Crystal Cable Arabesque Minissimo

REVIEW
by Andrew Quint
Oct 06, 2015

Replace whatever loudspeakers you’ve been using with a pair of Crystal Cable Arabesque Minissimos and people will notice—before they’ve heard a note of music. The whimsical apostrophe shape, the vibrant color, the assured smallness of the things stop folks in their tracks and make them smile. A fair percentage will need to touch the smooth, curved surfaces. Thanks to their unobtrusive elegance, Minissimos will work, visually, in a traditionally decorated room; in a modern space dominated by glass and metal, the speaker will register as a bold contemporary design element. But you wouldn’t spend $12,995 on a pair of loudspeakers just because of the way they look, would you? Good. I thought not.

Crystal Cable—perhaps not the best name for a company that’s been selling ambitious speakers for six years in addition to highly regarded wires—manufactures its products in Holland; Gabi Rijnveld is the founder and president. Rijnveld’s background is atypical for someone running a small high-end company in that she’s not an engineer by training. Rather, for a decade-and-a-half, she was a busy concertizing musician, a pianist trained at the Liszt Ferenc Academy in Budapest. For matters of technical execution, she has the benefit of the considerable talents and experience of her husband, Edwin Rijnveld, owner of Siltech since 1992. Crystal Cable and Siltech share offices in Arnhem and a production facility in Elst, but the endeavors of the two commercial entities proceed independently. Both produce cables, which look and sound very different from one another. Additionally, Siltech makes electronics and Crystal its Arabesque line of loudspeakers.

Crystal’s research, involving the extensive use of advanced modeling software, has resulted in a series of products that utilize unconventional materials to create transducers with unusual form factors. The top three representatives of the Crystal Cable line—the Absolute Arabesque, Arabesque, and Arabesque Model 3—are constructed from facetted glass panels and range in price from $55,000 to $110,000 per pair. Next comes the Mini, fabricated from aluminum panels, at $25,000. The materials to build these four speakers are quite expensive and their construction is very time-consuming. The Minissimo represents an effort to lower the cost of manufacturing a speaker that still delivers on the parameters that R&D has found to be critical to CC’s sonic ideals.

The Minissimo’s enclosure is milled from a solid block of a resin/metal matrix material, instead of being laboriously assembled from plates of glass or aluminum. The shape of the Minissimo cabinet, optimized to reduce resonances and internal standing waves, is realized in a beguiling, smoothly curved shape. Cabinet wall thickness can be carefully controlled (and varied) with this approach and, as with other Arabesque designs, no damping materials are utilized within the enclosure. Three striking standard paint finishes are available—Pearl White, Solar Orange, and the Aquamarine Blue of my review pair. The cabinet is sealed with a plate recessed into the bottom of the speaker; that plate is also where the downward-firing port is located. The orientation of the port precludes setting the Minissimo on a shelf, and the speaker comes with its integral stand attached—there’s no assembly required, which is heartily appreciated. The stand consists of three hollow, chrome-finished pillars of different diameters attached to a substantial, grey, gloss-finished base. A single pair of five-way binding posts is found on the rear of each speaker.

Crystal Cable Arabesque Minissimo

The two drivers in the Minissimo are a 150mm laminated paper cone woofer and a 25mm beryllium dome tweeter, both made to Crystal Cable’s specifications by Scan-Speak. The “Natural Science” crossover design is common to all CC speakers. Gabi Rijnveld explained in an e-mail, “The crossover filter shows a low phase and timing difference in the crossover region of both drivers. So more overlap is allowed and a faster roll-off achieved one octave away from the crossover point. Large, seven-wire air-core inductors prevent any compression or saturation—transients are basically transferred without delay or distortion.” Rijnveld maintains, as well, that her crossover’s filter design contributes to the Minissimo’s low THD of 0.2 percent or less from 200Hz up. Internal wiring is implemented with Crystal Cable’s proprietary 100-percent monocrystal material. No grilles are provided—one less thing for a user to agonize over.

Although the eight-page owner’s manual states confidently that the Minissimos will “perform well” in a big space, I suspect that most purchasers will deploy them in smaller rooms, or for nearfield listening in a portion of a larger one. In my 15′ x 15′ room, I left the prime listening seat where it works best for multichannel listening and ended up with the Minissimos 6′ 4″ apart (as measured from acoustic center-to-acoustic center) and at a distance of 28″ from the rear surface of the speakers to the wall behind them. It was 8′ 8″ from the front baffle of each Minissimo to the listening sweet spot. Each speaker faced pretty much exactly straight ahead, though CC advises that, at listening distances of 7 to 14 feet, “a small amount of toe-in can be tried.” Adjustments to the position of the speakers of under an inch mattered a good deal, as did carefully leveling the speakers so that both fired forward in precisely the same plane. (Four supplied threaded spikes per side serve the latter purpose and should be considered mandatory to achieve the best bass performance and spatiality.) Mostly, I drove the Minissimos with Pass XA60.8 monoblocks, but also tried a Parasound HCA 2200 II stereo amplifier. John Bevier of Audio Plus Services, Crystal Cable’s U.S. distributor and sales manager, sent along an eight-foot pair of Crystal 3M Reference speaker cables ($6800) that I used for the bulk of my time with the speakers; I also listened to the Minissimos with my own Transparent Ultra cables. As is my usual practice when evaluating new audio gear, especially loudspeakers, I implemented DSP room correction with my Anthem D2v’s ARC software, performing eight-position measurements for each speaker/amplifier combination (including a fresh set of measurements when a subwoofer was in the system, as below). The data was stored on a laptop and could be quickly uploaded to the Anthem processor when I changed the setup for comparison purposes.

