TAS 195: Vienna Acoustics “The Music” Loudspeaker

Rewriting the Rules of Loudspeaker Design

Large, full-range, multi-driver loudspeaker systems can be thrilling and a lot of fun, yet in my experience, they frequently suffer from a lack of coherence between at least some of their drivers. My former Infinity Beta and RS1B speaker systems, with their separate woofer towers, generated plenty of goosebumps, yet their lack of coherence ultimately destroyed the illusion of a live performance for me. Modifications to the external crossovers, cabinets, and drivers helped, but not enough to keep me from parting with them. Indeed, getting woofers or subwoofers which plumb the depths to mate seamlessly with smaller quicker drivers is a major design challenge. Full-range electrostatics, as well as some highly regarded two-way dynamic systems, solve the coherence problem at the expense of bottom-end extension and weight, and most limit dynamic output. I’ve typically accepted these trade-offs and voted in favor of coherence over goosebumps.

However, as subwoofer advocates can attest, that bottom octave not only gives the performance a solid foundation and dynamic impact, but additional spatial cues which help soundstaging and musical realism. When I heard Vienna Acoustics’ new “The Music” loudspeaker for the first time at CES 2008, I was mightily impressed that here was a full-range, multi-driver speaker system that provided plenty of goosebumps without sacrificing coherence, plus it also had an extraordinarily expansive and deep soundstage. Having lived with The Music for many months, and then again for several more after it returned from an appearance at a trade show, my appreciation for this brilliant loudspeaker has grown on many levels.

The Music occupies the uppermost rung in Vienna Acoustics’ new Klimt Series of loudspeakers, named for the Viennese artist, Gustav Klimt. The connection between art and music is intentional, as The Music advances the art of loudspeaker design, while also being quite an artistic statement, in both physical appearance and performance, staying true to “the music” and, in many respects, preserving the illusion of attending a live concert. It is a beautifully finished speaker, with a relatively small footprint that does not dominate the listening or living room, but also breaks new ground for Vienna Acoustics, propelling the company with great velocity into the reference loudspeaker ranks. Its remarkable flat, concentric, Spider-Cone midrange driver with a coincident silk dome tweeter is a stunning technical achievement (see sidebar), providing The Music (and presumably other speakers in the Klimt Series) with an absolutely breathtaking soundstage and the core of a level of coherence difficult to match by any full-range, multi-driver system. The Music is thrilling, dynamic, eminently musical, and truly full-range, with deep-bass extension and weight, as well as highs that go out to the stratosphere.

In my experience, if a transducer can reproduce the human voice coherently over its entire range, from lyric soprano to bass, limitations elsewhere in the frequency spectrum can be more easily tolerated. Full-range electrostatic speakers from SoundLab, Quad, and MartinLogan pass this vocal coherence test with flying colors, and so does The Music—it is very close to “being of one cloth.” What makes The Music different from most fine multi-driver systems is that voices come from a single point source in a phase-coherent time plane that is devoid of a crossover throughout this critical range. The Vienna Acoustics’ flat, concentric midrange driver alone covers an amazing seven octaves of music, which closely approximates the bandwidth of the human voice. It is skillfully coupled with a handcrafted silk dome tweeter at its center that extends beyond 20kHz. This remarkable coincident planar midrange/tweeter array, housed in a separate, enclosed cabinet that Vienna Acoustics calls the “Music Center,” is a major sonic breakthrough.