Acoustic Zen Technologies Adagio Loudspeaker
What is the sound of no distortion?
Sallie ReynoldsMy soap-box speech begins with
a reminder that all designed (as
opposed to formula) audio
equipment is a dance of compromises,
and any units
strengths and weaknesses are the product of the
designers sonic priorities and skills. Speakers are
relatively easy to characterize in this arena,
because we can usually identify their traits more
readily than those of other system components. I
enjoy listening and then picking out the areas of
magic and comparing them to places where I
want more. Thats called easy reviewing.
Rarely, though, a speaker comes along that
baffles me.
What is its nature? Where did the
designer put energy and resources? The performance
of such speakers is so balanced and
smooth and seems so accurate across the frequency
range, I find myself working to find
faults. And have to stop myself. Reviewers also
need balance, between picking apart a performance
and keeping a sense of the whole.
The Acoustic Zen Adagios are such an enigma.
At $4300, they should present music satisfyingly.
But in fact they do a great deal more.
The quality of this sound bespeaks a much higher
price. They are also beautifulmy review pair
is a bright red, burled wood veneer with a piano
finish. But the sound is the number-one surprise.
These speakers are so good theyre difficult to
write about. They make wonderful music. It is
nearly impossible to pick though the parts.
But to try: Their specifics strength is clarity
across the frequency range (specd at
30Hz30kHz, with impedance and phase measuring
nearly flat from about 100Hz to 1kHz).
The designs of their drivers are unusual: mid/bass
drivers, housed in transmission-line enclosures,
feature under-hung voice coils (the voice coil is
short and does not leave the magnetic field even
during long excursions), while tweeters sport a
modified circular ribbon that broadens the sweet
spot. These may well contribute not only to the
overall clarity, but to seamless crossovers points;
tonal and timbral accuracy; sparkle and sweet
detail in the highs; depth and detail in lows; richness
and nuance in midrange; and a soundstage
that is satisfyingly wide, deep, and high, and does
not collapse when you move out of the sweet spot.
These virtues are heard throughout The Silk Road
Ensembles Silk Road Journeys: Beyond the Horizon
[Sony], short pieces written by a variety of Eastern
composers, from the Steppes of Russia to the
Middle East to Asia and India. They have subtlety
and drama and a bit of strangeness, which
comes from instruments that are unfamiliar. Yo-
Yo Ma plays the Morin Khuur, a Mongolian
horse fiddle (a square wooden box with a horses
head at the top of the neck), as well as his cello.
You can hear the instrumental timbres clearly in
this recording, and the strange strings, sometimes
played open for eerie effect, are as engrossing as
Scheherazades tales.
Throughout, the Adagios played loud passages
without distortion and without overloading
the room or my ears. Soft passages were
beautifully subtle and clear, no single nuance
buried by the louder sounds. No frequency
range emerged from the smooth musical fabric
to assert dominance, not even with increased
volume. The decay of even the sometimes odd
high notes was clear and lingering, without protruding
into the overall fabric of the music or
disturbing the sense of being curled up at the
story-tellers feet.
All this illustrates my difficulty: How do you
describe the sound of purity? I put on an eerie
cut, The Wood Nymph from Sweet Sunny North
[Shanachie], in which the high plucked notes on
the hardanger fiddle and the high vibrato of the
ghosts voice (Wood Nymphs in Norse mythology
were not the nice sprites of our cleaned-up fairye
tales) make a duet that dances with the
hairs on your neck. These speakers were as
adept at presenting the late-night pulses
of the far North as they were with the
mysteries of the Far East.
But finally, in this piece, I got a
break. I heard a soft, far-off wolf howl
(instrumentally produced) that Id never
picked up before. My joy at listening to
new speakers is, as Ive often said, that I
hear new things in familiar recordings,
which in itself often helps me zero in on
the details of a speakers character.
