Many loudspeaker designers are minimalists at heart. They embrace a design aesthetic that says that simpler is better. Based on the evidence of the company’s R 8 Arreté, Ole Klifoth, of Danish loudspeaker maker Audiovector, is not one of those designers.
On its website, in the Specifications section for its “R”-model loudspeakers (footnote 1), Audiovector offers a long checklist of technologies, many of them optional, some of them, called “Concepts,” assigned snappy names and acronyms: IUC for Individual Upgrade Concept; LCC for Low Compression Concept; SEC for Soundstage Enhancement Concept; NES for No Energy Storage; FGC for Freedom Grounding Concept; and NCS for Natural Crystal Structure.
Several Audiovector loudspeakers come in different versions, sort of like trim levels in cars: Pay more to get more. The R1, R3, and R6, for example, come in three levels: Signature, Avantgarde, and Arreté. The differences among the levels can be meaningful: The R6 Signature has a soft-dome tweeter, while the Avantgarde upgrades the tweeter to an air-motion transformer (AMT) tweeter. The Arreté version has an AMT tweeter, too, but the Arreté’s tweeter employs an integrator grid behind the dispersion lens, which helps to integrate it with the other drive-units, and a “special resistive termination.” The Arreté adds a a rear-firing midrange driver, the Freedom Grounding Concept, and Natural Crystal Structure.
Audiovector’s two largest speakers, the flagship R11 and the one-step-down R 8, are only available fully loaded, in the Arreté trim level, which is to say, the options aren’t optional—except for one, sort of. In the US, the R 8 Arreté—the product under review—sells for $69,995/pair plus a ($3850) upcharge for the optional grounding cable, which is necessary if you want to take advantage of the Freedom Grounding Concept.
The R 8 Arreté
I first encountered Audiovector at the 2019 Toronto Audiofest. The R 8 Arreté was in the room, but the room was small, so the smaller R3 Arreté was getting most of the playing time. The R3 sounded very good, like a complete speaker, one that was well thought through. I was struck by several aspects of the design including the relatively lightweight enclosure, the openness of the cabinet, and especially that grounding cable and its associated grounding terminal. It was the first time I’d ever encountered that in a loudspeaker. I was also struck by its appearance: The R3 was attractive.
I’m not sure I paid much attention at the time, but here in my living/listening room, the much larger R 8, with its acres of glossy “Piano” Italian Walnut Burl veneer, is more than pretty. It’s gorgeous.
Mounted on the top, front part of that lovely wood-grain cabinet is a matte-finished aluminum-alloy baffle; all the front-firing drivers are mounted on this baffle, with contrasting polished rings providing just a touch of bling, luxury with a hint of ostentatious fun, enough to make you grin a little even before the music starts playing. Pride in ownership. A black grille comes standard, but who would cover up that lovely front?
That pleasingly blingy baffle holds three 6.5″ midwoofers designed by Ole in collaboration with a couple of other, unnamed driver specialists and built elsewhere (footnote 2), each with a different passband, plus, as already mentioned, the company’s most advanced AMT tweeter. The woofer cones combine carbon fiber and aramid fiber (think Kevlar) “loaded with synthetic wood resin.” This last piece of information comes courtesy of Audiovector CEO Mads Klifoth, the designer’s son. Mads continued: “Both these fiber types are strong, and together they form a very stiff, light, and sound dead membrane. This one is the one we have chosen over many others in our listening tests.” Voice-coils are wound on titanium formers. Because titanium is less magnetic than aluminum, which is slightly paramagnetic, using titanium instead “drastically reduces hysteresis compared to most other drivers,” Mads told me.
A convex aluminum panel runs the length of the backside of the R 8’s teardrop-shaped cabinet. At the top of that panel, opposite the tweeter, five horizontal slots, each about 5/16″ tall, allow the tweeter’s back wave to exit to the rear; that’s part of the Soundstage Enhancement Concept and also perhaps the Low Compression Concept. A few inches farther down that back panel, opposite the topmost midwoofer, a 4″ midrange driver fires to the rear through seven horizontal slots—another piece of the Soundstage Enhancement Concept. This rear-firing 4″ driver uses “a polypropylene membrane and a strong magnet,” Ole told me. Farther down are two port openings, each venting through seven horizontal slots, one serving the chamber shared by the two lowest-frequency midwoofers, the other serving a down-firing isobaric woofer.
