With its truly special bottom end, Acarian's
Alón 1 could revolutionise the middle market

by KEN KESSLER

Easy: I'd already heard enough products from Acarian Systems to have learned that Carl Marchisotto (I believe he's ex-Dahlquist) knows what he's doing. That he's almost certainly insane, has been known to hang around with strange people like the guys from Mondial and often lapses into a bad German accent for no apparent reason shouldn't detract one bit from the otherwise sensible approach he has to speaker design. He's a member of the 'baffles are bad' school (like Vandersteen and SD Acoustics and a few others) he likes his bass and he's waging a one-man war against hysterical pricing. I'd tell you what the Alón 1 (silly accented 'o' included) costs here but I'm afraid to ask, so I'm assessing these in terms of their US price . . . which suggests a UK retail of circa £1,000/pair* (*Acarian has since confirmed this price)

With a footprint of only 9 in wide and 13 ¾ in deep, this smallest speaker in the Acarian range occupies no more floor space than a typical British-made stand-mounted speaker. As it's only 38 in tall, it should upset no hi-fi user who had made allowances for a 'sensible' floor- or speaker-stand-standing system. Amusingly, the Alón 1 is almost the same size as the deliriously expensive Wilson WATT/Puppy combination, and the sloped front and back panels of the upper grille section give it nearly the same profile. The basic structure of the system is common to the Alón l's larger siblings, all combining scaled bass enclosures with open baffle upper sections.

Alón 1 starts with a cabinet which occupies the system's lower 23 in (including the spikes). This is a completely sealed box housing a specially designed 8 in long excursion woofer based around a 'long fibre wool cone' chosen for its high stiffness-to-mass ratio. The side panels are constructed from ¾ in MDF, the front baffle from 1 in MDF and the panels are finished with real wood veneers. (The review sample arrived with the refreshing and clean 'natural oak' finish, though black is available for the cowardly.) The enclosure is braced and damped for reduced coloration, and the company claims decent response down to 40Hz. Please make a mental note of that, as it's one of two qualities which make the Alón 1 a noteworthy design: the bottom end is truly special.

At the front is a grille covering 80% of the surface, above an Alón badge, while the back contains four chunky, five-way, gold-plated binding posts for bi-wiring. The spikes supplied with the system are fat, six-sided affairs and among the best spikes I've used. How do I know? Because one set of the spikes mysteriously went missing and I tried a lot of others (cones, too) until the replacements arrived from the USA.

Perched on the top is the nearly-a-figure-of-eight 'non-baffle', what the company calls 'an open baffle dipole' design consisting of a minimally dimensioned panel made from what appears to be nicely finished MDF. All of the edges are sculpted to prevent any signal diffraction. This assembly is bolted securely to the top part of the woofer enclosure, tilted slightly for time alignment. And though it feels rigid, it's fitted to rubber grommets that provide isolation from the low frequency vibration of the bass module.

Fitted to the lower section of the baffle is a 4 ½ in laminated cone operating in dipole mode, with the basket and magnet assembly visible from behind. Below it is a ¾ in aluminum alloy dome tweeter with a fine mesh protective covering, good for a frequency response beyond 25kHz. Capping the assembly is a metal-framed grille, which I left in place throughout the tests. The grille provides minimal interference, which I found to be a beneficial form of filtering given that the tweeter can sound a bit 'sharp'.

Inside, amidst the panel-mounted damping material and the bracing, is a crossover network with true bi-wiring capability, with separate hardwired crossover boards for the speaker's two sections. Parts include air-core inductors, polypropylene caps and oxygen-free copper wiring, despite Marchisotto's rare-in-audio abhorrence of 'designer goodies'. The crossover slopes are 'damped 2nd-order', with the slopes between 6dB and 12dB.

Marchisotto is blunt about the Alón 1's needs: however much you get him to admit that it sounds positively wonderful attached to twenty grand's worth of Krell, he designed this as an entry level model to work with sane products. So, despite preferring it with Krell MDA300s, I did spend a lot of time using the Mondial Acurus A250 power amp (less than £700) and a couple of elderly tube amps. The gospel according to Carl calls for 'Only high quality amplifiers capable of driving a 4 ohm load', noting as well that the sensitivity is a reasonable 87dB for 1W. But don't worry: 4 ohms is the minimum impedance, not the norm. I sure wish I had that AMC3030 integrated amp to try with this baby . . .

BASS BALANCE
I said that Selling Point No. 1 is the bass performance. Oh, is it good. Provided your amplifier is well damped and you've used reasonable cables and you've bi-wired the Alóns, you will hear such welcomed, tactile richness and extension and weight that you won't believe the driver is so small. These speakers deliver a foundation worthy of much larger systems, and yet they swing, too. It's not just a load of low-end energy but solid, palpable bottom octaves with clearly defined edges. And the coolest thing of all is that there's no insufferable overhang. True, I've heard tighter bass with faster transients, but often that's accompanied by a dryness which sounds too artificial. The Alón finds a perfect balance for a speaker of this size and price point, neither disappointing the owner with blatant compromises as most models in this sector would, nor telling the owner a lie to suggest real bass. The lower registers of this speaker are, as Goldilocks said of Baby Bear's chair, porridge and mattress, 'just right'.

Selling Point No 2? No doubt about it: openness. As any champion of vanishing baffles will tell you, once you get rid of boxiness you do away with congestion and smearing. It's one thing to eliminate a boxy sound by making a bombproof, vibration-free enclosure selling for £10,000, or to trade-off the bass by making an affordable but inert mini-monitor. This system gives you the bass, the mass and the 'presence' of a whacking great enclosure in a small package, the Alón 1's smallness and the 'open baffle' supplying a panel-like sense of transparency and space and, well, openness. The wee Alón wants to disappear. And yet this is the speaker to cause panic among agoraphobes. It is wide open, like a flasher's mac at five paces, a sound so big that you expect it to play only the theme music to Bonanza.

Retailers: you wanna have some fun? Place these on either side of some gargantuan muthasystem, turn 'em on and then count the number of customers who assume that it's the big stuff making the sounds. It's not just that they paint a full-scale picture, which is normally enough to draw attention away from any speaker which belies its size. It's that vanishing trick, the way this speaker can simply disappear once the level is boosted above a whisper. (Don't confuse this with the Klipsch Heresy, which only reaches vanishing point at Guns'n'Roses level.)

Within the larger picture is reasonably precise image positioning, not locked tight and to the millimetre as with an LS3/5A or a Celestion SL700, but admirable given that the images have so much space in which to lose themselves. The extreme clarity, the lack of veiling, the sense of air around the images more than compensate for any lack of precision. Another bonus is the neutrality, so the prime trade-off - the marginal lack of image specificity - pays for a lack of coloration. Also unobstructed are the subtle details, low-level sounds and dynamic shadings.

Affordable speakers are so good nowadays that there's a tendency to ask for too much performance for too little outlay. While we'd all like to be able to acquire the performance of the WATT/Puppy or the Sonus Faber Extrema for £99 per pair, it just ain't on the cards. There's still a clearly defined hierarchy, of getting just what the price tag promises. You want 20-20kHz response and true 3D imaging and zero coloration and 130dB maximum SPLs, then dig deeper into your piggy bank. But the Alón 1 has a way of making the Law of Diminishing Returns seem even more unjust and it could revolutionise the middle market.