Subpages (2): Speaker Positioning Sub-Bass System

Rear bass reflex ports: a pair/speaker.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bass_reflex

Mozart Grand, Symphony Edition

The silk-domed tweeter

Bass driver

Vienna Acoustics Mozart Concert Grand SE:

Do I Hear A Waltz?

by Neil Gader, The Absolute Sound

Some loudspeakers are simply born to dance. It’s part of their bloodline. They reproduce music with a distinctly light, nimble touch in much the same way Fred and Ginger seemed to defy the laws of gravity and float across the ballrooms of the silver screen. Vienna Acoustics loudspeakers evoke this sense of live music’s immediacy in ways that leave other loudspeakers chugging to catch up. I heard this when I spent time with the Haydn Grand, noted the same trait with VA ’s concentric-flat-driver flagship, the Music, and now with the Mozart Concert Grand SE.

The latest version of the Mozart now merits the SE moniker. Typically connoting “Signature Edition,” Vienna Acoustics opts for “Symphony Edition.” Like the original it’s a 2.5-way floorstanding speaker designed in a bass-reflex configuration with twin rear-firing ports. More evolution than revolution, the SE continues the VA tradition of extreme attention to detail at every stage of design and production. Fit and finish are superb—as good as they get in this range. I should add that visitors to my listening room inevitably ran their fingers across the impeccable cabinet, admiring every minute detail as if caught in the tug of an extraterrestrial tractor beam.

The narrow 38” tower employs a thick one-and-a-half-inch front baffle with one-inch sidewalls. VA describes the bracing pattern as “relatively complicated,” with the addition of a lot of internal batting material. Vienna Acoustics’ cone drivers are noteworthy for their transparency, not just sonically but literally. All designs are in-house. The X3P cone material for the transparent 5” mid/bass driver is a derivation of VA’s polypropylene hybrid cone technology and combines TPX, a thermoplastic used in its XPP cones, with three polypropylene based synthetics. The 5” ribbed mid/woofer is in fact the same XPP Spider-Cone used in the up-market Beethoven Concert Grand. The goal, of course, is to match very low mass with high damping and extreme rigidity for control. These transducers also use an inverted rubber surround to reduce cone edge-resonances. Treble duty is the responsibility of a proprietary 1.1” hand-coated, silk dome tweeter delivered from Scan-Speak. It’s slightly oversized in diameter and was selected to aid dispersion, an advantage for buyers opting for wide spacing between speakers.

Common to all Vienna Acoustics speakers is the mandate that crossover components hew to tight 1% tolerances—that is except for the inductors, which must meet an even more stringent 0.7% tolerance. Sonic margins are equally rigorous with each production pair frequency-matched to within 0.5dB of the reference pair—the original pair designed by the Peter Gansterer-led team. This achieves a level of consistency that ensures that the final owner is hearing exactly what Gansterer himself hears from his creation rather than a loose approximation. The speaker terminals are also VA-designed and use brass/silver with gold contact points, which are said to achieve a quieter interface. All internal wiring is twisted to reject any crossover-borne noise. Heavy crackle-finished cast-aluminum footers stabilize the narrow towers and are supplied with spikes and dimpled pucks to protect wood floors.

Sonically, the first things that come to mind with the Mozart Grand SE are speed and coherence. Whether it’s the obsession with highly select crossover components or the small quick drivers liberally aided by a clean dynamic tweeter, the result is wide-band frequency response and transparency that create satiny string sections, clean concise winds, and distinct placement cues from deep within the symphony orchestra. The Mozart Grand SE possesses a micro-dynamic resolving power that keenly suits classical and acoustic music. Tonally the speaker is not devoid of character. It’s more finely boned in presentation and conveys a lightness and delicacy that often accompanies smaller driver in narrow columnar enclosures—only this one has genuine mid-thirty Hertz bass and great midrange dynamics. This transparency is underscored by a leaner more sinewy quality that sets limits on the orchestral scale the Mozart can achieve. There’s a small energy dip in the presence range that flatters the dimensional aspects of symphonic music, but it also reduces some of the in-your face energy and grit from Pat Benatar’s scorching vocal from “Love is a Battlefield.” The brass section from Copland’s Fanfare [Reference] takes on a smoother almost glassy quality but for me lacks a bit of attack and urgency. Similarly, on solo piano, my favorite instrumental metric, the Mozart SE communicates a stunning soundboard reverberation, and captures the weight and rush of air in the bottom two octaves. But the relaxed upper mids are almost too pretty, lacking at moments the forward thrust and sound pressure that a well-struck run of notes would have. Because of its mid- and upper-bass energy, placement options are important. Anticipating room issues, VA provides foam plugs for the ports but I tended to prefer tweaking via repositioning. That said, I came away with mixed feelings regarding bass response. On the one hand I loved having my eyelids pinned back during the final section of Holst’s “Jupiter” from The Planets. On the other, bass response could thicken at times and I felt that the speed often couldn’t quite match the unalloyed quickness of the SE’s mids, particularly at high volume levels. Which is to say that every speaker has limits and the Mozart Concert Grand SE is not the kind of speaker that a DJ is going to take along to a rave party. This is not a knock—it’s only to point out that the Mozart is more of a parlor speaker designed to play at realistic levels in medium and smaller rooms rather than pounding out the chorus to Queen’s “We Will Rock You” at a halftime show at L.A.’s Staples Center.