Isobaric woofers are rare in the hi-fi world, though not unheard of. The isobaric concept was invented by Harry F. Olson in the 1950s; “isobaric” means “equal pressure,” achieved by having two identical drivers firing in phase in a single chamber so that the region between the two drivers isn’t pressurized. Olson’s insight was that the bass output achieved by such a configuration is equivalent to what you’d get with a single driver and twice the cabinet volume. (Since the extra driver takes up space, the actual yield is less than double.) The downside: It takes more current to feed two drive-units instead of just one. Which makes the R 8’s amplifier-friendly specifications—8 ohms nominal impedance, 92.5dB/W/m sensitivity, equivalent to 92.5dB/2.83V/m if it is an 8 ohm speaker—surprising.
The R 8’s isobaric woofer system is a variation on Olson’s original concept in that it uses woofers unequal in size: a 6″ driver internally and an 8″ driver on the outside; the 8″ driver uses a carbon-fiber cone, and the 6″ driver is similar to the front-firing midwoofers. The R 8’s elegant, slotted aluminum base directs the woofer output in a controlled manner to the rear and sides.
In the course of writing this description, I’ve come to recognize an apparent Audiovector design philosophy, a unifying concept behind the acronyms. Ole Klifoth aims to keep things free and easy, the pressure low and stored energy minimal. The LCC, or Low Compression Concept, means the cabinet is open so that pressure doesn’t build up too much on the inside—no more than necessary. The teardrop-shaped cabinet minimizes standing waves in the internal air space, and the enclosure is relatively lightweight so that it cannot absorb and store much energy. Don’t lock energy up inside the speaker; rather, send it out into the air as music.
The R 8 Arreté sends energy out into the air via no fewer than nine sound-radiating openings, only four of them—the three midwoofers and the tweeter—firing forward. The others are the down-firing woofer (which radiates through those base slots to the back and sides), the rear-firing midrange driver (diffracted through those five horizontal grooves), the vent that allows the tweeter’s back wave to emerge from the rear, and the two aforementioned ports. This rather complex radiation pattern is summed up in Audiovector’s SEC.
While I’m on the subject of “concepts,” here are the others. NCS stands for “natural crystal structure”; it means that all the copper parts used in the speaker are cryo’d. FGC, for “freedom grounding concept,” is where that grounding cable comes in.
A grounding cable for loudspeakers? What’s up with that? “In one sense, this is quite simple,” Ole Klifoth told me in an email. “We are simply grounding the baskets.”
When I first heard about it, I thought I understood what it was about, at least a little. Some driver baskets are made from ferrous metal. With all the magnetic activity nearby—strong magnets and magnetic voice-coils—I assumed the grounding was intended to modify eddy currents, which could be expected to influence the motion of the cones much as the eddy-current break on my Thorens TD-124 turntable modifies the speed at which the platter rotates.
Nice theory, except that Audiovector’s driver baskets are made of an aluminum-magnesium alloy. They possess no ferrous metal and minimal magnetism. If the FGC is not about modifying magnetic interactions, then what is it about?
Audiovector noticed that different driver baskets were at different electric potentials, which is to say, there was a potential difference, or voltage, between them. “Let’s see what happens if we get rid of that,” Ole recounted in an email. So they grounded the baskets.
Footnote 1: Audiovector also offers a less expensive series, designated QR. QR-series speakers have fewer “options.”
Footnote 2: This approach makes sense for just about any loudspeaker manufacturer, because each specialty driver manufacturer has different tooling. The ability to shop around gives a loudspeaker manufacturer more options. Audiovector’s drivers are made by Denmark’s Scan-Speak.
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