Issue 80 / January 2003
Loudspeakers: Alón Exotica
This speaker has superbly revealing transparency, and tactile, believable coherence. The key is Alón's use of drivers which are more pistonically accurate over more of the musical spectrum, than just about any other system using dynamic cone drivers. This pistonic accuracy reveals more of music's subtle inner details, and brings all portions of each musical transient into correct alignment. In contrast, most other speaker systems use cone drivers that operate in non-pistonic breakup mode over much of the musical spectrum. This smears music temporally, makes it harmonically incoherent, obscures inner detail, and adds artificial foreign colorations engendered by and characteristic of the cone materials that are non-pistonically breaking up (we've been working on a background analysis article explaining why this is so).
The metal cone drivers in this system are expensive Seas Excel magnesium units. As they are implemented in the Exotica system, with its crossover design, these metal cone drivers evince almost no metallic coloration, which has been the bane of most other speaker systems using metal cone drivers. This low coloration achievement is realizable in the Exotica because there is extraordinary spectral overlap potential among drivers, so the woofer and midrange metal cone drivers can be cut off by the crossover well within their accurate pistonic range and long before they reach their metal cone resonance. Thus, this deliberately engineered spectral overlap actually provides two important sonic benefits. It provides low coloration, by allowing the crossover to cut off each metal driver long before it reaches its non-pistonic breakup spectral region that would introduce metallic colorations. And it also ensures that all of the music spectrum is reproduced more accurately, by drivers acting only within their accurate pistonic region.
By reproducing music pistonically, the Exotica tracks each nuance of the music signal much more accurately. This is why the Exotica reveals much so much more of music's natural subtle inner details. It tracks these details better than conventional cones in non-pistonic breakup mode can, and it also does not obscure these details with obscuring smearing of energy over time, as conventional cones in breakup mode do.
Music sounds much more realistic and believable when its subtle natural details are more transparently revealed, as they are by the Exotica. You can easily hear the sonic benefits, even on a solo recital with a single instrument. For example, on a simple guitar pluck, the Exotica can reveal details that other cone speakers miss, details that dramatically put the performer right in front of you and make the experience sound real instead of like a mere canned recording. Immediately after the first strong sharp tick transient, of a guitar pluck by a pick, there's often a second tick, as the string snaps back and hits the backside of the pick before the guitarist has moved it out of the way. And then just after that, the strings buzz a bit, before they settle into their prolonged oscillation that produces the pitched musical note. Subtleties like this second tick and this buzz are revealed by the Exotica, but obscured by other cone speakers (since their cone breakup is continuing to resonate on its own after the first part of the string pluck transient, thereby generating a spurious smearing energy tail that obscures all those subtle details that follow the first strong transient). Likewise, when complex music is playing, such as piece for large orchestra, the Exotica lets you hear into the details of the composer's orchestration much more clearly, because the pistonic cones accurately track the very complex signal with all its nuances, and also because strong musical orchestral energy at one moment does not generate a smearing energy tail that obscures the more subtle orchestral sounds that immediately follow (as happens with conventional cones in breakup mode).
The Exotica's accurate tracking of each transient also makes music more believable because it is more coherent, more tactile -- and also more dynamic. That's because all parts of each musical transient occur together and simultaneously, instead of being smeared over time as they are by cones operating in breakup mode. Each musical transient and each note sounds more real, because you can hear it as a single coherent entity, with all its harmonic parts and all its temporal parts in correct alignment. In contrast, cones in breakup mode smear the energy of musical transients and notes over time, so they sound fractured and splattered, both harmonically and temporally. For example, the treble portion of a transient might sound as if it occurs after the midrange part, and the first attack strike might sound as though it occurs after the main pitched resonance of the note begins, rather than at the beginning (which is of course when it actually physically took place on the live instrument).
The Exotica also sounds more dynamic, and reproduces music's dynamics more accurately, because all parts of the musical transient stack up vertically (coherently and correctly) at the same instant of attack, thus giving you the full vertical amplitude impact of that transient attack. In contrast, because cones in breakup mode smear the energy of each transient over time, this energy is dissipated over time, so this energy cannot stack up vertically all at the same time to have the full amplitude be delivered simultaneously to you, and thus these other cones sound less dynamic and are in fact less accurately dynamic.
In short, the Alón Exotica gives you more music, more believable music, and less foreign coloration, than just about any other dynamic cone speaker system.
The Exotica is a 3 way midi tower system, with a narrow frontal profile, which helps it to achieve excellent stereo imaging. Its superbly transparent revelation of subtle details also reveals the subtle imaging and hall ambience cues that are needed to make imaging truly believable. The ribbon tweeter, extending response way out to a reported 45 kHz, sounds beautifully fast and airy, and complements well the transparency achieved by the metal cone woofer and midrange.
The sealed bass enclosure gives excellent quality bass down to a rated 35 Hz, and we found its bass quantity to be satisfying for music listening. However, the use of a woofer with merely an 8 inch diameter and the sealed (as opposed to vented) enclosure, both of which are intentional design choices to obtain the best quality bass (and less colored midrange, since a smaller woofer can remain pistonic out to a higher frequency) does impose limitations in bass quantity if your intended use is home theater (Alón makes another alternative model, the Lotus Elite, which is more suited for home theater use).
Being a dynamic cone system for most of its range (above 3500 Hz a true ribbon tweeter takes over), the Exotica can play reasonably loud, certainly louder than mini speakers and planar speakers. It is moderately efficient, and is a pretty easy load for any amp to drive (its impedance above 100 Hz does not go below 7 ohms nor above 12 ohms).
The Exotica is a huge leap forward for Alón, whose earlier systems of past years often had noticeable cone breakup symptoms, and indeed is a big step forward for cone driver speaker system technology in general. At $9500 per pair, it is a speaker that every serious audiophile and music lover should experience for himself, and then either buy or at least hold in his memory as a yardstick of what is possible in music reproduction today.