Hearing is believing, and I finally understood the reason for the frequent online recommendations when I visited room 456 at AXPONA. There, Philharmonic had teamed up with Minnesota’s Audio by Van Alstine. A pair of Philharmonic BMR monitors ($1700-2000/pair, depending on finish) took center stage. The BMRs are 20"-tall standmounts with RAAL ribbon tweeters that provide very wide horizontal dispersion plus, I was told, a ruler-flat response. The Balanced Mode Radiator midrange drivers are claimed to match the tweeters in dispersion characteristics “thanks to a shift from pistonic to a bending motion well below the crossover point.” Six-inch SB Acoustics ceramic woofers handle the lower octaves.
Weighing in at a portly 32lb each, the 4-ohm BMRs cover the 36–20kHz frequency range (±2dB), but that’s an anechoic measurement. In a real-world room with the usual boundary effects, they’ll probably go a little lower.
Older Philharmonic speakers, at least the ones I’ve seen, were boxy and a bit nerdy-looking. I’m happy to report that the BMR monitors are handsome. The company’s commitment to hard numbers remains: Philharmonic provides not just specs but extensive measurements of all of its products. More audio manufacturers should follow suit.
The BMRs were being driven by a recently launched Van Alstine NPI power amplifier (55Wpc into 8 ohms, $1199). Van Alstine rep Mithat Konar explained that the NPI separates itself from the pack with Advanced Nested Architecture (ANA), a technology that incorporates a dual global correction circuit, reducing nonlinearities "to the vanishing point."
The preamp/DAC combo was a Van Alstine DVA ($2499). All of these products were new to me. Obviously I heard them as a system, so I can't speak to their individual sonic qualities, but together, whoa boy. I thrilled to the clean tones of Fiona Apple's "Shadowboxer" and noted the terrific purity and holistic completeness when the rig reproduced "Lights of Louisianne" as performed by Jennifer Warnes.
Footnote 1: Reminds me of the earliest years of another Maryland-based loudspeaker manufacturer, Polk Audio.