The Mozart Grand SE playbook is equally impressive at low levels, producing a degree of realism and acoustic space that I associate with real concert-going. It’s as if you’re not listening softly through electronics, rather that you’re in a concert hall and sitting back a few rows to experience the performance from a different but undiminished perspective. It’s the rare box enclosure that doesn’t leave a sonic imprint on the music. To one degree or another most absorb micro-dynamics and transient speed and momentum like a well-placed speed bump in front of the music. And that’s not even considering the colorations that ported designs often bring to the table. However, in the critical midrange VA has minimized these concerns to the point of irrelevance with the Mozart Grand SE. The result is not just that individual images are cleanly and openly represented but that they are also set within a brilliantly dimensional soundstage. When the Mozarts reproduce the Turtle Creek Chorale, during the Rutter Requiem, the unbroken continuity of the delicate vocal array spreading across the hall’s soundspace is inspiring. It becomes a transparent curtain of energy, corner-to-corner, with a depth and dimensionality that are rewards unto themselves. The Mozart Grand SE may have a sensitivity of 90dB but that’s at a rated 4 ohms nominal impedance, so moderate power is essential. That’s the difference between the level of power required to establish a heart beat and what is needed to release the SE’s inner athlete. To illustrate this, there’s Natalie Merchant’s “Peppery Man” from Leave Your Sleep [Nonesuch]. I first heard this track at this year’s CES in the VTL room. An OMG moment ensued. The M450 Series III monoblocks were driving the TAD Reference One speakers and as soon as Luke and Bea Manley identified the song I knew I’d be ordering it posthaste. Among the musical marvels on this track are the Fairfield Four vocalists and a stomping tuba which anchors the track in the way a stand-up bass otherwise might. The point to all of this is that with smaller amplifiers, sub-100 watts, this track could sound a bit bloated and veiled. The typical judgment might be rendered that the speaker has issues like vent noise and overhang or a noisy enclosure. But not so fast, because once I laced up the ARC DSi200 integrated to the Mozart Grand SE the tuba’s full character was revealed. It was still full-bodied but much more controlled, and its timbre was more clearly defined, while the rubbery lack of resolution was replaced by superior pitch clarity and more transient detail from the mouthpiece to the bell.

The Mozart Concert Grand SE is a floorstander of many strengths but it has the soul and the moves of a compact. A terrific value, yet so beautifully constructed and appointed it could easily be at home with the black-tie-and-Chanel crowd at an opening night gala at the Vienna Opera House or Musikverein. And if that’s not something to dance about, I don’t know what is.

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Mozart Grand Loudspeaker

Equipment report

by Sally Reynolds, The Absolute Sound

While waiting for Terry Medalen, the distributor’s representative who was coming to help me refine set up, I hooked up the Mozarts to let them play for a couple of days. They sounded clear right out of the box and I put them where I start out with most speakers— about six feet apart, three feet from the wall, not toed in. I made no effort to tweak their position.

It is always interesting to participate in a setup when the experts are at work. In Terry’s competent hands, the Mozarts, in ten minutes, were a foot closer to the wall than I had them, three feet farther apart, and toed in. Final location: 24 inches from the back wall, nine feet apart (!), and toed-in sharply. All the while, I sat in the listening chair, saying, “Yes, better,” “No,” “Uh-” (I try never to pretend to hear something I don’t; though sometimes you want to hear something so badly, you think you do—or do you?).We were using a duet between soprano and double bass, which makes a good test for phase and soundstage [Rob Wasserman ~ Duets, MCAD; don’t get the German reissue. Jennifer Warnes is the singer; the song is “The Ballad of the Runaway Horse.”]. The voice was coming from the left. Terry swung the left speaker in about two inches—and most unsubtly, Warnes leapt into center stage.

