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Elac Adante AF-61VR Loudspeaker

Elac Adante AF-61VR Loudspeaker

The Elac Adante series of loudspeakers, especially the compact AS-61, have been the darlings of the press since the first one reached a reviewer’s listening room. Recently the AS-61 received the coveted 2018 EISA award. While the bookshelf-sized Adante has been a veritable rock star, the larger floorstanding model, the AF-61VR (A is for Adante, F is for floor, VR is rosewood veneer), has seen far less journalistic sunlight. That just isn’t right…so I will attempt to rectify the situation.

The Elac Adante AF-61VRs are priced at $5000 a pair. To be perhaps overly candid, I assumed the AF-61s were $5k each for most of the time I had them in my clutches. While this misunderstanding was partially a result of how rapidly “mid-priced” floorstanders have gone up in price during the past five years, it was also due to the AF-61s’ high level of build- and sound-quality. Let me put it this way: For $10k/pair I thought the AF-61s were an excellent, highly competitive option. For $5k a pair they are an obscenely good value. But are the Adante AS-61 floorstanding loudspeakers “the ones” for you? Hopefully, this review will help clarify that.

Technical Details
To the casual eye there doesn’t seem to be much that’s special about the AF-61. It looks, from the outside, like just another nicely finished multiple-driver box speaker with a rosewood veneer. Upon second glance you’ll notice that it’s not rectangular—its sides are slightly angled so they meet at a center-point, and there’s a second driver surrounding the 1″ soft-dome tweeter, so it’s actually a concentric-driver design.

The Adante AF-61 is an example of “stealth” technology taken to extreme measures. The three 8″ aluminum-cone woofers that reside below the concentrically-mounted 1″ soft dome and 5.25″ aluminum-cone midrange are passive radiators! Located behind each lightweight 8″ passive cone is an active 6.5″ aluminum-cone driver. Elac calls this configuration a “3-way interport-coupled-cavity design.” The internal ports work in conjunction with the passive drivers to further control and smooth the AF-61’s output. Because of the internally vented box, the front section (the area behind the passive driver and in front of the active one) serves as a second-order low-pass filter.

To integrate the AF-61’s five active and three passive drivers the crossover required was, in Andrew Jones’ words, “complicated.” It wasn’t “complicated” because it required a lot of parts, but because the AF-61’s crossover combines multiple physical and electrical elements in a way that they have an effect on each other. Many iterations and variations were required to find the ideal combination. Without computer-assisted design tools it would have taken far too long to parse the various possibilities. In a video interview Andrew Jones said, “With a regular crossover network, if you need to change its characteristics you pull or change an inductor and a capacitor. Here, to change the crossover you must change a physical volume or a mass. Unless you have a very accurate electric/acoustic model you end up cutting wood all the time.”

According to the published specifications, the crossover points in this three-way design are at 200Hz and 2kHz. I’m positive these are not your garden-variety, loudspeaker-cookbook, simple first- or second-order filters.

With a published sensitivity of 87dB at 2.83V/1m and a nominal impedance of 6 ohms, on paper the AF-61 doesn’t appear to be a difficult load for an amplifier to drive. During my review I used the Digital Amplifier Co’s Cherry Megaschino (800 watts into 4 ohms) as well as the less powerful Pass X150.5 (150 watts). Neither exhibited any signs of difficulty or strain while powering the AF-61 loudspeakers.

The published specification for the AF-61 lists its frequency response as 39Hz to 35kHz, which is only slightly more extended on the low end than its smaller stand-mounted sibling, the AS-61, which is rated as extending to 41Hz. The AF-61 does have 2dB greater sensitivity than the AS-61. With a double set of five-way binding posts, you can bi-wire or even bi-amp the AF-61s if you wish.

The AF-61s are available in gloss white, rosewood veneer, and gloss black. My review samples were the rosewood veneer version. The rosewood looked exquisite, and the black metal grille (I only received one) gave the AF-61 a clean, elegant, modern appearance. Obviously, I did all my listening sans grilles.

 

Setup
The review pair of Elac Adante AF-61VR loudspeakers arrived on a pallet that weighed-in at slightly over 250 pounds. My current home has ten concrete steps between the sidewalk and my front door. My first thought upon seeing the delivery in progress was, “Oh boy….” That last phrase contained equal amounts of anticipation and dread. While I had been looking forward to hosting the AF-61s for several months, the reality of adding two more 101-pound boxes to my abode was, in itself, daunting. The countervailing emotion was the expectation that the final sonic results would sound as wonderful as they had during audio-show demos.

Because of their size and weight, I did not install the AF-61s in my downstairs system. Instead the two loudspeakers spent their time at Casa Stone in the main-floor open-concept living room. And while the ten-foot-high ceilings and installed sound treatments make the room more loudspeaker-friendly than most multipurpose rooms, it is not a dedicated listening space. Instead it is a real-world room with other people, plants, and cats. While this may not have afforded me the level of environmental control I have in my dedicated listening room, it did let me see how well the AF-61s could perform in a real-world multi-use space.

The previous inhabitants of this room, a pair of Skiing Ninja-modified AV123 X-Statiks had been augmented by a pair of small subwoofers. With the AF-61s, in this room I found that on most musical material the subwoofers were unnecessary. I crossed the subs over at 40Hz, so except during cinematic explosions and synth-bass rumbles they were not really being used, and even when active they didn’t add much to the AF-61’s presentation. The AF-61s are capable of producing a lot of bass, which is great as long as your room can support it. My main-floor room apparently can.

