Gramophone Dreams

I think I just found the perfect Herb speaker. It uses a hand-crafted 5" wide-range driver with a cone made from Japanese calligraphy paper. It rolls off around 50Hz at the bottom and 30kHz at the top. It has no crossover. Its cabinet is made of MDF that responds loudly when I tap it with my fingernails. Inside is what its designer calls a "short horn," which appears to harmlessly disperse back-cone energy while adding energy below the driver's cutoff frequency. Mainly, though, it's a perfect Herb speaker because it is naturally phase coherent. And sparkplug fast. And completely unmuffled.

This speaker I'm describing is Voxativ's new Hagen2 Monitor (footnote 1). To say it is a "Herb speaker" is to distinguish it from a John, Jason, or Kal speaker, or even a Ken or Alex speaker. If you want to know what kind of sound an audio reviewer values, notice which speakers they embrace, how well they understand them, and how long they stick with them.

The Voxativ Hagen2 Monitor
In my small, speaker-friendly room, the new Hagen2 Monitors, which were released last fall, look piano-lacquer black, gold-logo glamorous, and level-5 German serious.

Replacing my conventional Brit boxes with these alpha-looking full-rangers was a memorable smiling moment. As I set the Hagens on the same stands in the same location as my Falcon Gold Badges, I wondered if they would sound as different from the Falcons as they looked.

The Hagen2's 8" × 14" × 10" dimensions fit my 24" Sound Anchor Reference stands perfectly. Fitted with Voxativ's AF-1.9 drivers, their $6900/pair price feels too modest for how luxurious they seem.

Fitted with Voxativ's upgraded AF-2B drivers, the Hagen2 costs $8900/pair. The Hagen2 is also available in a 38lb cabinet made of 0.5"-thick aluminum plate. This welded-metal version costs $8900/pair with the AF-1.9 driver or $10,900 with the AF-2B driver.

For true believers—and $29,900/pair—Voxativ offers a fully realized "Hagen2 system," which places metal-cabinet Hagen2 monitors with AF-2B drivers atop the aluminum-case Alberich2 bass modules. According to Voxativ's founder and chief of everything Inès Adler, "both housings are completely made from aluminum plates that are properly welded together. There's no wood anywhere, and it weighs 182lb per side."

There's one more Hagen possibility: The $9900/pair "Hagen Absolut System" mates two MDF Hagen2s to Voxativ's "Absolut Box," a substantial component in a separate cabinet that activates the Hagens with an amp, DAC, and DSP optimization for its AF-1.9 drivers. I heard this simple, musically effective system at High End Munich. After listening to a few cuts, I left the room smiling, dreaming about Marzipan Stollen on blue-onion plates.

I decided to audition the Hagen2s with no subwoofer. Adler recommends the AF-1.9 driver for subwoofer-less operation because it goes deeper than the AF-2B; the AF-2B rolls off sooner but is said to be more resolving. If you're a DIYer, Voxativ sells the AF-1.9 drivers separately for $2895/pair. The AF-2B, which has a more powerful magnet and higher sensitivity, goes for $4600/pair. Whichever drivers you order, they're carefully pair matched. Voxativ's complete loudspeakers place those full-range high-tech drivers into a variety of high-style, high-sensitivity, low-coloration enclosures.

All Voxativ enclosures are aided in their task by what Voxativ calls "Acoustic Stealth Technology" (footnote 2) "The Russian scientist Pyotr Ufimtsev invented the original stealth fighter in the 1950s, but the plane didn't fly. In the late '70s, American scientists made the technology work, with computer help. The stealth fighter had been created and was invisible to radar waves. In the '90s, Voxativ transferred this nonreflecting technology into the musical band to optimize housing resonances. Acoustic Stealth Technology was born."

My experiments with full-range drivers started in the late '70s with Ted Jordan's aluminum-cone modules. In the late '80s, I graduated to Western Electric's 7" paper-cone 755a full-rangers; I quickly abandoned them because I could never find two 755s that sounded similar enough to make a stereo pair. After that, I tried full-range drivers from Philips, Jensen, Altec, JBL, Audio Note, Marlow, Fostex, Zu, and lots of Lowthers—but none of those presented recordings with the level of grip, speed, clarity, and smooth, ear-pleasing tone I'm experiencing with the Voxativ AF-1.9 5" widebander in their Hagen2 cabinets.

The AF-1.9's frequency range is specified as 50Hz–30kHz. In my room, measured casually with an iPhone app, the Octave Real Time Analyzer, the level at 50Hz was down 5dB from the 1kHz level, and 10kHz was up 6dB (both measured at 2m, C-weighted). The Hagen2's AF-1.9 driver features a heavy cast basket and a neodymium magnet, resulting in a specified sensitivity of 88dB at 43Hz and 95dB at 5kHz (footnote 3).

