BEST STEREOSPEAKERS €4000+ Can any speaker be worth ve positioning of each of the instrument thousand Euro’ s? The answer used. It'll make the hairs on your depends on the individual and neck stand up. available funds. What we can say Switch genres to lay Z's The is that if you have that kind of Blueprint and you'll nd the A9s money to spend. the A9 should he more than capable of kicking out top of your audition shortlist. basslines with plenty of speed and a great deal of denition. Unlike Certain things have to be in place for previous generations of Spendor a speaker like this to perform product (most of which we adored, it optimally. You'll need top-class must be said) the A9s don't deal in sources and amplication, not to overt richness at low frequencies: mention suitable cabling; don't they're massively taut, fast and expect much change from 10 grand punchy. Some similarly priced rivals for the whole lot. After that you'll go deeper still, but none we've heard need a relatively large room and can match these Spendors when it enough space to let these speakers comes to rendering low frequency breathe. subtleties. Integration that amazes Spendor's speakers have always been known for their immaculate integration, and this is one area where the A9s stay true to the brand's traditions. This might be a three-way speaker, but you'd never know the frequency range was The Spendors' well controlled bass divided between so many drivers, so performance means they'll be less smooth is the transition from bass to fussy about room positioning than treble. A convincingly even tonal most similarly-sized rivals, but you'll balance conrms Spendor's skill at still need to take care to get the best merging and balancing drivers. sound. Get it right and there's little These speakers are wholly else to do but sit back and enjoy the transparent to the source and the music. recording. Listen to something Play a top-class disc such as gentle and they'll sound suitably Live at Vatnajokull om the Opus 3 polite, move to something label and the A9s can make the aggressive and they'll oblige. walls of your listening room Four grand is an awful lot of disappear and replace them with the money to spend -but then again, the inside of the grand church where the Spendor A9s are an awful lot of recording was made. The sense of talented speaker. space is palpable, as is the precise Substantial Spendor MARTIN COLLOMS PUTS SPENDOR’S LATEST A9 HEAVYWEIGHT UNDER THE HIFICRITIC MICROSCOPE recent meeting made it clear that Philip more complex crossover fixes to correct minor dips Swift, Spendor’s current owner-director, and peaks in the response, or do you fix the drivers at is now firmly imbued with the company’s source using engineering fundamentals?” Anear legendary, BBC-based ethos. Co-founder All this has led to the new £4,000/pair A9, first of Audiolab, with many years of production and seen at the recent Bristol Show and the largest of corporate management experience behind him, the more value oriented A series. While Swift was Swift has long admired Spendor. Indeed he was undoubtedly a guiding hand, Spendor’s recently active in hi-fi retail from 1969 at the original Audio appointed chief designer is Terry Miles, who has T in Oxford Street’s Dryden Chambers, forming a been production engineering Spendors for decades, tech support team that included myself and Derek including under Spencer Hughes. Scotland, when Spendor first burst on the audio In line with my own views (and indeed those scene, setting remarkable standards for clarity and of Keith Howard who writes in Hi-Fi News and low coloration from box loudspeakers – standards Stereophile), the A9 is designed from the start as a which in part have yet to be equalled. We marvelled good amplifier load with a usefully high sensitivity. at the intricate layered sounds created by the BC1, Both these factors make amplifiers and speaker cables which made so many instruments and voices sound sound better, period. (This bonus is regularly ignored substantially more natural then we had previously – indeed contradicted – by many brands, which heard from anything save the more quietly voiced pursue a senseless scramble for the ‘loudest speaker original Quad Electrostatic. in the showroom’, no matter what the cost in overall Swift has had to reconcile the disparity between system sound quality.) the earlier and recognisably BBC derived Spendors, A true three-way system, the A9 has a pair of now called Classics (several still in production and custom built bass drivers with 180mm cast alloy deservedly popular), and the more recent modern chassis’ and Kevlar reinforced diaphragms, designed designs where style, slim form and a more ‘up to for optimal tuning in this fourth generation linear date’ sound (if there is such a thing). It’s something flow, low