Here, the wolf gave me a clue to the
Adagios. I listened to the passage over and
over. I listened to the details, shutting my
brain to the overall music; I listened to the
whole, with the new information woven
in. And finally I caught hold of what I
think is happening. The Adagios are so
free of distortion that sounds usually lost
in noisesoft sounds that get masked
all too easilywere coming through
across the entire frequency range. In other
speakers, there is often an enviable clarity
in a certain range but its not matched by
other ranges. A virtue, as it were, is pointing
out a failing, or to be more exact, the
point of compromise. But this is not so
with the Adagios. The nuances I heard
were across the whole musical spectrum.
Elsewhere in this Norse recording, there is
also a soft, deep thunder on drums that a
powerful female vocalist usually overwhelms.
Not now. And the harmonics of
all the instruments on both these recordings
were so clear and so mesmerizing I
had to listen again and again.
I pulled out my hard-test recordings:
Gamelan pieces, choral ensembles,
orchestral complexities. And the
Adagios unthreaded them all, with the
kind of purity that makes you gasp. And
without losing the orchestral roar,
through which, in a good hall and on
really, really good speakers, the subtle
accents whisper their soft wonders.
On good studio vocal recordings,
the Adagios put the singer in the room,
breath, spit, and timbre. A doublebass
(emphatically not a cello) in a Schubert
sonata made my body vibrate with its
rich, deep power, and the rasping vocal
quality,
a wonderful singer whose
pure voice has thickened and deepened
with feeling and fatigue, made my own
throat ache with the power of song
[Basso Cantante; Gary Karr and Harmon
Lewis, Lemur Music].
In a nice touch, the Adagios are tolerant
if not completely forgiving of badly
recorded music (sopranos too closely
miked still sound metallic); you can listen
to your entire collection without
wanting to throw away your 1980s CDs.
And on finely recorded albums, of course,
they are superb. They present all the
goodies with clarity, grace, and excitement.
They handle full orchestras better
than any speakers I have had in my house.
They played magnificently with the
Musical Fidelity kW500 integrated
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WWW.THEABSOLUTESOUND.COM 75
amp. I turned them up louder than I
normally do and heard no distortion
from that exercise. They played well
with the MF X-150 integrated, though
most good speakers, they appreciate
power. And they are reputed to
single-
ended triode amps, too.
So my question is: What dont they
do well?
They dont do the 16Hz organ pedal
note. Nor are they supposed to. They go
cleanly into the 30Hz region and then taper
off gently as the music descends below that
point. Since this was so smooth, I didnt feel
the need of a subwoofer, but you may want
one if you listen to opera, full organ recordings,
and complex bass-heavy rock.
Acoustic Zen offers a sub, and a center channel,
neither of which Ive heard.
And that, Dear Reader, is all I can
find to carp about after three weeks of
listening. They took 100 hours of breakin,
which is a drag, but you forget that
once its past (and they are not unpleasant
to listen to in the process). They
weigh a ton, and thats a real drag if
youre a reviewer. But if you arent, you
can just set them up once and forget
about them. The manual, incidentally,
goes into glorious detail on good setup.
The Acoustic Zen Adagios make
extraordinary music. They present such a
smooth and balanced performance you
almost forget to get excited by them. Instead,
you get lost in the music you love. &
e q u i p m e n t r e p o r t
M A N U FAC T U R E R I N F O R M AT I O N
ACOUSTIC ZEN TECHNOLOGIES
16736 W. Bernardo Dr.
San Diego, California 921227
(858) 487-1988
infoZen@AcousticZen.com
Price: $4300
D I S T R I B U TO R I N F O R M AT I O N
FRANK L. KRAUS
Director of Distribution & Marketing
(856) 374-4757
FLKraus@netzero.net
SPECIFICATIONS
Type: Two-way transmission-line loudspeaker
Driver Complement: Two 6.5" woofers
(with 2.5" under-hung voice coil linear
motor system); one 1.5" circular ribbon
tweeter
Nominal Impedance: 6 ohms
Sensitivity: 89dB/1W/1m
Frequency response: 30Hz30kHz
Recommended power: 50200W
Dimensions: 9" x 48" x 13"
Weight: 78 lbs.ASSOCIATED EQUIPMENT
Musical Fidelity A5 CD player, kW500 and
X-150 integrated amplifiers; Spendor S82
loudspeakers; Nordost Blue Heaven cabling