I mentioned earlier how uncolored, detailed, transparent, and image-specific an open baffle loudspeaker can sound. Unfortunately, not all open baffle speakers are created equal, and making a coherent and musically satisfying open-baffle speaker is much more complex than just bolting a few drivers to a sheet of plywood. The question any loudspeaker designer must ask is, how far should I go? When is done right?
To my ears, “done right” describes the Pure Audio Project’s Quintet15 Horn1 Modular Open Baffle Loudspeakers ($9995) I auditioned at CAF. Pure Audio Project offers a range of tall, structurally solid, open-baffle speakers with a user-selectable choice of single “main drivers” mounted in bass-mid-bass arrays with groups of 15” woofers. I have experienced Pure Audio Project open-baffle speakers in variety of configurations, but most often with a Voxativ wide-range main driver. Here, I was especially impressed by the power of the presentation and the three-dimensionality of the imaging. The Quintet15’s sounded coherent, and the horns just looked right sitting in the middle of the curved 72″ x 21″ aluminum frame. These are to my taste: good-looking loudspeakers.
All Pure Audio speakers are rated at ~96dB/1W/1m and have proven triode-tube-friendly. Here, though, they were powered by Pass Labs XA160 mono amplifiers ($20K/pair). There was also a VPI Prime turntable with an Audio-Technica AT-OC9/III phono cartridge driving the Luminous Audio Arion phono stage ($6995) followed by the Luminous Audio Axiom II passive preamplifier ($895).
The adjectives that best describe the Pure and Luminous Audio’s sound are: full, large, relaxed, open, and naturally detailed. No hi-fi unnaturalness.
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