Next we went for tonal balance and other goodies with Sanctuary’s Sanctuary: Contemplative Improvisations for Organ, Cello, and Bass Clarinet [XXI]. On Cut 3, the organ rides deep beneath the breath of the clarinet—oh, yes, this CD has far more going for it than just setup testing.

That was fun. Most of us are guilty of thinking, from time to time, that the tweakers are a bit over the top—after all, how much difference can an inch make? Well, a lot, actually, if you know what you are doing or have infinite patience and are not afraid to experiment. (This is my way of urging you to play with your speakers.) A good speaker will sound basically good almost anywhere. It will be clear and extended and have its specific tonal characteristics, top to bottom; you might be satisfied with it as is. But proper placement is nearly always an audible and exciting improvement, and on some speakers, it’s necessary for developing both proper soundstaging—how the musicians are laid out in front of you—and imaging—where each instrument is set and the air and “light” around it.

The Mozart Grands are very, very good speakers. They have one quality I’ve never heard before in loudspeakers in this price range. They reproduce the recording space—any recording space—in a way that will make the hair rise on the back of your neck. In Saudades [Water Lily], the small jazz group is in a large cathedral. The two mikes are crossed above them about 7 feet up and 10 feet away. On these speakers, you hear the walls, you hear the stone of those walls (stone makes a reverberant space that sounds quite different from that of a wooden room— deeper; hollower; sharper in the lows, sometimes slightly flatter in highs) and the arching height. And yet the players are there in front of you, undiminished by this would-be daunting space.

On The Essential Leonard Cohen [Sony], you hear studio space. And you hear different studio spaces, some large, some small, a few positively claustrophobic—an airless feel that’s uncomfortable. This characteristic, by the bye, isn’t just a high-end brag point. It makes a difference in the overall perception of “reality,” just as hearing the moisture in the mouth of a singer can take you to a jazz club, and its lack keep you just that last inch away from suspension of disbelief.

The Mozart’s highs are extended, clear, crisp. On Sneakin’ Out’s Train Wreck, the high percussion of the bells and xylophone ring and tingle and decay into sweetness. Mandolin strings twang, sing, and quiver. The bass hums and growls. The walls of the bakery, where it was recorded, are flimsy and close (I won’t say flour-coated—you might not think it was a joke.) On the Mercury CD of Kodaly’s Hary Janos Suite, the violins have that faint raspy, resiny sound real violins do, from about 15 feet away, at the onset of a note. The cimbalom, that hammered- string instrument from Eastern Europe, rings and sings and reverberates magically. The transients of notes are so well reproduced by the Mozarts that you get a satisfying sense of “speed.” And each sound is delineated in its full range from onset to decay, yet all feed seamlessly into the musical fabric. This reproduction of the continuity of music plus the individual character of each note is devilishly hard to describe, but it is, when you come down to it, what music does: Music creates the whole, its parts, and the sum of its parts, all in the same breath.

As an ancillary quality, the Mozart's midrange has remarkable depth and transparency. Even in heavy orchestral works, the individual instrumental groups are correctly placed and make their contribution within the fabric of sound. The lows are powerful (though making them fully so requires a subwoofer), with the Mozart’s purity emphasizing the tonal quality of organ pedal notes, something you hear seldom even live.

What’s left? Some details. You will need the metal bases and spike feet, beautifully designed not to be obtrusive and to do the isolation job. And you’ll want the grille cloths. Yes, you will, too. Vienna Acoustics’ designer, Peter Gansterer, decided that since he had to have grilles, they’d better do something. So he designed them with aluminum frames, with a lovely V-shaped “diffuser” to control dispersion. If you take the grilles off, you’ll listen awhile and then put them back on because the speakers sound better that way. The “bungs” (VA calls them “BCUs”) to close off the ports on the rear? Didn’t need them; didn’t use them. But to get to those celestial golden streets, you’ll need a good subwoofer. The Mozarts are so deep and rich without a sub you’ll be tempted to let it go, but don’t.

But the Mozart has a soundstage and midrange magic that brought tears to my eyes. For sheer listening pleasure, it is the best of the three speakers we tested. Indeed, with a good subwoofer, you won’t find much better sound anywhere. Only different. And usually much, much more expensive.

[1] The Mozart Grands features two midbass drivers and one tweeter, where one mid-bass driver handles low frequencies only, while the other’s response extends all the way up into the midrange. In this way you enjoy the purity of a single midrange driver, but the power (and surface area) of dual bass drivers.

