The light at the end of a 40-year tunnel?
By Roy Gregory
When it comes to audio system performance, human voice is always an acid test: the ability to render a voice (that most familiar of instruments) natural, intelligible, recognisable and in the best cases, real. Break the system down and different instruments, different music, tell you about the various elements. For speakers (and the speaker/amplifier interface) the ability to reproduce piano is a key performance indictor. Not only does the instrument possess the bandwidth to cross most filter frequencies (the fundamentals on an 88-key grand piano extend in range from around 27Hz to 4.2kHz, with harmonics extending well beyond that), its very nature as a percussion instrument place a heavy premium on note weight and spacing, attack and evolution. The ability to capture not only the sound of the instrument but the character of a performer and his/her performance on it, is a crucial indicator of musical continuity and coherence. If you want a quick and dirty test of speaker quality (or the capabilities of the amplifier driving that speaker) play a couple of different pianists performing the same piece. Whether it’s a new amplifier to drive an existing speaker, a new speaker to match an existing amplifier, or most sensibly of all, a new amp/speaker combination (even if you can only afford one of them right now), you’ll be leaving whatever it is you are listening to with nowhere to hide…
I’ve been listening to a lot of piano recently – partly because I’ve been playing with speaker/amp matching, but mainly because the speakers in-house rise to the challenge with such effortless grace. Those speakers are the Clarisys Minuets and the reasons for their affinity with this most demanding of instruments are as interesting as they are revealing. Whether listening to a solo piano or a pair, a concerto with full orchestral scoring or small group jazz, the Clarisys manages to capture the scale and complexity of the instrument, its nature and broad, uninterrupted range. All of which reflects the very nature of the speaker itself.
When it comes to electrical, mechanical and acoustic behaviour, the two-way Minuet offers an unusual combination of characteristics (some would say virtues) when compared to a conventional box speaker of similar bandwidth. For starters, it is a two-way – which is far from common in a speaker that offers a bandwidth of 28Hz to 20kHz ±3dB. So, just one crossover point (at a low 550Hz) to navigate from top to bottom. That leaves one driver covering well down into the lower mid-band, close to the traditional point at which a three-way speaker would roll-off its bass driver. Of course, that crossover could be benign enough an obstacle to pass barely noticed by amplifier or listener, or it could be the electrical equivalent of the Zambezi River rapids – confused, turbulent and positively dangerous to anything attempting its passage! In the case of the Minuet, like other Clarisys speakers, that crossover is first order, offering gentle slopes and minimal change in phase angle. Furthermore, although the two drivers don’t share an identical impedance (the tweeter runs at roughly 4Ω, the mid/bass at around 5Ω) both offer a flat, non-reactive load to the amplifier, significantly easing complex power demands under load (a situation that is eased still further by bi-amping). Both drivers are constructed using identical materials and magnets, while the open baffle design helps to minimise cabinet signature and eliminate the delayed mechanical feedback associated with an enclosed air volume. Box speakers at this price ($46,000) with this bandwidth are generally spending a large slice of their design budget on cabinet construction and materials, but dealing with a problem is never as effective as eliminating it from the get-go.
