Installing Aries Cerat Symphonia horn speakers

flyer

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Hi all,

Want to share the journey for installing the new Symphonia speakers that arrived in my garage. Five crates on three pallets. They will be installed in the next few days by Stavros himself :)

Here are some pictures already as I can't wait to unpack them :p. Finish looks amazing already.

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They will take the place of the excellent Stenheim Alumine FIVE that are in demo in my room as well!

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Will keep you posted in next few days.
 

bonzo75

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Hi all,

Want to share the journey for installing the new Symphonia speakers that arrived in my garage. Five crates on three pallets. They will be installed in the next few days by Stavros himself :)

Here are some pictures already as I can't wait to unpack them :p. Finish looks amazing already.

View attachment 32105 View attachment 32106 View attachment 32107 View attachment 32108

They will take the place of the excellent Stenheim Alumine FIVE that are in demo in my room as well!

View attachment 32109

Will keep you posted in next few days.

Wow that already looks like a dream set up. How was the bass and soundstage and slam of Stenheim compared to avior?
 

flyer

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In the past few months I had a pair of Magico S1mkII, YG Hailey, the Rockport Avior and now the Stenheim.

They all matched really good with the Concero amps which have 65Watt of triode power.

Soundstage of the Alumine FIVE is about the same as the Avior but the bass and medium bloom is markedly better than the Avior. Finally, their positioning in my room is easier due to their front ported design. I guess this will apply to most, if not all, rooms.

The higher frequencies allow all there is to reveal in a recording. A keeper for my room, if it wasn't that I am now having the horn speakers.

Allow me not to comment on the other speakers I had, I don't want to go too much OT. I will just say that, based on the tests I did, I decided to represent Stenheim in the Benelux, that should suffice...
 

GuillaumeB

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In the past few months I had a pair of Magico S1mkII, YG Hailey, the Rockport Avior and now the Stenheim.

They all matched really good with the Concero amps which have 65Watt of triode power.

Soundstage of the Alumine FIVE is about the same as the Avior but the bass and medium bloom is markedly better than the Avior. Finally, their positioning in my room is easier due to their front ported design. I guess this will apply to most, if not all, rooms.

The higher frequencies allow all there is to reveal in a recording. A keeper for my room, if it wasn't that I am now having the horn speakers.

Allow me not to comment on the other speakers I had, I don't want to go too much OT. I will just say that, based on the tests I did, I decided to represent Stenheim in the Benelux, that should suffice...

Interesting! What's the retail on the Alumine FIVE?

Guillaume
 

flyer

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55.000 EUR, transport and VAT included within EU
 

bonzo75

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Stenheim Alumine 5 was the find at Munich last year because it was in a small room next to corners generating a large soundstage with tremendous bass and slam and speed, very musical too, at 95 db 8 ohm impedance. I think many people who try to force big cones in small/medium rooms should go for this instead if they can afford it. It's my favorite cone. (with caveat it was heard at Munich only. But then usually things sound not as good at a show, so if it sounds excellent at a show, it can only get better in a proper set up)
 

flyer

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Stenheim Alumine 5 was the find at Munich last year because it was in a small room next to corners generating a large soundstage with tremendous bass and slam and speed, very musical too, at 95 db 8 ohm impedance. I think many people who try to force big cones in small/medium rooms should go for this instead if they can afford it. It's my favorite cone.

I can confirm this one!
Will open a new thread on Stenheim as soon as I get my Alumine TWO in as well. These are best value for bucks if you ask me.
More to come, now ... Symphonia :)
 

GuillaumeB

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Stenheim Alumine 5 was the find at Munich last year because it was in a small room next to corners generating a large soundstage with tremendous bass and slam and speed, very musical too, at 95 db 8 ohm impedance. I think many people who try to force big cones in small/medium rooms should go for this instead if they can afford it. It's my favorite cone. (with caveat it was heard at Munich only. But then usually things sound not as good at a show, so if it sounds excellent at a show, it can only get better in a proper set up)

Thanks Ked, this is very helpful. I will try and hunt them down at Munich, if they are indeed being demonstrated this year. Would be interesting to see how they compare to my Wilson Sasha 2s. I imagine they will be very different.

Guillaume
 

Narayan

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I can confirm this one!
Will open a new thread on Stenheim as soon as I get my Alumine TWO in as well. These are best value for bucks if you ask me.
More to come, now ... Symphonia :)

Really looking forward to your impressions on the Symphonia flyer. Is the Symphonia Aeneus an external crossover? Never heard about or seen it before.
 

bonzo75

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Thanks Ked, this is very helpful. I will try and hunt them down at Munich, if they are indeed being demonstrated this year. Would be interesting to see how they compare to my Wilson Sasha 2s. I imagine they will be very different.

