Issue 132 / October/November 2001

FURTHER THOUGHTS
Alón Circe Upgraded: A Higher End Still
BY ARTHUR S. PFEFFER

Following up on the success of his seductive Circe three way dynamic towers (review, Issue 112) Carl Marchisotto of Acarian Systems has executed some subtle but serious modifications He has improved crossover parts and wiring topology, decoupled the upper baffle structure from the woofer enclosure by means of hard spacers, and replaced the original woofer driver with one retaining the Alnico magnet but boasting increased low-frequency power response and cone excursion. Listeners whose Circes were shipped after January 1, 2001, are already enjoying the mods. Earlier units can be upgraded for $2,000 per pair. The crossovers are returned to Acarian for alteration, while the woofers and couplers are installed by the user - not a difficult job for anyone handy with a screwdriver and a soldering iron (for the speaker leads).

The new Circe is still its alluring self - liquid-edged clarity and neutrality, firmly defined bass, enormous soundstaging, sharply focused images, absence of quirks, essential grace and self-effacement that minimize the intrusion of electronic artifice into the enjoyment of music. That first watt of Alnico delicacy is still very much in play. The Philip Jones Brass Ensemble's Renaissance Brass [LP Argo ZRG 823] shines forth in bronzed magnificence and purity, with interstitial silences as quiet as black-body radiation. But the upgrades take the Circe phenomenon to an even more thrilling level. The secret of the enhancement is dynamics. The Circes now corroborate HP's insistence that dynamic responsiveness, both macro and micro, is the key to accurate reproduction.

The baffle and crossover mods, which I heard before the arrival of the new woofer, made the revealing midrange and upper-midrange ultra-revealing. And also ultra-responsive to dynamic intricacies and pulses in the signal - finer and sharper peaks and valleys. Absent an equivalent improvement in bass response, however, the net effect was to tilt the subjective frequency balance upward, toward a thinner, edgier, albeit more dynamic and transparent sound.

So when Marchisotto informed me that the new bass driver was the same as the old in construction and sonic character but with more power below 50 Hz, I thought, well, that's a comforting safety cushion with high-powered amps like the VTL MB75Os. But listening showed immediately that the effects of the new woofer go beyond safety and alter the way the entire waveform presses out into the air. I hadn't recognized that the excursion limitation of the old woofer was damping its response even to low-level signals. In effect, to match that slight damping, the upper drivers had had to be slightly "damped" as well, through tuning, voicing, and crossover design -damped in the sense that they marched in step with a woofer cone less responsive in its lowest register.

The woofer's greater power transmission liberates dynamics and enhances accuracy by allowing the cone to respond more quickly and completely to peaks and transients and to trace minute dynamic contours. It marries bass to midrange, which itself has been liberated by the separators. The mods open the midrange and upper bass while the woofer captures more low end without altering the tight, natural, neither-lush-nor-lean bass character. A great improvement in a hard-to-improve speaker. Now I've been forced to detweak my Circes by removing the handful of Walker Resonance Control Discs that helped the original version sound its best; on the new version, the discs add harshness and grain, a case of gelding the lily, though Valid Points (and discs) underneath the speakers still sharpen focus and transparency.

Marchisotto was Jon Dahlquist's chief engineer in the days when the fast 10-inch woofer of the DQ-10 speaker was replaced by a 10-inch cone in a 12-inch basket. The DQ-10 was quick, neutral, focused, and coherent in a time when muddy bookshelf boxes were the norm, but some listeners lusted after more voluminous bass. The effect was to give the DQ-10 not better or even deeper bass, but subjectively mire bass. Marchisotto's first big speaker, the Alón IV, had (1) a 12-inch woofer and (2) heaps of bass, plus (3) the mild chestiness that 12-inch cones sometimes slyly inflict on upper-bass. The Alón V offered greater speed, coherence, neutrality, freedom from chestiness and - a 10-inch woofer; it could have been called the Alón IV minus II.

Beat me upside the head if I'm wrong, but I now associate a seamless full-spectrum blend and tight, somewhat light-bodied (if deep) bass with the smaller woofer cone, and ampler, rounder, more colored, yet also more fulfilling and exciting bass with the larger one. But again the upgraded Circe woofer challenges my assumptions. I did not expect that upping the power handling would enable a 10 to pump out bass with nearly the generosity of a 12, but it does, at least in Acarian's Alnico-magnet version.

What this dynamic capability means in listening is not only more substantial organ pedals and death-star explosions but also the coherent whip-crack transients - drums, bass guitar, cymbals - we normally hear in live music, bass components smartly aligned with midrange and highs. With the new woofer, I thought the faithfully recorded bass drum bashes at the start of Reference Recordings' Fiesta Mexicana [RR-38, LP] would run wild, but they don't. They are fully contained, controlled, complex in texture and timbre, a sharper shock but not a boomier, thuddier one - just as live bass drum or Mercury's 1812 Overture cannon shots [434360-2, CD] shock but do not boom or thud. The sudden movements of ambient air around the bass and midrange pulses conform exactly to the speed of the pulses themselves. Now I can discern the center of the sound, the shape of the envelope of attack and decay.

