Hales Design Group Concept Five loudspeaker Page 2

The proprietary 2" midrange dome is manufactured by MB Quart, and uses an edge-wound flat-ribbon conductor on the coil that gives the unit greater sensitivity than the standard Quart driver used by other manufacturers.

The 10" woofer used in the Concept Five sports a long voice-coil—nearly an inch in length—wedded to a dual-layer Kevlar cone that Hales deems the "ultimate" for stiffness and low moving-mass. "I spent a great deal of time modeling different designs in the computer to optimize that driver to provide the greatest bass extension in a 0.5-Q enclosure—a reasonable-size enclosure—that would maintain quality. I think I've achieved that. I don't know of any driver in the world that performs better, in an application like that of the Concept Five, than this 10"."

All of the diaphragms, Hales explained, operate as perfect pistons throughout their operating ranges. "I'm convinced—although I don't actually have any documentation that proves this—that they must, if you want to reproduce the harmonic structure and the natural timbre of instruments correctly. That's one reason I chose the 2" dome midrange—it acts as a piston from about 300Hz up to 11kHz. That's a wide bandwidth for any driver.

But you can't talk to Paul Hales for long without returning to his choice of a sealed-box enclosure. "What bass-reflex does to the impulse response is one thing, but what it does to the music is quite another. Next to harmonic integrity, bass response is probably my second-biggest pet peeve. For years, speakers have been very badly designed; they've been under-damped. Because of that, consumers have become used to it—it's what they expect. In fact, some listeners won't accept anything else. Just as grain in the top-end is perceived by some as greater detail—until you hear it done right, you don't know that it's wrong.

"My attitude is, if you can't do it right, don't do it at all. I suspect this is one reason why some sophisticated listeners choose small monitors, because they'd rather pass up the bottom octave than hear it screwed up. It's so much easier to suspend disbelief if there are no gross anomalies reminding you that what you're listening to is artificial."

Wedded to his convictions about cabinet construction are equally strong opinions about crossover design. "There are two camps in crossover design: steep slopes and shallow slopes. The first-order school of thought is that it's the only crossover that's transient-perfect and phase-perfect. They're right—it is the only crossover that gives you those things. The problem is that you're trying to blend two drivers over a really wide range, and that makes them very sensitive to time alignment. The designer has to choose a point in space—the design axis—to optimize everything. At that point, the speaker is pretty coherent, the drivers blend, and everything works just fine. That speaker measures great in an anechoic chamber, but put it in a room with a ceiling and a floor and you end up with a power response that's no longer flat.

"First-order speakers always sound thin to me—three-ways, not necessarily the two-ways. You can almost get away with a small, slanted, stand-mounted two-way first-order design; in a three-way, the woofer and the midrange are physically far apart from one another and they overlap in an area that's crucial for music reproduction—typically between 150 and 500Hz. That's the crucial range in the midband. Warmth and natural harmonic richness are gone, because those drivers are no longer summing correctly throughout all the different points of the room.

"I had a very well-regarded first-order speaker in my listening room. I ran a 1/3-octave analysis of the room response, and sure enough, the response—at the listening position and all around the room—was rolled-up in the bass, with a huge suckout right at the woofer/midrange crossover and another little depression right at the tweeter/midrange crossover. Well, that's exactly what I hear, too. Which makes disregarding phase linearity a no-brainer for me.

"I will acknowledge the superiority of first-order slopes in the reconstruction of the leading edge of little transient sounds. You might hear the sound of a guitarist's fingernails on the strings with greater detail. I believe that the ability to reproduce little ticks and clicks, or even resolve the individual brush strokes on a snare drum, is secondary to what we're trying to do here—which is to reproduce the music that we love. If we're too busy concentrating on whether we can hear fingers striking piano keys to do that, I think we've missed the point. Not that I think that people who care about those things are wrong; I just find all that less important to the music than other parameters."

Q: Are you going to play something we can dance to?
A: As soon as you dance something we can play to.

My current listening room has a lot of volume—much of it above my head, given the 14' ceiling. After trying several orientations, I've settled on using an exterior wall as the rear boundary for speaker placement. The wall does have two windows, located more or less behind the speakers themselves, but this orientation allows me to use our dining niche to put a lot of space behind my listening position. RPG Abffusors help control reflections from the upper walls behind the speakers and behind the sweet spot. ASC Tube Traps have proven remarkably powerful in tuning the room's bass response, and (using their reflective side) in breaking up early HF reflections.

The Concept Fives need room to breathe, although they don't eat up a room as severely as some speakers I've auditioned. The best blend between airiness and bass impact found them 42" off the rear wall and approximately 6' apart—and 9' from my listening position. A pair of stacked Slim Traps (absorbent side facing out) placed precisely in the middle between them, against the rear wall, improved their focus tremendously—in fact, I have found very few dynamic speakers that do not benefit from this.

Threaded aluminum cones are provided to mass-load the Concept Five to the floor, although I used Black Diamond Racing's Mark 4 carbon-fiber cones out of deference to the finish of my Saltillo tile floors. The Fives are bi-wirable via high-quality solid-brass Cardas binding posts.

