elac debut reference floorstanding speaker review

Turning to Christopher Cross’ eponymous debut LP, I felt the Elac accurately captured the vocal balances of Christopher Cross’ vocal and Michael McDonald’s classic harmony. As I listened to Ana Caram singing “Fly Me To The Moon,” accompanying herself on a nylon-strung acoustic guitar, there were all the familiar cues-her gentle, airy vocals, the warm, subdued resonances of the guitar, and an expansive, immersive ambience that put me in mind of white sand beaches and soft tropical breezes. In sonic criteria like tonality, micro- and macro-dynamics, and transient speed, the B5 and F5 have got the essentials down pat. It takes the strengths of the B5-a warm, relaxed, and responsive midrange, surprising bass extension and tunefulness, a lack of cabinet and port colorations, and a strong sense of musical truth, then significantly builds on them. In sonics, the pint-sized B5 would be a tough act to follow under most circumstances, but the F5 still manages to steal the show. The bass-reflex configuration uses a single port for the uppermost tweeter/midrange section while the bottom section of the cabinet has two ports. Internally the upper third of the black brushed-vinyl cabinet is sectioned off to isolate the mid/bass and tweeter, and there are twin horizontal braces to further stiffen the cabinet and prevent unwanted resonances. But the quantity has grown from a single mid/bass driver to three woofers, or more accurately, a mid/bass and twin woofers.Ĭrossover points are specified at 100Hz for the mid driver, which in turn, hands off to the tweeter at 3kHz. Also carried over is the 5.25″ woven-Aramid woofer with an oversized magnet and vented pole piece. The F5 uses the same cloth-dome tweeter, which thanks to the deep spheroid waveguide provides good off-axis dispersion that doesn’t lock the listener within a narrow sweet spot or leave an adjacent listener out in the cold. The form factor is virtually the same: It looks like the B5 after a teenage growth spurt-a good two feet of cabinet, to be exact. It has the same basic DNA as its smaller sibling, the B5. The F5 is a three-way floorstanding loudspeaker in a bass-reflex enclosure. Presenting, the “much-more-to-come” Elac Debut F5.īefore the cartwheels begin, a quick description. However, there’s no harm in admitting that even a mighty-mite like the B5 may not meet every audiophile’s expectations for dynamic output and bass extension, right? That’s why I also called the B5 “the teaser”-a compact that even within its limits seemed to auger much more to come. There, I heralded its class-shattering performance and sonics, and the stupendous value that the speaker represents. Recently I wrote about the Elac Debut B5 (Short Take, Issue 259), a two-way compact with mighty intentions and an unpretentious $229-per-pair sticker. Jones, formerly of KEF and TAD, wasted no time getting to work, and within a few short months brought to market the Debut Series, an entry-level lineup of loudspeakers. One of the great stories in the high end for 2015 is the resurgence of the venerable German loudspeaker company Elac, and its hiring of one the industry’s top designer/engineers Andrew Jones.

Elac debut reference floorstanding speaker review