The ability of the Arabesque Minissimos to convincingly reproduce instrumental and vocal sonorities with all their complexity and moment-to-moment variation is as good as it gets. This virtue was apparent with both speaker cables employed, even though the Crystal wires had a leaner tonal balance than the Transparents. From my experience over many weeks listening to a wide range of musical genres, a single tiny example will serve to illustrate what I mean. Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E flat major, Op. 44, is a favorite chamber music work of mine. An Audite SACD featuring the Mandelring Quartet with Clair-Marie Le Guay on keyboard is a particularly well played and well recorded performance. The unforgettable second subject of the opening movement is a melodic phrase in two parts. When first introduced, the cello plays the first half and the viola the second. At the moment the two instruments hand off the melody one to the other, a single note is doubled. Most accomplished musicians will do their best to make the transition seamless—and these players do it as well as anyone. But experienced live, a cello playing a G in its middle range and a viola producing the same pitch in its lower reaches generate sounds that are subtly different in texture and overtone structure—and it’s always possible to tell that two instruments are playing together for that brief duration. The Minissimos have the capacity to make that fact of human auditory perception apparent; it’s the sort of thing that can make one forget he or she is listening to canned music.

Similarly, the Minissimo’s knack for effortlessly resolving detail contributes substantially to long-term listenability. On The Bird and the Bee’s Interpreting the Masters Volume 1: A Tribute to Daryl Hall and John Oates, the exceptional duo of vocalist Inara George and multi-instrumentalist Greg Kurstin create versions of nine hits by the Top Forty legends that faithfully capture the essence of those beloved pop songs yet also manage to amplify their spirit. Every electronic blip and bleep, every layer of overdubbed background vocals in these intricate arrangements, is transparently revealed to reanimate these oh-so-familiar tunes.

After taking a set of measurements and calculating a correction, the ARC program generates a series of room response curves so the user can evaluate the environment both before and after correction is applied. Examining the Minissimo’s “before” curve, there’s a significant dip (10 to 11dB down from the target) centered at about 15kHz—a deeper trough in this frequency region than with any other speaker I’ve heard in my room. It’s responsible for a slight softening of the upper treble that is not necessarily a bad thing with many pop and rock recordings. The cymbals on Steely Dan’s “The Caves of Altamira” can sound splashy, even with the best remasterings of The Royal Scam. This splashiness is significantly lessened played through the Minissimos, to the recording’s advantage. On the other hand, the aggressively tactile, jangly sound of Joni Mitchell’s guitar throughout her 1971 album Blue is an indispensible part of that album’s enduring appeal—and something, it could be argued, is lost with the Minissimos. Well-made orchestral recordings certainly have loads of air and, in the final analysis, I find the Minissimo’s upper-frequency performance to be quite good.

With the design of the speaker’s enclosure and crossover likely responsible, the speed of these small wonders is another sonic parameter that’s decidedly in the “plus” column. This is best appreciated with music possessing strong initial transients, such as piano or tuned percussion material. Listening to keyboard super-virtuoso Marc-André Hamelin negotiate the blistering passagework of his own (not entirely serious) Etude No. 6: Essercizio per pianoforte (Omaggio a Domenico Scarlatti) from the essential CD Kaleidoscope, one is as impressed with the Minissimo’s ability to keep up with the flurries of notes coming its way as with the soloist’s ability to produce them. Similarly, mallet strikes on marimba, vibraphone, xylophone, and xylo-marimba in the “Claviers” movement from Pléïades, on a recent Linn Records all-Xenakis SACD from percussionist Kuniko Kato, are particularly ear-grabbing for the way in which the attack connects naturally to the sustained body of each note.

When it comes to imaging and soundstaging, the Minissimos disappear, as do most well-made and properly positioned small loudspeakers. Though I would not call the spatial reproduction “holographic,” neither is it the least bit vague or homogenized; the Minissimos create a broad, deep, and continuous soundstage when the information is there on the recording. Imaging is highly specific within the realm of a real concert hall experience, reflecting the engineer’s decisions regarding recorded perspective.

