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Electrocompaniet Nordic Tone Model 1 Loudspeaker

Electrocompaniet Nordic Tone Model 1 Loudspeaker

Electrocompaniet is one of the grand European names from the early days of high-end audio, the introduction of its first amplifiers (reviewed many times in TAS, starting with Issue 16) in the late 1970s causing quite a sensation. The company has changed hands in the intervening decades, but the Nordic Tone Model 1 offers firm evidence that what has not changed is the commitment both to sonic excellence and to technical innovation. The first Electrocompaniet amplifier way back when broke new ground in electronic design. The Nordic Tone Model 1 can surely claim a similar groundbreaking status, in cabinet design in particular.

The drivers are of high quality, but more or less standard issue, from SEAS and Scan-Speak though the woofers are built to Electrocompaniet’s specifications. But the cabinet design is another world from MDF boxes. For a start, the cabinet is metal. But what is unique to my knowledge is the use of spherical metallic surfaces, which of course curve in all directions. Most curved metal work is made curved by rolling-mill equipment—it curves in one direction only and has, in mathematical terms, Gauss curvature zero. Metal curved in all directions—Gauss curvature positive—is much more rigid. It is also harder to make since one cannot make it by rolling sheet metal. The panels here are cast aluminum. This subject is close to my technical heart since my first research in mathematics was on the rigidity of surfaces of positive Gauss curvature. I think neither Electrocompaniet nor TAS knew about this when the speakers were sent to me, but the Nordic Tone Model 1s came to the right home, mathematically speaking. [Dr. Robert E. Greene is a professor of Mathematics at UCLA and the author of advanced-mathematics textbooks. —RH]

The Nordic Tones (as I shall call them from now on) were the product of a substantial research program, supported in part by the Norwegian government. (That is Scandinavia for you, and good for them. Don’t hold your breath waiting for the U.S. government to support research on your loudspeaker-building project.)

The Speaker in Physical Terms
The Nordic Tones are fairly small floorstanders, three-and-a-half feet high, just over a foot wide, and a little short of two feet deep. The shape is, as noted, curved. A picture is worth a lot of words here. They are heavier than one might expect for their size at 165 pounds. Fortunately, they have rubber-coated feet rather than spikes, and it is actually possible to move them around fairly easily by “walking” them, though if you need to take them up stairs, some care and help will be needed. Maybe it is partly because I’ve thought a lot about curved-surface rigidity, but to me they sit there projecting absolute solidity. But visual impressions aside, this solidity turns out to be real in sonic terms, to the extent one can separate out such things just by listening.

Acoustically, they are sealed boxes with dual woofers. The sealed-box loading gives good in-room bass extension for their size on account of their more gradual low-frequency roll-off compared to ported boxes. The midrange is a cone with the sliced and rejoined surface treatment that is supposed to (and I believe does) reduce break-up modes. The tweeter is a soft dome. Good drivers, but it is the cabinet that is unique.

The speaker has a sensitivity of 89dB—high for a sealed-box speaker—and a nominal impedance of 6 ohms. There is a dip below 3 ohms in the lower frequencies, around 100Hz, and an amplifier with respectable current capability is a good idea. The Sanders Magtech, with its ability to perfectly drive anything at all, was unperturbed by the Nordic Tones, but tube amplifiers (people tell me there are still some out there) might not be the ticket.

Electrocompaniet Nordic Tone Model 1 Loudspeaker

The Sound
When one first fires a speaker up, the instantaneous impression is dominated by the frequency balance. Let’s dispose of this before we get to the less obvious: The Nordic Tones belong to the school of rising top on-axis/flattest response somewhat off-axis. (This is quite common nowadays—c.f. my review of the DALI Epicon 6, the Sony AR-1, etc.) In this context, the speaker sounds very smooth. Its balance is slightly midrange-oriented, with a dip in the 3kHz region (and rise above) and a dip around 200-250Hz again exposing the mids somewhat. The paired woofers, one quite close to the floor, seem to eliminate the disastrous suck-out in the power range that floor-loading often produces in floorstanders, but some dip intrinsic to the speaker remains. The Nordic Tone’s overall in-room response is quite well balanced, though one does hear these broadband deviations from neutrality, small though they be as speakers go.