air velocity and hence low ‘wind’ noise of a juggling act to hold the two lines together and bass reflex, vented near the floor boundary for more make the best of both. consistently controlled room coupling. No enclosure The Classics have lightweight thin wall low volume damping is used, in order to deliver coloration enclosures with bitumen panel damping unrestricted, fast and well timed bass. and more traditional rectangular stand-mount The midrange driver has a 150mm cast frame with enclosures – even for the largest three-way S100 with an open voice-coil and phase correcting pole. Its cone its 12inch bass driver. The more recent designs tend material, codenamed ep38, resulted from an in-depth to be slimmer, usually floorstanding, with more rigid trawl of a number of recent engineering co-polymers. braced enclosures and innovative drive units. While one may begin by assessing mechanical A key factor is Spendor’s commitment to making parameters like stiffness and loss or damping with its own bass and mid drivers, a tradition begun by raw sheet stock, nothing compares with making up founder Spencer Hughes, derived from his painstaking a number of cone samples and listening to them, the labours spent building and voicing polymer cone method used to select this promising newcomer. drivers for BBC prototypes in the 1960s. The Since it has an inherent output beyond 10kHz, resources of the BBC, with its reference recordings and Miles was able to choose a higher than usual comparisons to live sound, vitalised the creation of crossover frequency of 5kHz, above the most finely tuned, highly developed, repeatable, consistent critical aural band and allowing greater tweeter speaker systems which are essential characteristics dynamic expression. The crossovers also avoid most for a studio monitor. Making its own drivers allows attenuating resistors by using Spendor’s own high Spendor to maintain these standards of consistency, tolerance auto-transformer inductors, and exploit the and develop the drivers to a high standard. degrees of freedom these provide to blend the system Talking design with Swift revealed his grip on the phase and amplitude response. The nominally 25mm more subtle aspects of speaker technology, design doped fabric dome tweeter has a wide surround and and voicing, and understanding of how Spendor’s moulded elliptical waveguide. long researched technology could be applied to A new approach to enclosure damping applies low advantage in the new designs. As he explained, while mass constrained layer polymer damping selectively everyone favours a smooth, flat frequency response, at high energy locations. The spiked feet locate into it’s how you get there that matters. “Do you employ large steel reinforcements to the enclosure floor, 20 HIFICRITIC APRIL | MAY | JUNE 2010 ◆ REVIEW MARTIN COLLOMS rather than the usual vestigial threaded inserts. Perhaps the best surprise here is the bass, which However, the plinth footprint is no wider or deeper is not only dynamically capable and able to play than the enclosure proper, so the lateral physical really loud without compression or early truncation stability in particular of this tall enclosure must be of the frequency range, but which can also deliver considered marginal. a satisfyingly percussive punch that is far from Specifications include 90dB/W sensitivity, a true typical of most reflex designs. It also has a Spendor 8ohm impedance (minimum 6.2ohm), a 250W like inner balance which is rarely found. That low unclipped power capacity, and a nominal 50Hz to frequency punch is quick and tuneful, lending an 20kHz +/-3dB axial frequency response, extending to uncommonly upbeat and well timed quality in typically -6dB at 28Hz in-room. Real veneer finishes conjunction with the ‘fast’ midrange transients. This include black ash, cherry, light oak and wenge, while bass remains powerful down to about 33Hz, playing signal input is via one pair of high quality fine- well beyond the expectations for its box size. threaded WBT terminals. Overall it sounds satisfyingly uncompressed, and is lively and interesting even when occasionally Sound Quality caught out, for example by Jan Gabarek’s sax on Auditioned predominantly with a Naim Twelve Moons, which is rendered a little stridently SUPERNAIT/Hi-Cap amplifier, an Audio Research and up front. However, quick transients can Reference 5/Krell 402 pairing was also used, and make you jump, just as they should. Nevertheless, the A9 was not a disappointment. While clearly a coloration is also quite low, the speaker is generally very easy cruise for the Krell, the A9 revelled in its clean, un-boxy and well tailored, and the mild bass abundant power and headroom, indicating that it lift heard at the lowest frequencies is not sufficient to could well be suited to costly systems.