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From http://canadahifi.com/vienna-acoustics-mozart-grand-symphony-edition-speakers-review/

July 31st, 2012, In Reviews, Speakers and Subwoofers, by Phil Gold

What’s a spider cone? It’s an important question, because it’s the principal upgrade in the new Symphony Edition of the Mozart Grand speakers from Austria’s Vienna Acoustics. The Mozart Grand has two 6 inch drivers, both clear X3P designs, while the upgrade replaces the lower of these with the new spider cone. According to the company’s Patrick Butler:

“The Spider Cone design dramatically increases rigidity while maintaining an optimal balance between low moving mass, rigidity and inner damping. The Spider Cone was first designed for the original Beethoven Classic in 1996 as a solution to the problem of not being able to find the right bass driver. A series of radial and axial reinforcement ribs were added to our X3P cones with the design assistance of Finite Element Analysis. The net result is a lower noise-floor, improved dynamics and lower bass extension over the older Mozart Grand model. Additionally, the crossover is optimized to take advantage of the capabilities of the Spider Cone bass driver, which resulted in greater midrange clarity. There are also some minor changes in damping used inside of the cabinet. All for a $500 price premium over the outgoing Mozart Grand.”

Let’s take a step back. Who are Vienna Acoustics, and where does the Mozart Grand Symphony Edition fit in their offerings? I first came across their speakers at CES 2004 at the Sumiko display in the Las Vegas Convention Center. The speakers were beautifully finished but of conventional design, in contrast to the Sonus Faber speakers also represented by Sumiko. Then one year the remarkable Vienna Acoustics “Music” speaker, the first in their Klimt series, made its debut and suddenly everyone was paying attention. Strikingly modern in design with its unusual drivers on prominent display, the sound quality was equally impressive. The spider cone technology was taken to a new level in the NAVI bass drivers and has surfaced now in the Concert Grand line. Klimt speakers are beyond the budgets of most music lovers, but it is good to see such high tech solutions trickling down to the more affordable part of the product range. Spider cones and regular X3P cones are cast in Austria and then sent to SEAS to build up into drivers.

From day one, Peter Gansterer has been the mastermind behind this operation. Vienna Acoustics’s first speakers were shown in 1989, while the original design work for the Mozart speakers dates back to 1993. Today the company offers three distinct ranges of speakers: the Klimt Series, the Concert Grand Series and the Schönberg Series.

So we see a wide range of speakers. What distinguishes this company from all others is the perfection of the cabinet work, which is executed by a furniture manufacturer in nearby Italy. No cheap thin veneers here. Vienna Acoustics specifies furniture grade materials and hand finishing using special techniques, and employs seven layers of varnish. The members of the Concert Grand Series all feature carefully curved narrow baffles to minimize early refection and edge diffraction. Very strict quality control standards are imposed all the way along the line, and each speaker’s crossover is selected to create a close acoustic match to the reference speaker of each design, accommodating small differences in measured tweeter performance. Consistency – it’s what made McDonalds so successful. It may not be the world’s best hamburger but it’s always going to taste the same. Small differences between two speakers can impair the imaging so the very tight tolerances imposed here are designed to guarantee you get what you’re paying for, and ensure that reliability is going to be high.

The Mozart Grand SE stands 97.2cm tall, 34.3cm deep but a mere 21.6cm wide (with spike assembly) and sits on a black metal frame with four adjustable spikes to couple it firmly to the floor. A Scan Speak silk dome tweeter (exclusive to Vienna Acoustics) sits near the top of the thick front baffle. If you have small children or pets you’ll probably want to keep the protective grills in place, because this excellent tweeter has many fine qualities but resilience to finger pokes is not one of them. Immediately below the tweeter sits the first of the two main drivers, exclusive to Vienna Acoustics, and featuring a transparent cone made of X3P material. X3P combines thermoplastic TPX with 3 polypropylene based synthetics to achieve maximum inner damping, ultra-low mass and precise control over cone density and rigidity. Working from a single pair of high quality gold and silver alloy coated binding posts and high quality twisted pair solid copper conductors, a 2.5 way crossover feeds the full bass/midrange signal to the middle driver while the lower driver concentrates on the lower frequencies only. In the earlier version of this speaker the lower driver was identical in construction to its partner but in the Symphony Edition the lower driver is the new spider cone design. Still made from X3P but with important gains in rigidity it is able to dig deeper in the bass at reduced levels of distortion.