Guillaume

Better to go across to Brussels, easy, to flyer.
 

flyer

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Better to go across to Brussels, easy, to flyer.

Indeed, either way. My speakers (and electronics) are going to Munich to be used at the show there as well. We will be in room P13 in Hall 3.

You can also come to listen at my place but please allow me to get accustomed myself with the speakers first to find their best settings.

More pictures following on Saturday no doubt.

Oh, and yes, the crossover is external. I will add a picture of it as well.
 

flyer

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OK guys, here are some pictures of the installation of the horns that now sing wonderfully in my room since about 24 hours. The packaging of these speakers is very good I must say and Stavros and his team really thought about every detail to minimize risk of damage or mistreatment of such complex speaker.


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I will post some pictures of the horns in place in the next post so as not to make this one too large.
 

flyer

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What a revelation, what an addictive system I must say. Looking at the progress we made in tuning the speakers and the room in last couple of hours, we don't think we have come at the end of it all, but it already plays better now than anything else I had in this room... I have not only the mid bass but also the low bass, upper bass, low mid, etc... in spades!

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The designer Stavros Danos with his latest baby :)


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Reflection of the side of the bass horn, what a first rate liquid glass finish!!



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More pictures to follow soon!
 

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LL21

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stunning!
 

flyer

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Look great. Please send more pictures.


Here some more, to please the eye and sense of aesthetics. Enjoy the immaculate finish and the evident amount of work put into this.

Soundwise, they are for me the ultimate speaker. They do everything right, plain simple. Hard to describe actually. This is the first time in a very (and too) long time that I have been so absorbed by the music. We listened this afternoon with a few folks to some modern space music, to organ music in a big church, to jazz music recorded in a small venue, etc. It all sounded so very right to us.

If you are interested to read on the philosophy behind the speaker, then please read the small paper written by Stavros on his website: http://aries-cerat.eu/products/speakers/symphonia Scroll down a bit as well and make sure you read the section with the 'Story of the Symphonia speaker'



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flyer

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Hello Michel,

Sincere congrats for this acquisition. I am looking forward to listening to these long awaited loudspeakers.

Best

DCC

Thank you!

Equally looking forward to receiving you here.

Michel
 

853guy

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Last year, I travelled to Brussels to attend the New Music High End Innovation Show, the purpose of which was to listen to the Aries Cerat Kassandra II Ref DAC, the Impera II Ref linestage, and the Concero 65 SET amplifiers. After hearing a collection of tracks played in a tiny space, augmented with Entreq boxes and SMT diffusors, and with a speaker that I personally have not so far developed any affection for, I walked away from that room with two things: Some newly made friendships in Stavros and Michel, and the lingering suspicion I had experienced a collection of components that would likely form the basis of the last system I will ever own.(1)

Really? Really really.

I know. It seems like a rather impetuous statement to make. But made it I did, and for those interested, you can read the rationale for it here:

Given everything I think I know about life, the universe and hi-fi, nothing present nor past has changed those thoughts, with the exception of the feeling that A) I was probably not hearing the full potential of it, sat on the carpet as it was and subjugated to show conditions, and B) the desire to own horns, despite having been underwhelmed by most high-efficiency designs and their (many) shortcomings in the past, still required further exploration. Could the Symphonia be the answer to all my hopes and dreams, and the vanquisher of all the phase anomalies and driver integration issues that beleaguered other designs?

First, a little about me. Not a professional reviewer. Not even a part-time or wanna-be one. Don’t have a hi-fi blog, a Pinterest account or a Facebook page. Don’t import, distribute or sell audio gear. In other words… just some anonymous guy on the Interwebs, typing an opinion. I’m guessing that means you can take it or leave it, or type some reply vehemently disagreeing with everything I’m about to write. I’ll be okay with any of the above.

To spare those of you who hate long, drawn out, verbose posts filled with subjective feelings and intellectual excogitations, yes, the Symphonia is the greatest speaker I’ve ever heard. And yes, once we’ve finally… finally… found a house to call home, we will assemble a complete Aries Cerat system with the Symphonia taking up several cubic meters of whatever sort of living room we end up living in.(2)

But to those of you who love long, drawn out, verbose posts filled with subjective feelings and intellectual excogitations, allow me to explain…

Most of the systems I’ve owned in the past, and indeed, most of the ones I’ve heard at friends, and dealers, and distributors, and hi-fi shows - irrespective of pedigree and price - did, er… stuff. Y’know, you’d put on an album and sound would come out the other end, having been transformed from some form of electricity to some form of acoustical energy. And for the most part, many times I’ve thought, ‘Oh, that sounds… like, er… things’. You know it’s not “real”, but like a magician performing at your child’s birthday, at the time it passes for moderately distracting entertainment - though you tend to surf the internet on your phone a bit.