Q: How are you going to play this?
A: Beautifully.

The most noticeable thing about the Hales Concept Fives was the intense focus they brought to a soundstage. Images were palpable. Recordings of vocal music produced the sensation that the vocalist was standing, large as life, between the speakers. This is the stuff of magic—it's hard not to get goosebumps, no matter how many times you experience it. In fact, I spent far too much of yesterday marveling at the Beatles' Anthology 3 (Apple CDP 8 34451 2, two CDs—although I hear there's also a domestic three-LP version) when I should have been writing this review. Suffice it to say that the Fives put the Fab Four in my room convincingly, adding to the chief pleasure of the set—it really seemed like I was just eavesdropping on an informal jam session. This is no insubstantial thing.

I came of age listening to, examining—dissecting, actually—the Beatles canon, so I'm the sort of fan who really would listen to all 67 takes of "I Will." Having George Harrison in my living room playing an acoustic version of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" is the sort of magical moment that justifies all of this audio insanity—and the Hales, God bless 'em, put him there.

But it didn't have to be the Silver Beatles—any well-recorded disc could invite the musicians into the room. Sam Pilafian and Frank Vignola's reading of "Don't Get Around Much Any More" (Travelin' Light, Telarc CD-83324) put them squarely between the speakers, Pilafian's tuba sounding deep and massive—but remarkably agile—while Vignola's tricky guitar fills skittered along above the melody. A big brass instrument usually gets flattened out in playback; that orotund physicality just gets lost, the transient edges of the tongued notes seldom having any real impact. Not so on the Hales—at least, not if you were careful in matching the playback level to that of the real event.

What I once heard Quad's Peter Walker explain is true: Every record really only has one realistic playback level—that of the real performance. How could it be otherwise? But you usually can find a range in which the original event could have transpired. Not so with the Concept Five. I could find—at most—only one volume level at which the performance convinced. Truth be told, the Concept Five needs to be goosed a bit in order to produce much sense of drive. But if I turned things up too loud, they started to sound harsh and compressed.

Was this a flaw in the speakers, or an indication that they were so superbly transparent that they revealed any deviation from accurate reporting? I suppose you could argue the latter, but I became impatient with this quirk. Accuracy is all to the good, but music is, sometimes, a social occasion—such as the evening when, my wife having left town, I invited JA and Robert Baird over to my crib for boys' night out. Robert brought along a bootleg disc of Oasis that Sony had sent to a limited number of critics (don't ask, it's too confusing).

Playing it, we had to really crank it to make it rock, but then we had to shout to hear one another. I hate that—too much like college. Still, the Concept Fives did capture the excitement of the live show while never letting the proceedings disintegrate into noise—a line guitarist Noel Gallagher successfully negotiated throughout the show. I don't wish to slight this accomplishment, as many speakers can't walk that tightrope at any volume. (JA took the disc home and played it through his beloved B&W Silver Signatures. "Too polite and lifeless," he declared, making this an even more interesting conundrum.)

Some of this quality could be mitigated by careful choice of wire. The Fives proved to be very sensitive to bi-wiring—and, by extension, to cable differences themselves. An AudioQuest Crystal/Argent combo, for example, was a revelation over the much more costly single wires I'd auditioned. The bass became more supple and dancelike, while the sense of air around individual instruments placed them more firmly in their acoustic environments. I assume this is another manifestation of the speaker's remarkable transparency.

In addition to the palpable, dense, dimensional acoustic image they manifested, the Fives also offered a tonal purity I've seldom encountered in a multi-driver dynamic speaker. Overtone structures were wed inextricably to their fundamentals. Many speakers, especially three-way designs, flunk this test. With the Hales, I could hear a foundation upon which the harmonics were stacked; sometimes I could hear that there were two storeys on top of the basement. Am I saying that the Concept Fives emulated a point source? No. They emulated the instruments—and quite successfully.

A recording that usually wrecks speakers on the rocks of its complex harmonic nature is "Koto Song" from The Duets by Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond (A&M Horizon CD 3290). Its pentatonic melody, stated by Desmond in broad, breathy stokes, is carried along like a leaf floating on the stream of Brubeck's piano. Simple, yes—the way a brush drawing of a blade of grass looks simple until you attempt to conjure the natural world in seven strokes.

Through the Fives, the piano was solid, smooth, propulsive, and gentle. I could hear Desmond's leaky embouchure, which he exploits to create the sound of gentle winds. As he fingers his alto without blowing into it, I could hear how it shapes the tone—and I could hear the space inside it as distinct from the acoustic in which it takes place. Such lovely sounds—such a bear to reproduce. Bravo, Concept Five.

That must be Shelly, 'cause Jake don't jam like that!
For all that I admired in the Concept Five, I couldn't shake the sensation that they were, ah...somewhat rhythmically reticent. A little stiff. As I've stated, I could increase their sense of drive by goosing 'em a little, but that didn't change their essential nature.

COMPANY INFO
Hales Design Group
16812 Gothard St.
Huntington Beach, CA. 92647 (1997)
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