Because the AF-61s are point sources with the midrange surrounding the tweeter, setup, specifically accurate triangulation, is critical to obtaining optimum imaging and soundstaging. But unlike some point-source designs that limit your lateral movement, once these speakers were set up, the listening sweet-spot was large enough that no amount of physical movement or head-bobbing could propel me out of the listening happy place.

This is as good a place as any to ’fess up to the fact that I did not employ the AF-61’s outrigger base and spikes. My main reason for leaving them off was that the outriggers made placement more difficult within the area where the loudspeakers needed to reside. And while the AF-61s would be more stable with the outriggers employed, I don’t own a large dog or have small children. Even without the outrigger the AF-61s were extremely stable on the nice, level, laminate flooring in my three-year-old home. Also, after several days of listening I concluded that my lower-than-average-height couch, combined with a mid-field listening distance of 7.5 feet from ears to concentric drivers, meant that the tweeter was closer to parallel with ear height without employing the outriggers. With them installed the tweeter would have been high enough so that if a listener slouched, he could begin to notice some upper-frequency differences.

Sonic Performance
Usually my listening sessions are solo affairs in my downstairs listening room, but since the Elac AF-61s were ensconced in the living room, my wife had ample opportunity to kibbutz. She was the first person to notice the Elac’s ability to fill a space with sound. Even in my wife’s office, which is slightly more than fifteen feet away from the back of the AF-61s, the sound was surprisingly full-range and not lacking in detail. My wife was the first member of my household to conduct a LIAR (listening in another room) test of the AF-61s, and they passed with flying colors. In fact, the AF-61s were better in this respect than any other loudspeaker I’ve had in my living room. When I did my own LIAR tests using tracks that featured solo piano, I was amazed how well the AF-61s preserved the dynamic power and transient speed of that 88-keyed even-tempered monstrosity. Human voice, specifically Emma Kirkby’s voice accompanied by her husband Anthony Rooley on lute, had an eerie verisimilitude as I listened from my wife’s keyboard chair. Who let the baroque ensemble into my living room? What will I feed them?

More conventional audiophile listening through the AF-61s, where the listener completes the audiophile trinity of two loudspeakers and one human, proved that the AF-61s are more than ready to put you into that spot where instruments have their own three-dimensional locations within the soundstage. Lateral imaging was so precise that on well-recorded tracks with multiple vocalists, such as the Wailin’ Jenny’s album 40 Days, each voice was distinct, with its own unique spot in three-dimensional space.

I mentioned earlier the lack of need for subwoofers. When I set up the AF-61s in my main-floor listening room, the quality of the bass was powerful without being overblown. Not only was the pitch clear, even on the lowest notes, but low-level textures remained intact. I would call my main-floor listening room “leaky” in terms of bass, meaning it does little to augment bass frequencies through sympathetic resonance. If your room is tight, like my downstairs listening room is, with no place for bass frequencies to “escape,” you may find that the bass actually needs some attenuation to prevent overloading the room. The AF-61s are capable of putting out a lot of low-frequency energy. Ideally, your room should be configured to deal with it.

While the AF-61s can produce a lot of energy, they are not hi-fi-ish. Brass instruments sound like brass without blaring or edgy hardness, even at substantial volumes. The midrange has a relaxed presentation that provides a full-scale image without shoving it in your face. The front of the soundstage begins slightly behind the front of the loudspeaker in my room. Especially around the critical (for me) range of 3kHz, where the human ear is most sensitive, the AF-61s sound right, with excellent energy control and no additive bloom.

 

I’m the first to admit that my high-frequency hearing does not extend as high as it did when I was in my 20s. At last measurement I can still hear 13kHz, but above that, not so much. Within my hearing range I found the AF-61s to be exceedingly smooth yet revealing. I’ve also found that while I may not hear higher frequencies as well as I did in my youth, I’m more aware of any spectral anomalies in the upper midrange and treble than when I was young. I have noticed that many older audiophiles have discovered a similar increased sensitivity. If the upper midrange is peaky, I hear it. The AF-61 clearly avoids this sonic pitfall.

Conclusion
The Elac AF-61 reminds me of that person in school who always had the right answer but never put his hand up first—the understated, confident one. Mid-priced by today’s standards, the AF-61 delivers in all the areas that a loudspeaker needs to. It can image precisely, play loudly without distress, extend low enough that with a bit of room-gain assistance a subwoofer may not be necessary, and be driven easily by the vast majority of good amplifiers, and looks comparatively unflashy while doing all this.

The ideal physical situation for this impressive loudspeaker would be a room that is slightly too big for the stand-mounted AS-61, and the ideal listener would be one who likes his music played louder than the AS-61 can muster. So, if you heard the AS-61 at a show or in a store, and thought “That’s the sound I want, but I just need a little bit more,” the AF-61 is very likely to supply the more that you crave.

Specs & Pricing

Type: Three-way, interport-coupled-cavity floorstander
Driver complement: One concentric midrange/tweeter driver (1″ soft-dome tweeter, one 5.5″ midrange), three 6.5″ internally mounted aluminum-cone drivers, three 8″ aluminum-cone passive radiators
Frequency response: 39Hz–35kHz
Impedance: 6 ohms nominal
Sensitivity: 87dB
Dimensions: 9.6″ x 52.34″ x 15.67″
Weight: 101 lbs. each
Price: $5000/pr.

ELAC AMERICA
11145 Knott Avenue, Suites E & F
Cypress, CA 90630
elac.com

Tags: ELAC

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