"Boy, that's flat!" I whistled. I was looking at a quasi-anechoic TDS response Avalon Acoustics' Charles Hansen had produced for his latest brainchild, the two-way Eclipse loudspeaker that he was setting up in my listening room. "Who is Charles Hansen?" I hear you muse. "And who are Avalon Acoustics?"
Charles is a whimsical-looking Coloradan with a penchant for loudspeaker design; Avalon Acoustics is the company formed to manufacture and sell those designs. Those with a nose for recent history will remember the excellent sound to be found in the CES rooms shared by Avalon…
Sound
Setting up the Eclipses in my 20' by 17' by 9', wood-frame-construction listening room proved somewhat problematic. As one of the longer walls consists of windows permanently covered with blinds, the only way to set up a pair of loudspeakers so that their acoustic environments are symmetrical is to place them along the other long wall. This tends to place the listening chair about 7' away from the speakers, which is on the close side. Although I rarely have trouble getting a good balance between low-bass extension and upper-bass flab—two recent exceptions were the Thiel CS5, where…
It was in the presentation of the recorded soundstage that the Eclipse excelled. My usual test for image specificity is the imaging test tracks on the Chesky Test CD (JD37). The Eclipses performed better than any speaker I've heard on this test apart from the big Thiels. Lateral images were tightly defined in space from left of left to right of right. (It was interesting that the reverberation excited by Bob Enders's voice remained pooled in the center-rear of the soundstage no matter where the direct sound came from.) On the LEDR tests, the signals could be heard quite unambiguously to rise…
For the last listening session, I thought I'd return to the Jeff Rowland Model 1, this time using two of the amplifiers, bi-amping each speaker with each stereo amplifier. In this way, with the help of a Bourns 10k stereo pot in the feed to the HF amplifiers, I could lower the tweeter level by arbitrary amounts, which might help the sound of the speakers driven by the solid-state amplifiers to match the much better sound obtained with the tubed models. The only cable that I had four equal lengths of was the inexpensive (79 cents/foot) AudioQuest F14. This proved to be surprisingly good in…
Sidebar 1: 1991 Review Context Source components used in the preparation of this review consisted of a Linn Sondek/Lingo/Ekos/Troika setup sitting on an ArchiDee table to play LPs, a Revox PR99 to play 15ips master tapes, and the Meridian 208 (Bitstream) CD player, this also used to drive the Stax DAC-X1t processor.
Charles Hansen is a big fan of Convergent Audio Technologies' SL-1 and recommended I use this tube preamplifier to get the best sound from the Eclipses. This didn't prove possible, however, so my preamplification consisted of initially a Mark Levinson No.26/No.25…
Sidebar 2: Measurements I use a mixture of nearfield, in-room, and quasi-anechoic FFT measurement techniques (using primarily DRA Labs' MLSSA system with a B&K 4006 microphone, but also an Audio Control Industrial SA-3050A 1/3-octave spectrum analyzer with its calibrated microphone) to investigate objective factors that might explain the sound heard. The speaker's nearfield low-frequency responses and impedance phase and amplitude were measured using Stereophile's Audio Precision System One.
The first thing I wanted to examine was why the sound of the Eclipses seemed so…
Looking at the manner in which the fig.6 impulse response decays gives the "waterfall" plot in fig.9. With the exception of some nonsense between 1 and 2kHz, the decay is exceptionally clean in the treble, which undoubtedly contributes to the speaker's transparency and impressive sense of image space. Repeating the measurement for the woofer alone with 15Hz resolution, however, shows that the woofer does contribute some resonant hash in the midrange (fig.10), perhaps due to the cabinet, which might contribute to the feeling of hardness I felt the speaker's sound to acquire at high levels.…
Arnis Balgalvis wrote about the Eclipse in August 1992 (Vol.15 No.8): In the Altis room at the 1991 Summer CES, an impromptu press conference was called to demonstrate Jadis's brand-new Digital Processor, flown in from France the night before. Jean-Paul Caffi, Mr. Jadis himself, was present, as was US Jadis importer Victor Goldstein and, of course, Altis's Howie Mandel. As good as their intentions were to demonstrate the masterful abilities of the Altis Bitstream processor when mated to a tube analog stage, what ended up impressing me most was the loudspeaker they'd chosen—the Avalon…
I'm sure the Eclipses also benefited from the exalted ancillary gear. First a Theta Data, then a Micromega/Versa Dynamics Duo transport fed a Wadia 2000 processor. Jeff Rowland's wonderful Consummate preamp fed a pair of Krell MDA-300 power amps. The analog front end consisted of the Ikeda 9R and the Lyra Clavis cartridges, the Airtangent and Graham 1.5S tonearms, the Basis Gold Standard Debut turntable, and the balanced Rowland phono stage. A Tice Power Block was used with all low-power equipment. I found that the Eclipses had a special synergy with Purist Audio balanced Maximus…
Sidebar 3: Specifications Description: Two-way, sealed-box, floor-standing loudspeaker. Drive-units: 1" titanium-dome tweeter, 8.5" Kevlar/Nomex honeycomb-cone midrange/woofer. System resonance: Q=0.5 at 42Hz. Crossover frequency: not specified. Crossover slopes: not specified. Frequency response: 45Hz-24kHz ±1.5dB (typical -3dB point in-room is said to be below 35Hz). Sensitivity: 86dB/W/m (2.83V). Nominal impedance: 6 ohms (minimum 5.5 ohms). Amplifier requirements: 30-200W.
Dimensions: 39" (991mm) H by 11" (280mm) W by 15" (381mm) D. Weight: 105 lbs (47.75kg) each.
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