But lately, I’ve been noticing an interesting phenomenon. The magician that turns up at your kid’s birthday party has got a lot more fancy. They’ve put on mascara and a bit of lip gloss, and smartened up their cape. They wear shiny shoes and a shiny tie and have a shiny forehead. You can’t look at your phone anymore because all the attention is on them and their shiny bits.

My basic conviction for any note created via the volition of a human being attempting to make music is that it will contain three fundamental measurable attributes depicted thus (Illustration 1):


Screen Shot 2017-04-24 at 09.50.17.png


That is, it will have a fundament frequency (with associated harmonic content), it will have amplitude which varies over the note’s envelope, and it will have a duration in which it starts and stops measurably over time. Theoretically, any system, and specifically, any electro-mechanical transducer has the potential to allow the note to be converted into acoustical energy in which the relationship between pitch, time and amplitude will be proportionally distributed thus (Illustration 2):


Screen Shot 2017-04-24 at 09.51.32.png


However, this is not what I’ve been hearing from the majority of systems. To me, most of them alter the relationship between pitch, time and amplitude, decreasing the proportionality in order to sound like this (Illustration 3):


Screen Shot 2017-04-24 at 09.53.50.png


That is, the emphasis has shifted toward the reproduction of frequency (linearity and extension with a reduction in harmonic distortion), at the expense of time coherence and dynamics. It’s like that kids magician in your garden… An excess of distracting bling to divert your attention away from more problematic areas, like the fact that he sucks at performing magic.

Lest you think I’m about to name a whole bunch of names and point fingers, I’m not. No system is perfect. None that I’ve heard reach the theoretical limit of reproduction when compared to the real thing. Historically, my own move toward idlers, SETs and horns(3) was in part a reaction against the number of systems that chased frequency linearity and extension over everything else. They sounded amazing but the music - the bits of it that were time and dynamically-related - were relegated to the minor divisions, and some didn’t even bother showing up. Boring. Lots of very expensive and technologically sophisticated sounds masquerading as music, and failing.

So, are you expecting me to say the Aries Cerat Symphonia with the full caboodle of Aries Cerat electronics has finally solved all the electro-acoustical problems of the world and is the first one to ever perfectly reproduce a note with its pitch, time and dynamic relationship holistically intact?

Okay. Why not? That’s pretty much what it sounded like to me. It’s certainly the first horn I’ve ever heard do it. And anyway it’s just an opinion from Some Guy on the Internet, right?(4)(5)

For those of you who are already readying your fingers to type a dismissive reply that I haven’t heard every other system (true) and that I don’t go to enough classical music concerts anymore (also true, the last one was the Emerson Quartet, I think…) or that I haven’t recently had my ears tested, read up on Toole and Olive, or passed multiple ABX tests to determine my level of objectivity (that’s all true too) let me say this - it was just like any other system I’ve ever heard in that it sounds like a system playing music. You can stop reading there if you need.

But oh my lord, there’s no other horn - and hand-on-my-heart I swear on my deceased family member’s graves - no other speaker irrespective of topology or hybridisation that has smacked my intellectual pretentious about and left me laughing, awestruck and close to tears on several occasions with the same sheer force, power, subtlety, delicacy, viscerality and engagement I’ve had from playing and listening to live music over the last thirty-five years.

No, I’m not saying it’s the same as live music. I know I’m listening to a recording. I’m saying that it produced the exact same response in me as I get from playing and listening to live music and with the same level of intellectual and emotional intensity.

Need some audiophile specificity? Okay, try this: This is the first speaker I’ve ever heard that manages to convey the propagation of acoustical energy of musical instruments as bespoke and individuated entities. What…?

