Dynaudio Excite X12 loudspeaker

I miss the High End Shows. Not the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas—no thanks. I can do without the overpriced hotels, the 45-minute taxi lines, the frantic racing from venue to venue. No, it's theStereophile shows I miss, with the centralized location, the rubbing shoulders with readers ("Hey, you're the cheap-speaker guy! Check out room 206!"), the listening to live music, and maybe even playing a little of it.

There was always a number of manufacturers who regularly displayed their wares at the Stereophile show and always achieved good sound, no matter what they demoed. One was the Danish loudspeaker maker Dynaudio. Over the years, I spent many hours listening to splendid sound in Dynaudio's rooms—the kinds of spaces where you just want to kick back, listen for an hour, and throw your notebook away.

There hasn't been a Stereophile show since 2007, and I haven't listened to Dynaudios for a while, save for the speakers in my friend's Volvo (footnote 1). Invariably, the Dynaudio speakers I heard at shows were their more expensive lines, but I began to wonder: Does Dynaudio make an affordable bookshelf model? The answer was a resounding yes, and soon a pair of Excite X12 loudspeakers ($1200/pair) were headed my way.

Dynaudio designs
The X12 is the entry-level speaker of Dynaudio's Excite series, which includes three other models ranging up to $3600/pair. The rear-ported, two-way X12 sports a 5.7" cone made of a proprietary magnesium-silicate–loaded polymer (MSP), with a voice-coil and die-cast basket both made of aluminum. The cone's material is designed to offer an optimum combination of stiffness, inner damping, and low mass. This drive-unit also features a longer voice-coil excursion than previous Dynaudio designs, to allow higher dynamics at high volume. The 1" silk-dome tweeter is made with a proprietary doping compound that benefits from a new precision coating process intended to achieve a more natural high-frequency response. The X12 also includes an impedance-correction circuit that is claimed to make the impedance completely linear above 100Hz. This presents the amplifier with very small inductive and capacitive loads; the X12 should be easy to drive for a wide range of amplifiers.

The X12 is available in real-wood veneers of Maple, Cherry, Rosewood, or Black Ash; high-gloss white or black are available for another $75/pair. My Cherry sample looked quite elegant and unassuming. I set the X12s on my Celestion Si stands, and though I felt the speakers' timbre was the same with or without their grilles in place, their resolution of detail and retrieval of ambience were dramatically better with the grilles off. Off they stayed.

Listening
Even as I began setting up the Excite X12s, I had some reservations. In the past five years I've reviewed many speakers at or near the X12's price, most of them bookshelf models. All have been excellent in different ways, and I was concerned that this review would be yet another repetition of "amazing bass and dynamic slam for an affordable bookshelf with no meaningful colorations." These days we're blessed with an embarrassment of riches, as creative manufacturers churn out more and more compact, affordable loudspeakers that can reproduce music with surprising realism. I hoped there'd be something special about the Dynaudio Excite X12 that would set it apart from all the other affordable bookshelf models I've heard recently.

That something special arrived during my very first listening session. The layers of detail revealed by the X12's rich, glorious, silky midrange made me want to listen to female singers. There was a quality in the lower end of the alto range that made particularly luscious Cassandra Wilson's rendering of Robbie Robertson's "The Weight," on Belly of the Sun (CD, Blue Note 35072). Further up the frequency range, there was a rightness to Madeline Peyroux's voice on Careless Love (CD, Rounder 11661-3192-2) that made her the perfect foil for Larry Golding's upper-register colorings on Hammond organ. I speak here of rightness of harmonic structure. From the mid-midrange to the lower highs, the X12 had such a "rightness" of timbral reproduction that I could almost see the drawbar settings on Golding's instrument.

Electrocompaniet AW400 monoblock power amplifier

One of my favorite parental duties is dispensing advice that's calculated to make me sound wiser than I am. Among those pearls: Every so often you should change your point of view—yourphilosophies—just to see if your opinions can stand the strain. In doing so, you may discover a few things that are better than you expected them to be!

