And when asked about an unusually low crossover frequency:
“Human hearing is most precise between 2-5 KHz and we strongly feel this area should be as free from any potential artefacts as possible. Chair and sofa manufacturers do not place the seam in most visible place, they always hide it. Why do most of the speaker manufacturers think that the area where is most sensitive is a great place to place a seam (which is what a crossover point actually is).
At 21 C the length of the soundwave at 1600 Hz is 21,5cm. This is longer than the distance between the center points of the drivers in Amphion products. Therefore your ear cannot localize separate drivers, but senses a two or three driver combination acting as one. Even if they do not look like that, all Amphions work in point-source manner, which is the only correct way of reproducing sound.”
Then there’s that another thing that I asked about. All of the Amphion loudspeakers have single speaker terminals. And at the same time the Finnish manufacturer is not alone here, since the same design choice we can find, for example, at Dynaudio, not to mention many other brands. Yet also here we are dealing with a clever and logical explanation:
“Bi-wiring is one of things that in most cases end up being detrimental to end results. Bi-wiring only makes sense if you bi-amp. . How many audiophiles do that? For example using a tube amp for the tops and D class for the bass could be interesting if one can solve the levelling issues. If such a customer enquiry would even arise it would be easy to modify the product for that single rare customer who would actually benefit from bi-wiring instead of making the performance worse for all of those who would never use it. As most customers will not use bi-wiring there must be some way to bridge the terminals. There is no termination plate nor wire that will not degrade the signal.
Why do we have so many products with bi-wiring options that get seldomly used and which do not offer any performance benefits and could actually be detrimental to the end result? Bi-wiring was heavily lobbied by the cable manufacturers who filled magazines with full page advertising. Unfortunately it is more driven by making money than improving the sound. When we started we went along with this nonsense as well, as we felt we needed to do what the norm was. Pretty quickly we noticed that most of the time the second terminal pair is getting used and we are hurting the signal flow by making the speaker more complex for nothing. Hence nowadays everything is single wire only. We strongly believe that the customer is better off buying a single better quality speaker wire, than lesser quality ones. Even those open to spending double the money on similarly priced cable are be better off with the simpler set up, as the impedance behavior when using a single wire is always drastically superior.”
What I should admit here is that such explanation, while not being – so as to call it – politically correct, makes a lot of sense. What we can feel here is a rational approach that also may be coming from a studio environment. And the gist of it is to not complicate things and put all focus on things that really count. At the same time I would also like to emphasize the fact that Amphions – looking at their design – are not your usual, typical I would say, speakers. Because what we have here is a low crossover point, and also a waveguide surrounding the tweeter. And also, a clear choice regarding the diaphragm material in their drivers. There are many companies that use hard materials for tweeters, but at the same time softer materials are chosen for midrange or midwoofer drivers. Or vice-versa. Here we have a pretty clear choices, yet the materials are still different for midwoowers and high-frequency drivers. And this also means that for some reasons manufacturer has decided to go that route – what is especially interesting if we take into account that titanium is much more expensive than aluminium.