The horizontal off-axis response is very smooth indeed, even quite far off-axis. There is a shift in sound if one moves (vertically) much above the ideal listening axis—be prepared to sit low if you want ideal sound, no high seats nor standing up for best results. Indeed the best axis to my ears was actually below the nominal “on-axis” (tweeter height). The overall sound seemed most neutrally balanced low in position and somewhat off-axis (speakers toed away somewhat from being aimed straight at the listener). To reiterate for emphasis: You have to sit low— the speakers are not tall and the best listening axis is rather lower than a usual chair. I actually sat on a footstool that was about six inches high for best results. (In the manual, there is a photo of a listener lounging back in a low chair—fair enough. That is the position if you want to avoid a deep 3kHz suckout.)

Where the Nordic Tones enter some rarefied world with few equals—and they really do do that—is in the nearly absolute clarity of the sound and the vanishing of the speakers. To take the second point first, of course all decent speakers vanish in the superficial sense of not being obvious sound sources. But the odd but clearly not accidental shape of the Nordic Tones’ enclosure with its gracefully curved shape seems to minimize diffraction to eliminate any suggestion of the speakers as discrete sound sources. Even when one of the speaker is playing alone, it somehow sounds less like sound from a speaker than usual. Intriguing—and musically effective.

 

The impression of not sounding speaker-like is also associated with the excellent driver integration. One effectively never “hears out” the drivers. (The only exception is occasionally high percussion, which can sometimes localize in tweeters on almost any speaker, or the top end in the alternate channel on a spaced-omni recording, where for example the first violins can put their top in the right-hand tweeter—but of course this is the fault not of the speakers but of that oddball kind of recording). Overall, driver integration is top-drawer here, albeit at the price one suspects of those dips in response at the crossovers.

The sense of clarity and background silence is presumably attached to the cabinet silence at least in part (along with the particular balance, one supposes, plus good driver behavior). The internal damping no doubt plays a role also—the company claims its form of this is unusually effective. The cabinet question will be discussed further later.

The Nordic Tones will play plenty loud. I was using them in a room of ordinary domestic size, 18′ x 22′, albeit quite heavily damped. They had no difficulty at all providing realistic orchestral levels, and I felt that they could likely do the same in considerably larger rooms. Strain was not in evidence at all, even cranking up Rimsky-Korsakov’s Dance of the Tumblers from Reference Recordings Tutti (my recent favorite for noisy music). Brasses blared and so on with ease and realism. A facsimile far more convincing than most live orchestral experiences at fairly close range was presented here, something I could listen to after one of the rehearsals of the full orchestra I play in (95 members) without the “where’s the sound?” feeling that one gets with lots of speakers. In particular, one can hear down into the lower frequencies without mushiness in a most attractive way. Lots of speakers either truncate the bottom or turn it to mush. The Nordic Tones do neither. “Sounds like the real thing” comes to mind as the right description here.

Switching to music less dynamically demanding but more indicative of exact timbre truth in the mids and upper mids, I tried David Hancock’s Grieg Sonata recording, with Hancock himself as pianist as well as engineer, and violinist Gerald Tarack. This fared well enough though not perfectly, with piano and violin slightly brighter than I am accustomed to from my Harbeth M40s and more midrange-oriented, as well as slightly leaner. Still it was smooth and without overt coloration, just some overall shifts of balance.

From another part of the world, a comment from Canis lupus familiaris: “Robert is always coming down into my part of the house and messing around with sound. I mostly ignore it if it is not too loud. I am not much into classical music (or any other kind for that matter except that I love Robert Redford’s The Language and Music of the Wolves), though I am always glad to spend more time around my guy and happy when he comes down for any reason.

But there I was sleeping on my mat when all of a sudden I heard some people talking in the next room, people that I did not know. I got sort of excited and started barking my head off. When Robert says ‘friend’ I am fine with strangers. Otherwise, it is bark time. I felt like a darned fool when I came around the corner and saw that there were no one was there except Robert and some speakers. I guess that is what people mean by realism and high fidelity and all that stuff. But it is a lot harder to fool us dogs than to fool people. Still, it happened this time.” (signed) Red, the Dog.

