and fluid, to communicate this directly. Yet at the same time, it is fitted with casters as standard and supplied with 10m speaker leads (and locking SpeakOn connectors) in the very real expectation that owners might well want to wheel their speakers outside for a genteel soiree, a party or a family barbie!
So, is the AXjet Pro the audio-equivalent of a souped-up Mercedes GT, but one that doesn’t even blink when confronted with gravel tracks and ploughed fields – or a super-pimped G-Wagon, a truck that hurtles from zero to 62 in considerably less than four seconds? I guess that depends on your point of view, ‘cos in truth, it’s both or either… But what it is – unquestionably, unmistakably and unequivocally – is FUN!
Silver Machine
These days, it seems that everyone and everything has to have an ‘Origin Story’. The AXjets have the musical Origin Story to die for, with props like concrete horns built into Welsh hillsides and sub-woofer stages, locations like The Isle Of Wight (festival that is) and Glastonbury, guest appearances from the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Hawkwind and Underworld. Fred Davies, the man behind AXhorn, the company that builds the AXjet Pro, started out designing massive domestic horn systems that could be built into the fabric and foundations of houses. Practicality and commercial pressure soon redirected his efforts into quality PA applications. But he never lost his fascination with the idea of a full-range, horn-based, domestic system, even if the very concept of exactly what a domestic system might actually be was altered and informed by his experiences in the PA field – and I use that term intentionally! It might have taken all of five decades, but the AXhorn domestic solution is finally a reality, first in the shape of the AXsuperjet and now the full-range AXjet Pro reviewed here.
Enough of the history and the flannel: what exactly is the AXjet Pro? This is a single-driver, balanced output horn system, augmented with an active bass unit, back loaded by the bass-horn and operating below 70Hz. The enclosure is cast GRC (glass reinforced cement) with a damped GRP housing (ensuring the geometrical accuracy that’s critical in horn speaker systems) finished in automotive paint to the customer’s specification. So, in effect, what you are looking at here is a cast concrete horn enclosure in a glass-fibre housing, with damping material between the two. Although early AXhorn incarnations used Lowther drivers, the AXjets use the highly-regarded units manufactured by AER in Germany – most familiar from the Voxativ designs.