With its fine woodwork and slim design the Mozart Grand SE in Cherry finish looked great in my listening room. Even my wife approved, and that doesn’t happen every day. Being a dual-ported design, it is naturally quite fussy about positioning. Patrick, who delivered the speakers to me, also spent an hour or more making fine adjustments until he found the optimal spot and angle for each speaker, and your Vienna Acoustics dealer will (I hope) do the same for you if you are unwilling to take the time to experiment. Once in place the powerful bass locked in and the wide dispersion characteristics of the tweeter in particular means you do not need to constrain yourself to a narrow sweet spot. With some speakers it’s the other way around – it may matter less where you put them but once in place, there’s just a two foot range best suited for listening. Well in my house, people move around and speakers stay still so the Mozart exhibits the right imaging characteristics!

I mentioned that the bass was powerful and along with that, the image stable and spacious. Now it was time for some serious listening. I used a variety of amps and sources to partner with the speakers, but the speaker cables, like all the cables in the system were Nordost Valhalla throughout.

From a speaker called the Mozart Grand Symphony Edition I was expecting it to sound at its best in large scale material. That was not what I found. It performed well enough in the big orchestral works but I found it reached its limits of resolution in the climactic moments and didn’t display the nimbleness in the deep bass that its big brothers in the Klimt series offer. But switch to chamber music or jazz and it’s a different story. It’s quite at home with Miles Davis, a perfect match for Ray Charles and entirely convincing in the Beethoven String Quartets. It’s partly a question of squeezing a quart out of pint pot. You can do it, in terms of bass response, by leveraging the characteristics of reflex porting to enhance the output of relatively small woofers, but there’s no free lunch. The volume and bandwidth of the bass performance may meet your objectives, but the level of control and the deep bass sonority itself takes a beating, noticeable mostly in fast moving orchestral passages.

The Pavel Haas Quartet’s recording of Dvorak String Quartets [Supraphon SU40382] won a lot of accolades last year, including Gramophone’s “Chamber Recording of the Year”, and it simply leaps from the Mozart Grand full of energy and passion. The imaging is excellent, the string tone rich and warm, while the dynamics are if anything a bit over the top, although you cannot blame the speakers for that.

I’m crazy about the sound of the Beatles “Love” album [EMIDA 79810] and find it a great disc for bringing out the strengths and weaknesses of the various components passing through. In this case I noted some sibilance in the vocals on the opening track and the bird calls fall lower in the mix than with the reference YG Carmel speakers, but the imaging is solid and three dimensional. At a small fraction of the price, you wouldn’t expect the same level of detail retrieval. The voices are less than ideally distinct but the sound is dynamic, musical and low in distortion. “Blackbird” is excellent – full in tone and quick footed. Paul’s singing of “Yesterday” is slightly shut in but ideally warm and clear. “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” fully resolves the guitar line but while the cello is rich it loses some volume and clarity in the deep bass.

I’ve just bought a new SACD recording of Bartok’s “Concerto for Orchestra” which is in the demonstration class on all counts [Hungariton HSACD 32187]. Some of the bite and tension in the upper strings is sacrificed here for a smooth treble presentation and the winds lack their full blown harmonics, both symptoms of a shy top end, but the midrange is very strong above a tuneful but slightly recessed bass. By contrast the superb 1957 mono recording of Coleman Hawkins “The Hawk Flies High” [Mobile Fidelity UDSACD2030] is much more comfortable ground for the Mozart Grand SE. Lots of low bass energy and a delicious rasp from the sax coupled with a slight step down in the level of the brushwork suit the recording well. The trumpet is very clear and concise with excellent colour while JJ Johnson’s trombone is deliciously well captured. There is a tremendous drive here and the rhythms dance along in a spritely fashion. Oscar Pettiford’s bass is particularly nimble although somewhat lacking in the deep fundamentals. Each instrument is presented clearly within a coherent whole. This is almost an ideal rendition and difficult to match in this price range.

Equally good is the complex track “Diamonds and Rust” from Joan Baez [Vanguard VCD3 125/7] who performed this again on her recent trip to Toronto. Reduced somewhat in level at both frequency extremes, the essence and impact of the music is well preserved and the track sounds delicious and infectiously musical. The strong imaging abilities of the Mozart Grand help sort out all the fine layers of detail here and elsewhere on this disc.

I enjoyed my time with this speaker. As long as you don’t push it out of its comfort zone by throwing Mahler’s “Symphony of a Thousand” at it, you will be rewarded with a fully fleshed out soundstage, competitive levels of resolution, a surprisingly full if not fully sorted bass, a sweet and slightly recessed treble in a beautifully put together chassis that will give credit to any living room. It’s fairly efficient and will match a wide range of amplifiers. I find it well priced and worthy of extended audition for the serious listener looking for the truth in music rather than a brilliant HiFi sound designed to impress the neighbours.