For whatever it is worth, this is not just a joke—it really happened. And it hardly ever does happen, that the dogs take recorded sound for real. (The DALI Megalines would do it, but it is not the usual rule.) Who knows what it means? But there you have it.

What Red and I were listening to was the BBC-recorded version of Sherlock Holmes’ “A Case of Identity,” great fun and a good test of speaking-voice naturalness. Obviously, it was very convincing to Red—and to me, too. Interesting, too, was the change in imaging from other speakers. Image precision was good but at the same time the voices sounded more suspended in space than usual. You need to listen to this effect for yourself. I am guessing that this intriguing phenomenon happens on account of the unusual curved enclosure shape. It is hard to say what it is coming from exactly in technical terms, but intriguing to hear it is. Of course other people (e.g., Vivid) have been experimenting with unusual and curve-y enclosure shapes. But the effect of this shape—supposing that is what is the cause—is very striking and effective when it comes to imaging.

Experimenting with Balance
I experimented with pulling the top down and smoothing things out a bit (with a Z Systems rdp-1 EQ), making the speaker quite precisely flat on-axis and aiming the speakers at me, instead of listening off-axis, where the speakers are more nearly flat in the top on their own. This involved not just bringing down the top-end but raising the 250Hz area a bit and pulling the 500Hz–1kHz octave down slightly. All these were fairly small changes but easily audible. This alternative setup gave a more or less ideal speaker according to one ideal—flat on-axis, radiation pattern varying smoothly with frequency, sloping power response with increasing frequency.

 

Was this “better” than before? It was surely different. The sound was noticeably less top-oriented and was smoother but slightly less overtly detailed. If I had to choose, I would definitely go for the flattened-out version. But the difference was not enormous in my heavily damped room. In a “hard” room, in the acoustic sense, the Nordic Tones as they are might be a little much in the high frequencies. (I am not entirely sure why people, especially it seems in Europe outside the UK, have gotten into making this rising-top/flat off-axis choice. It ups the power response in the treble, where traditionally people wanted to roll the power in the top—and a good idea that was, too, in my book. Don Keele’s constant-directivity speaker has a control to turn down the treble for a good reason.)

Electrocompaniet claims to have done extensive listening tests on the Nordic Tone, but I wonder how it came up with this setting of the mid-driver up too far, leaving small but definite dips between the bass and mid and the mid and treble. Perhaps this latter is an audiophile preference nowadays, flattering as it is with female vocals. But it sounds a bit odd on broad-bandwidth material like orchestras. Still, as high-end speakers go—where absolute neutrality seems to have been largely deserted as a compulsive goal—the Nordic Tones are quite neutrally balanced.

Another Sonic Example or Two
People are always saying that a good test of a speaker is how well it distinguishes similar but different things. Whether this really makes sense depends on what kind of distinctions one is talking about. But for what it is worth, as it happened, I got interested in various approaches to the recording of the Sibelius Violin Concerto, having just bought the RCA Victrola recording with Dylana Jenson and the Philadelphia conducted by Ormandy— still around after all these years. This is some great performance to my mind, but it is very much of the put-a-mike-on-the-soloist style of recording. And it sounds that way—detailed, neutral overall, good bass in the orchestra, but with the violin very close indeed. One hears fingers on the fingerboard and so on. Then I switched to Kavakos on BIS, Lahti/Vanska. Another fine performance, though Jenson gets to me a bit more. But what a sonic difference—BIS was apparently eschewing any spotlighting and Kavakos was integrated into the orchestra as if at a concert.

Of course one would hear the difference on any decent speaker, but the Nordic Tones analyzed it to a “t.” I found this quite typical. The Nordic Tones are not the sort of speaker where half the recordings you put on are unbearable— not at all. They treat things very even-handedly, in the context of more top than I personally prefer. But they do tell you quite emphatically how a recording is put together and what it really sounds like.