Compared to my LS3/5a's, the Hagen2s went 20Hz lower in the bass and were flatter from 100Hz to 2kHz and about 5dB louder between 2kHz and 20kHz. The subjective effect of the 2's frequency response was one of speed and immediacy. The treble range was clear and extended, but the Hagen2's sound was never bright, peaky, forward, glary, shouty, or strident and was always smooth, clean, and even sounding. Nevertheless, subwoofer-philes will undoubtedly be saving up for one of Voxativ's bass modules, which, when I've heard them at shows, add depth and polish to top octaves.

Interestingly, the AF-1.9's extended high-energy treble and horn-augmented bass power kept the geometric center (footnote 4) of the Hagen2's passband in approximately the same relative position as that of my Falcon Gold Badges, making the two speakers sound surprisingly similar. The Falcon's narrower bandwidth rolls off symmetrically top to bottom. The same is true of the wider-bandwidth Hagens.

If you're an LS3/5a person, you will immediately get what these Hagens are about. Similarly, the Hagen2's sound character reminded me of what I regard as my #1 most accurate best-imaging in-house transducer: RAAL's full-range Requisite SR1a ribbon headphones. They do transients, image purity, and uncompressed dynamics with a remarkably similar feel.

According to the Voxativ website, the Hagen2's extraordinary bandwidth is a result of the company's "Endless Gap Technology." "The endless gap refers to the magnet gap within which the voice coil is operating," Adler told me. "Voxativ is using an underhung voice coil. This means the magnetic gap must be very long. This driver can do an Xmss (footnote5) of about 15mm. I have found a way to make the gap long and keep the power up. And what you hear is strong bass with excellent mids and highs."

With First Watt's SIT-4
The 5" AF-1.9 driver weighs 4lb and features a nominal specified impedance of 10.3 ohms; that, then, is the impedance of the single-driver Hagen2. In my setup, the Hagen2s felt unhindered and fully charged—no sign of clipping or compression—driven by the Nelson Pass–designed First Watt SIT-4 amplifier, which is specified to make 10W into 8 ohms, with an output impedance of 4 ohms.

The first thing I noticed about the SIT-4– powered Hagen2 was how true of tone, unmuffled, and uncompressed it felt—how awake and high-revving. On Clear or Cloudy, the complete works of Hungarian composer György Ligeti on Deutche Grammophon (DG CD 00289 477 6443), I noticed myself raising the volume in the quiet patches and lowering it when climaxes appeared. The silences were deep and dark, and the climaxes were clear and bright. After a while, I got a feel for the Hagen2's wide dynamic range and knew intuitively where to place the volume dial.

The Hagen2s played Ligeti's meticulously expressive compositions with deeper, more expansive bass, clearer, more detailed midrange, and more explicit highs than my Falcon LS3/5a's, causing me to wonder, how is this possible? Maybe I didn't need a tweeter or a crossover after all.

The next thing I noticed was how concretely mapped and precisely focused the images were, and how they were portrayed with minimal shrinkage and zero blurring or generalizing.

Powered by Parasound's Halo A 21+
Parasound's Halo A 21+ stereo amplifier features separate gain controls for each channel, making adjusting overall system gain and stereo balance easy. When I hooked the A 21s up to the Hagen2s, those controls required no attenuation. That spoke well for Voxativ's pair matching while verifying that my room provides equal room-boundary environments for left and right speakers.

Arrogant and contrived, but always wonderfully delirium-inducing, Paganini's 24 Caprices for Solo Violin are my favorite tool for assessing my cognitive development and my understanding of 19th century European culture, as well as for judging the tone and temperament of components under review. Through the Hagen2 speakers, I streamed Ruggiero Ricci's Complete Caprices for Solo Violin (16/44.1 FLAC Alto/Qobuz), then followed that by playing the Alto CD of the same performances (LC 1077) with TEAC's 701T transport into Wattson Audio's Madison LE streamer/DAC directly feeding the Parasound A 21+. My goal was to see if these two versions sounded different.

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Footnote 1: Voxativ, Gebäude A2 Schmalenbach Objektgesellschaft mbH, Märkische Strasse 64 15806 Zossen, Germany Tel: +49 179 2924224 Email: contact@voxativ.com Web: voxativ.berlin, There are 5 US dealers listed at voxativ.berlin/dealers.

Footnote 2: See voxativ.berlin/tech.

Footnote 3: Voxativ calls this "efficiency" but expresses it in units of dB. Adler told me that this measurement is made at 2.83V.—Jim Austin

Footnote 4: I experience the "geometric center" of a loudspeaker's passband as a sensed bisection of the speaker's power response: where the energy on the bass side balances the energy on the treble side. This dividing line is not difficult to spot. If I add a subwoofer, the line moves lower. If I add a tweeter, it moves up. Very often, it is the first thing listeners notice when auditioning a new speaker.

Footnote 5: That's German for Xmax.—Jim Austin