I didn't urge the original Circe on rock enthusiasts, but I strongly advise them to check out the "Mark II" in the Nylons' One Size Fits All [Open Air OD0202, CD]. The Circes' newfound ability to slam out bass is combined with classical elegance and purity in vocals. Though picked up efficiently by the mikes, sibilants are under superb control. I'm hearing several new sounds in the mix in "That Kind of Man" and the doo-wop "Silhouettes." I had fun dissecting Alan Silvestri's sabre-toothed orchestral climaxes in the soundtrack of The Mummy Returns [Decca 440-013-983-2, CD]; for instance, "Imbotep Reborn." The new Circes tell me that bass on this disc holds up to the low area but tails off at the bottom. A bass-drum stroke at the start of this track punches out with razor sharpness and zero smear. The eerie sense of space here is no doubt digitally enhanced, and the speakers reveal what is acoustic and what is not, hinting that electronic overlays absorb much of the wattage.

Reference's concert band and orchestral recordings such as Pomp and Pipes [RR58CD] and Trittico [RR52CD] have in the past sounded bafflingly pallid and even unfocused in my somewhat bass-shy small room, but the new Circe brings forth their gigantic atmospheres and full-bodied images, as conveyed by bass-ample amps like the Herron MB150s and VTL Brunnhildes. These no-holds-barred recordings will not to come to life without dynamically expansive electronics and speakers that give everything and give it instantly - and this the new Circe does.

The mods further expand the Circes' free-floating, well-ventilated soundstage in depth and vertical height and recess it untethered in space, as if teleported from the concert hall. The speaker boxes themselves miraculously seem to be listening rather than playing. The performers, of course, appear firmly rooted to a stage floor, part of the overall illusion of solid, three-dimensional instruments playing and humans vocalizing in a fully realized space. The mods narrow the small gap between the Circes and the finest electrostatics in midrange and upper-frequency transparency and speed, while the woofer enhances the bass authority flat panels lack. (To hear all of this, you will have to remove the wood caps, untie the drawstring, and carefully slide the non-removable grille cloth down below the woofer cone; think of it as foreplay.) Choruses present not just a wall of vocal cinder blocks but sharply focused aggregated individuals, if not quite with living delicacy and richness. Again harking back to the Dahlquist DQ-10s, I well remember the added spaciousness and easy relaxation the separate subwoofers added to the sound, and the Circe woofer upgrade performs the identical magic. Properly proportioned low bass can make midrange and highs sweeter and reduce background grunge.

In one of my favorite Living Stereo CD reissues, Rossini's William Tell overture and Liszt pieces with the Boston Pops (BMG 09026-61497-2], the size, location, and composition of the percussion department can readily be discerned. The Circes open a window on the rear corners where four hard-working guys, as I'm sure they were at the time, perspire on full aural display operating triangle, tympani, bass drum, and cymbals. I have seen percussion live many times and noted the distinct sources, but seldom before in a recording, where, even when heard vividly, percussion images can merge into a general mass.

While the new bass driver has little or no chesty color of its own, no undercurrent of unwanted bass, it more faithfully transmits that color when present in a recording. Likewise, because of the baffle mods, the Circes call added attention to upper-midrange glare zones in recordings like Amirov's Acerhaijan Mugam and other Everest early-stereos [SDBR 3032, LE or FVC 9048, CD]. The speakers pitilessly reveal unmusical distortions and noises emanating from connectors, cables, electronics, or AC lines. The Circes convey musical textures gently but without kid gloves or soothing lotions. They neither harden edges nor round them off and do not produce the 'feathery" highs some listeners enjoy. Their increased dynamic responsiveness can also prove a mixed blessing, exactly as the Chicago Symphony performing live in your listening room would be. The room has to accommodate the peaks, and my room does not quite; they ring and overload the air. Unless I wish to live with lower levels, further room tuning is in the cards.

The Circes have taken hormone therapy without sacrificing seductiveness. To their elegance, focus, and clarity, Marchisotto has added power and dynamic coherence in the low end. Their bass performance is now first-rate, to my ears the current state of the art in basic three-way design.

ARTHUR S. PFEFFER

MANUFACTURER INFORMATION
Acarian Systems, Ltd.
 Hunters Run, Suite 104, 181 Smithtown Blvd.
Nesconset, New York 11767
Phone: (631) 265-9577; fax: (631) 265-9560
AlonByAcarian@cs.com
Price: Alón Circe, $12,000/pair; upgrade, $2,000

ASSOCIATED EQUIPMENT
ASP's Associated Equipment removed for space, can be found in Issue 130, page 133.

MANUFACTURER'S RESPONSE
Some additional details on the upgrade:
(1) ...The new woofer provides lower electrical distortion in addition to higher power handling. This improves bass, midrange, and high frequencies by reducing the masking effects of low-frequency distortion. ... The woofer improvements have been accomplished without increasing the driver moving mass so that the critical dynamic and transient response is not degraded.
(2).. We have found the optimum way to couple the top section.. to the lower bass section. We have developed solid copper couplers that are inserted beteveen the sections... These provide reduced coloration and increased transparency.
(3).. A new topology has been implemented for the Circe crossover, providing a smoother impedance curve with less reactance, so the speaker presents a more resistive load to the amplifier for a more linear dynamic response. We have found an improved method to mount certain critical components. . . The new crossover ... provides greater dynamics over a wider frequency range...

- CARL MARCHISOTTO, PRESIDENT