CES 2014

The Enigmacoustics company from Irvine in California has become renowned for the self-energized, horn-loaded Sopranino electrostatic supertweeter they introduced a couple of years back. They were still promoting the tweeter at CES, demonstrating a pair with Magico speakers in one of their rooms. But I was more interested in their second room, where they were introducing a complete loudspeaker, the Mythology M1 standmount. Intended to sell for >$12,000/pair, the M1 adds the Sopranino supertweeter to a two-way design featuring a 35mm dome tweeter that crosses over at a low 1kHz to a proprietary 6” woofer in a rear-ported enclosure made from a laminated birchwood and glass, with an aluminum front baffle.

There’s no low-pass filter on the tweeter, which is allowed to operate up to its natural limit, but there is a high-pass on the supertweeter. Crossover is third-order on the tweeter but second-order on the woofer.

Driven by Ayre amplification with a Paradox DAC that was new to me, the M1s sounded a bit too rich on Ray Brown’s double bass on Oscar Peterson’s We Get Requests, but the midrange and high frequencies were superbly clean and detailed and the system overall threw a great sense of recorded space and ambience.