Peripheral Considerations
Claims are being made nowadays on occasion that only “hard” drivers, ceramics and the like, really give the resolution of detail that is possible. I must say that the Nordic Tones to my ears give the lie to this viewpoint quite completely. These are “soft” drivers (except the woofers). But the overall sound is very well resolved, indeed—and at the same time very natural. Like the Sony AR1s (which use similar drivers), the speakers seem to let you hear all there is to hear with real clarity but without any extra bite, in the context of their overall balance. I never felt that I wanted in any sense to “clean the window” on the sound. As long as a driver is operating in a band where breakup is minimal —and if there is any, non-chaotic—then to my mind its diaphragm being made of a hard material is not any sort of advantage. All too often “hard” drivers sound, as the word suggests, hard, and traces of their aggressive breakup modes, inevitably not far enough out of their passbands, can be heard. The Nordic Tones, though a little brighter than what I am accustomed to, are definitely not hard in any sense. And indeed one can crank them up to realistic levels with no discomfort or sense of breakup or distortion at all.

The Situation in the Marketplace
The Nordic Tones occupy a curious spot in the marketplace/ perceived value milieu. In one way, the price of a decent car seems like a lot to pay for what are in effect off-the-shelf drivers, even if they are off the top shelf. But the truth is that driver manufacturers have taken a strong interest in making really good drivers, and they have commenced to be really good at it. As a result rather few speaker manufacturers make their own drivers, though they sometimes like to imply that they do (and some actually do, of course). The days when the only really good drivers were custom drivers seem to have passed into history.

In any case, I think that what one is getting here are not only really good drivers but also an enclosure in the absolutely top echelon of good cabinet behavior, and at a much lower price than is often charged. The Nordic Tone speakers seem to me to be fully competitive with much, much more expensive speakers where the specialité de maison is cabinet rigidity and, indeed, where often the cabinet is the only apparent justification of the ultra-high price. So if background silence that arises from nearly zero cabinet contribution is one of your major goals, this speaker can seem even something of a bargain, a startling idea for a speaker at its price.

Moreover, leaving detailed balance questions aside (which people seem hardly to notice often enough), the Nordic Tones seem to me impressively neutral overall compared to a great many high-end speakers, which can often strike one as looking for a distinctive sound of their own, rather than a neutral reference sound. The Nordic Tones are in particular to my ears considerably more neutral sounding than the DALI Epicon 6s, the GamuT S5s, or the Wilson Audio Duettes, to take three designs I have either reviewed or listened to carefully in a familiar home environment recently. On the other hand, the PSB T2s and T6s, also among my review items fairly recently, are more nearly neutral in octave-to-octave balance in particular, and at least the equal of the Nordic Tones in smoothness frequency-by-frequency so to speak, and at a far lower price.

The Nordic Tone design brief was to create what the company calls a “reference speaker.” To my mind, it has succeeded rather well overall, and in terms of cabinet silence very well. This speaker seems both good-sounding and accurate. It is possible that some audiophiles will listen to it and say, “But it does not do anything.” And that it true—it just sits there sounding like its input. In that sense, the Nordic Tones call attention not to themselves but to the music. I tended to find myself listening to the recordings critically rather than to the speakers themselves, which in that sense got out of the way. But to my mind this is what a speaker ought to do, and to do it to this extent is a remarkable achievement. This is a speaker one could just buy and get on with the listening to music. This is especially so if background silence and clarity are your primary goals. Top to bottom, the music is all there, sounding essentially as it should and remaining uncluttered and articulate all the way down to the bottom in a striking way. You won’t find it easy to find a forward-radiating quasi-point-source speaker that does the duplication of reality more convincingly, especially for large-scaled music.

SPECS & PRICING

Description: Three way, fourdriver/channel floorstanding box speaker, sealed-box (“infinite baffle) loading
Driver complement: Two 8″ custom-design Seas woofers; 5″ Scan-Speak Revelator midrange; 1″ Scan-Speak Revelator tweeter
Frequency response: 30Hz to 28kHz, -3dB points
Crossover: 230Hz and 2.5kHz, slopes 12dB/octave
Sensitivity: 89dB (2.83V/1m)
Maximum output level: 108dB
Impedance: 4 ohms nominal, minimum 2.4 ohms at 90Hz
Dimensions: 14″ x 42″ x 20″
Weight: 165 lbs.
Price: $33,500

ELECTROCOMPANIET AS
Breivikveien 7
4120 Tau
Norway
47 51741033
electrocompaniet.com

Robert E. Greene

By Robert E. Greene

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