I admit that, when I made up that nonsense, I had certain vegetables in mind. But late one night, when an unpleasant bout of thinking kept me awake, I realized that there are a great many older people, such as myself, whose belief systems could also stand a bit of shaking up. Surely, if there's more to heaven and earth than is dreamed of in our philosophies, it's far easier to change the latter than the former.

And then it happened: Mere days later, I was offered the chance to write about a powerful solid-state amplifier, the likes of which I hadn't experienced in ages. How could I say no?

Electrocompaniet
Among the historically well-regarded makers of solid-state amplifiers—Mark Levinson, Krell, and Threshold come to mind—one of the most notable of all is from a nation with fewer inhabitants than the city of Baghdad: the Norwegian firm Electrocompaniet, whose 1973 premiere gained it recognition in virtually every hi-fi market around the globe.

That debut product, snappily named The 2-Channel Audio Power Amplifier (footnote 1) also heralded the arrival of Matti Otala, a Finnish college professor and electronics engineer whose work is also associated with Philips, Harman/Kardon, Nokia, and Robert Bosch GmbH. In 1973, Dr. Otala presented to the Audio Engineering Society a paper in which he described a distortion mechanism called transient intermodulation, or TIM, and which had otherwise gone undetected, apparently because the standard measurements of the day relied overmuch on steady-state test tones (footnote 2). Dr. Otala proved that the nonlinearities he described were audibly present in solid-state amplifiers that used global feedback to reduce other, more commonly known distortions.

For the technically minded, Otala's work influenced the way we look at feedback loops and amplifier slew rate; for those more interested in audio philosophies—there's that word again—Otala and, by extension, Electrocompaniet underscored the danger in suggesting that any existing suite of measurements can say all that needs to be said about an amplifier's musical performance, and reminded us that measuring without listening is of limited value. (So, too, is the opposite—for the designer, at least.)

Matti Otala never actually worked for Electrocompaniet; today he's a professor of Technology Management at the University of Technology in Tampere, Finland. But the Norwegian engineer Terje Sandstrom, who was instrumental in turning Otala's theories into a practical commercial amplifier, continues as mentor to Electrocompaniet's design team—whose recent fruits include the AW400 monophonic amplifiers ($12,500/pair). The AW in the model designation is a subtle reference to Electrocompaniet's Ampliwire models of bygone years, while the 400 signifies that this solid-state amp is capable of passing 400W, without clipping, across an 8-ohm load (not to mention 765W across 4 ohms and 1010W across 2 ohms).

The Electrocompaniet AW400 has the added distinction of being fully balanced: From its tidy input boards through the appropriately rugged banks of heatsunk output devices, each AW400 is as symmetrical an amp as I've seen—although I could see less of their innards than I'm used to, given the manner in which the circuit boards and RF shields are arranged. (A telltale bolt betrayed a toroidal mains transformer, but other parts of the puzzle remained unseen.) I was very impressed with the AW400's mechanical construction: The sheet-metal chassis, in tandem with a pair of metal straps between the two banks of heatsinks—not unlike the crossbars one sees in the engine compartments of certain high-performance cars—provide the requisite rigidity, without the kind of crazy-high mass that adds far more to the cost than to the performance (in my opinion). And the front panels are nicely finished sheets of clear acrylic, backlit in blue—beautiful, but not, in the manner of other high-end amps, pointlessly so.

Setup and installation
Anxious though I was to try something from outside my usualphilosophy, there was a catch: The Electrocompaniet AW400 is optimized for true balanced operation, and my reference system is not. In particular, the output of my Shindo Masseto preamplifier, though sensibly low in impedance, is decidedly single-ended.

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Footnote 1: I've often decried the silliness of fitting domestic amplifiers with rack-mount faceplates, but in this case there was a good reason: That name wouldn't have fit on a narrower panel!—Art Dudley

Footnote 2: "An Audio Power Amplifier for Ultimate Quality Requirements," by Jan Lohstroh and Matti Otala, presented at the 44th AES Convention (March 1973), Paper H-6, available from www.aes.org.—Ed.