The lower end of the dynamic scale is rendered with exceptional finesse. There’s no better example than the solo clarinet movement of Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time (“Abîme des oiseaux”). The soloist begins as softly as possible, producing mysteriously sinuous lines and sustained tones that eventually rise to an anguished cry. On another Linn SACD showcasing the Hebrides Ensemble, clarinetist Maximiliano Martín demonstrates incredible breath control throughout the challenging movement and the Minissimos fully deliver his artistic mastery. When source material gets very loud, you will not be surprised that Minissimos begin to reveal their diminutive dimensions—that is, if you insist on approaching realistic SPLs. What is surprising is just how robustly these guys will play before beginning to lose their composure. These are small speakers that play big. The other expected limitation relates to deep bass reproduction: Needless to say, the center-of-the earth solidity of a physically much larger design isn’t there. But the heft of well-recorded bass guitar or even pipe organ pedals can be pretty satisfying at reasonable levels and, believe me, I pushed the little Minissimos hard with such ball-busters as the Saint-Saëns Symphony No. 3 (Eschenbach/Philadelphia Orchestra/Ondine SACD) and Daft Punk’s Random Access Memory (a 96/24 HDtracks download).

There are two ways to improve the situation with bass extension/impact and dynamic scaling, if your musical tastes and listening habits require it. The first is to use a more powerful amplifier. When I switched to the John Curl-designed Parasound HCA 2200 II stereo amp that’s rated at 250 watts per channel, there was better grip on the bass and more dynamic control in general. Snare drum possessed more visceral snap on “The Bug” from Dire Straits’ On Every Street and loud guitar solos on Toto IV maintained coherence more successfully. But there was a price to be paid: The sound of those instruments was just less interesting with the Parasound powering the Minissimos, compared to my usual Pass amps. Perhaps this should be no mystery as that Parasound model represents an older design (and cost around $1800 when new) while Nelson Pass’ monoblocks represent that brilliant engineer’s latest thoughts on single-ended solid-state circuitry (and run close to $13k per pair). You could spend tens of thousands on more powerful state-of-the-art amplification. A better and more cost-effective way to maximize the Minissimo’s performance is, of course, to add a subwoofer.

The goal of adding a sub is not just to extend low-frequency reproduction into the true deep-bass range but also—at least as important—to make life easier for the Minissimos. With a correctly implemented subwoofer, the Minissimo’s considerable strengths need not be compromised with either dynamically challenging or bass-heavy music. This necessitates a preamplifier or processor with bass-management capabilities, something the Anthem D2v does quite flexibly. I turned on the bridged Parasound A23 that drives my Wilson WATCH Dog passive subwoofer, which was permitted to operate up to 80Hz. The Minissimos were rolled off at 60Hz. Suddenly I had a world-class, full-range loudspeaker system on my hands. On Daft Punk’s ubiquitous “Get Lucky,” it became patently clear that the French electronic music duo had gotten their money’s worth when they hired master bassist Nathan East to lay down that selection’s electric bass track. “The Bug” took on an unstoppable drive that wasn’t there with the Minissimos alone—with either amplifier option—and the Maestoso finale of the Saint-Saëns symphony was truly grand and not just grandiose. I’m confident that a good JL Audio or REL (or one of the other subwoofer options detailed in Issue 252) would do the trick, without being as physically imposing (or pricey) as the WATCH Dog. Knowing placement of the sub would not undermine the aesthetic effect achieved by the gorgeous Minissimos; the unsuspecting will wonder where all that sound is coming from.

Have no illusions. Even using a good subwoofer with Minissimos, you can never expect to approach the musical scale achieved by a large Magico or Wilson speaker system. Two small drivers can only move so much air. But with an expenditure of $2000 to $4500 for a top-notch sub, the total cost of the speaker system will still come in at well below $20,000—no small amount of money, to be sure, but a number that has become a line of demarcation for our hobby between the merely expensive and the very expensive in the high-end loudspeaker universe.

When one of my kids was ten, she announced that she wanted a dog. Neither my wife nor I had any experience with dogs and were hesitant, but ten-year-old girls can be pretty persistent. We looked for an obstacle and came up with this one: “If you can find a small dog that doesn’t bark, we’ll do it.” The daughter did her research and a few months later, we had an adorable Cavalier King Charles Spaniel puppy, which improved all our lives immeasurably for the next 11 years. He never got bigger than around 15 pounds and he rarely vocalized. I think of that animal when I hear audiophiles insist that there doesn’t exist a small speaker that will play big. The Crystal Cable Minissimo Arabesque does exactly that, with or without a subwoofer. They’re pretty adorable, as well.

SPECS & PRICING

Type: Two-way, ported stand-mount loudspeaker
Driver complement: 150mm Scan-Speak laminated paper woofer, 25mm Scan-Speak beryllium dome tweeter
Frequency response: 48Hz–38kHz (-3dB) near-wall position
Sensitivity: 86dB
Impedance: 8 ohms
Recommended minimum amplifier power: Transistor 50W, tube 30W, switching 80W
Dimensions: 11.5″ x 10.5″ x 10″
Weight: 60 lbs. (with stands)
Price: $12,995