Upon arriving, the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s "Pathétique" was playing as conducted by Valery Gergiev. I’m not very familiar with the composer’s work (though I like him), and I’ve not owned any of Gergiev’s either. But this is what immediately captured my attention: Every instrument propagates acoustical energy in a unique manner, right? A piano creates acoustical energy in a way that is wholly dissimilar to a guitar or cello despite having tensioned strings, and in a way wholly dissimilar to a drum, despite having a percussive mechanism. Its energy is released into the air by exciting the strings held within the frame and then amplified through the soundboard and into the case, into the floor boards and then back up into the piano. Most speakers I’ve heard - no names…! - differentiate the sound of each instrument individually, but not how they create that sound. The Symphonia somehow - and y’know, I’m just some guy who works in advertising, how the hell would I know, you should ask someone way cleverer than I am - manages to not only create an explicitly tonally, timbrally and texturally individuated sound from each instrument, but does so in a way that also individuates the way in which the sound from each is propagated into acoustical energy. That’s a first for me. No other speaker I’ve ever heard has done that and made it so apparent.

And whatever the hell reason Tchaikovsky decided to score the orchestra to jump from pianississimo to fortissimo at just over nine minutes in, I can only imagine it must have been to ensure future generations of audiophiles listening to 101dB-sensitive speakers could scare the living c*** out of guests unfamiliar with the work and make them physically jolt upright out of their seats. Like happened to me. (They laughed.)

But enough with the tomfoolery! Auditioning expensive hi-fi systems should be a dour and solemn act filled with female singers of dubious artistic merit. And because I pride myself on having music taste no self-respecting hi-fi store would ever play, I cued up Battles “Race In” from their debut album Mirrored, visa Michel’s EVO server. John Stanier’s choppy syncopations introduce lots of looping in which a few quick strokes and plucks of guitar strings are then sampled and looped through analogue and digital delays. What’s really interesting is that those initial human-made strokes retain their humanity through every iteration. The little inflections of tension applied to the strings and then released still have a envelope of life that survives on their own beyond the sampling. It means that for an album created with live drums and guitars but using extensive manipulation in both the analogue and digital domains, it feels so very much alive and flesh-and-blood. Like it was music by, er, humans, rather than sound created by machines. Weird, right?

Is Battles too post-rock and too compressed for you? How about Tim Hecker, then? "The Piano Drop" from Hecker’s 2011 release Ravedeath, 1972 starts brutal and ends brutal. Shimmering synths get square-waved into oblivion and modulated into harmonically saturated pixels of white noise. It’s utterly fantastic. And again, so human. It’s as if the dislocation and disquiet Hecker expects me to feel is more truthfully and forcefully articulated. Is it that the Symphonia manages the whole pitch/time/amplitude relationship so proportionately? That the single 8” heavily-modified Fostex woofer is barely moving despite the fact my chest is imploding from the impulses of the low-end which is harmonically full and yet temporally integrated with the rest of the transient? That there’s no hint of honk, cuppiness, woofiness, bloat, boom, incoherence, phasing, resonance or whatever else horns are supposed to suck at?(6) I don’t know, I just know music that’s that offensive shouldn’t be so completely assuring, emotionally engaging and intellectually enveloping. Yet it is.

Stavros actually laughed out loud at this one. I couldn’t tell if he was laughing at me, my music taste or the sheer ridiculous width that Fabio Perletta’s Ichinen ?? cast in that room. Yep, massive width. And layered, front to back. And when it got quiet, like real quiet that micro-tonal minimalist composers like Perletta like to tease out the tension in, you could separate out the noise-floor of the recording from the noise-floor of the system. I mean, insert your favourite cuss-word here. It was that gosh-darn impressive.

Finally, some grown-up music. I love Arcadi Volodos. And I love Frederic Mompou. I discovered Mompou first, in 1995, when Herbert Henck released the complete Musica Callada on ECM. Four years later I discovered Volodos when I heard his Live at Carnegie Hall on Sony. Never did I imagine that the ferocious intensity of Volodos’ technical prowess would ever be bent to the will of a Spanish composer whose output was shaped and defined by the impressionism of Satie and Fauré. Yet there’s something very definitely romantic about the way Volodos plays that imbues his work with an emotional resonance that goes way beyond the dexterity of his virtuosity. It’s not technique for technique’s sake. And here, in the slow incantatory and bell-like miniaturist compositions, the space, weight and filigree of tiny notes given flight for ephemeral moments to wash over one another before finding their life brought to an end by the piano’s damper felt have never seemed so tenderly created, crafted and curated whilst revealing more of the piano’s complex harmonic character - each informing the other in an exchange of initiation and reciprocation.

Is that it? Five tracks and that’s enough to make a decision for the rest of my life? Yep.

Okay, well, we did listen to some other stuff. Michel and Starvos took back control of the server (hastily, or so it appeared to me) and played a selection of Loreena McKennitt, Dire Straits, a jazz combo recorded in a small club in front of a small (and mildly drunken) audience, and Simon Preston playing Bach’s organ works. And just because you might as well, a track from the Kodo drummers absolutely laying into the skins of their ?-daiko. None of it bothered the Symphonia. It was like, “Really. You think turning electricity into sound is hard for me? Pfff.”

I know what you’re thinking. A single 8” in a back-loaded horn can’t do bass. Three separate driver technologies won’t integrate seamlessly and coherently in time and phase and will be dynamically compromised relative to one another. Horns don’t do imaging. They’re coloured and nasal and throaty. Sorry, but whatever sonic criticisms you might have, the Symphonia flicked them away as effortlessly as one might an ant from one’s pant leg. Oh yeah, and turned it all into meaningful, important, living, breathing music better than any other speaker I’ve ever heard. And all from Redbook - take that high-res!(7) I didn’t, not for one second, think “(Sigh), I wish we were listening to vinyl…”. Or anything else for that matter. You want to be in the moment even when just listening to averagely-recorded faves and be moved to tears by it? The Symphonia will scrape every single emotional intention from whatever you throw at it and treat it all like it matters to you. And all the stuff I heard at the Brussels show? Though there mostly in form then, now - much like when God breathed into Adam’s nostrils - fully alive.(8)

Still not convinced? I get it. Honestly, I’m not here to convince anyone. That I’m convinced is enough for me. No system will appeal to everyone. And even had you been there yesterday and loved it, you may have like Stavros, Michel and I, still moved the couch back and forward and played with vertical height and adjusted toe in and each come to different conclusions about how to tailor the sound closer toward individual preference. Michel and Stavros both believe the Symphonia is actually extremely room-friendly (and from what I heard, I have absolutely no reason to doubt it), but there’s a level of performance laying dormant still yet to be unlocked (crossovers were brand new, and drivers still needed running in). Me? I would have liked the couch to be about 30cm further back, with the speakers toed in a touch for a little more centre-fill at the expense of staging width, and the speakers to be angled up at the back to be more on axis for a greater window into their extreme phase and time alignment rigour (I was the smallest one there, so was sitting a little lower than everyone else). That it’s all innately in there already, means extracting it is so much easier.

I often find myself bemused by posters with few posts making extravagant claims for components made by some company that lacks the pedigree of well-established brands with large marketing budgets that advertise in you-know-what. It’s like their credibility is just ripe for dissection. And yet here I am extolling the virtues of the only system I believe is worth my money from a company that’s the same age as my children. But do more posts make for a more credible opinion? Isn’t it more true to say that an opinion is exactly what it is and no more than that? Is mine anymore credible because I type a lot of words? Because I played music most of my life? Because I used to produce and engineer albums for indie rock bands? Nope. If you’re still reading (and my word, if you are, my hat’s off to you), then please be assured, mine is worth whatever you want to take it for, even if that’s nothing.

In the mean time, I just feel so very grateful that Stavros and Michel, aside from being great guys whose company I enjoy immensely, have brought to the market a speaker, and indeed a system that feels more like an investment in personal growth and cultural enlightenment than it does the purchase of a bunch of inanimate objects costing more than many people (if not most) earn in a year. That both are true, doesn’t make it any less or more of a justification, but one I can honestly say I believe is worth it, even if you may not. At the very least, if you make it to Munich, you’ll be able to hear it for yourself, and then call into question my credibility to my face.

Best,

853guy


(1) For the main system. Still possible we’ll assemble a family system with some fancy dynamic drivers, and if I have my druthers, an office system based around ESL 57s or LS3/5As just because.

(2) We’ve been looking for a property for over three years. As well as providing a home for our family, we’re wanting it to provide forms of income either from agriculture, animal farming and/or as accommodation, while permitting my wife and I to continue to freelance. Oh yeah, shelter for chickens and goats. We’re getting closer, but we’re not there yet. And in order to keep our powder dry financially speaking, we won’t be purchasing depreciating assets until we know what we’re in for. Ugh. Maturity. It’s so… adult.

(3) It's not that I believe idlers, SETs and horns are inherently superior simply due to their topology. Like all things audio, implementation trumps ideology, especially once real-world results are taken into consideration.

(4) Based on a direct, first-hand audition using music I am intimately familiar with and actually listen to in real-life in an extremely well sorted acoustically treated room - I believe some people consider these sorts of experiences to be preferable to opinions offered without the former.

(5) I work in advertising, remember. So there is that. Take my opinion with a large helping of salt, now with 25% less iodine for slim, healthy eyes!

(6) To be fair, many of them do suck.

(7) The Mompou was actually a 24/96 download in FLAC from prestoclassical.co.uk.

(8) Genesis 2:7
 
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