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Gradient 1.4 Loudspeaker

Gradient 1.4

From the very beginning, back in 1984, when Jorma Salmi founded Gradient jointly with Jouko Alanko and Mikko Paloranta, Salmi’s speaker designs for Gradient reflected unusually careful thought about the basic questions of how the speaker would interact with the room around it. Of course, any speaker designer has to face this question de facto. But Salmi was exceptional in the extent to which he dealt with the question overtly, and how successfully he did so. The Gradient 1.4 is, unfortunately, the last design from Gradient involving Jorma Salmi: He died in May of 2018 (theabsolutesound.com/articles/jorma-salmi-1948-2018-1/). The design of the Gradient 1.4 was completed by his son Atte Salmi, who is in charge of Gradient in both the business and design aspects, and with whom Jorma was working closely before his sudden death.

Thus, the 1.4 is the end of an era for Gradient, but it is also a demonstration that Gradient will continue along its historical paths of producing speakers which address the fundamentals of speaker design with real profundity. It is a really good speaker, but it is more than just good. It presents a new way of thinking about how a speaker can work in a room. The result is sonically different from conventional floorstanding speakers, different in a way that I shall try to make precise. One might well argue that it is better than the conventional approach in certain fundamental regards, but the essential thing is to understand how it sounds. I shall then leave it to you to decide if that is better from your viewpoint.

What is Unique about the Gradient 1.4

The Gradient 1.4 has a floor-firing bass driver that is omnidirectional horizontally, but has overall half-space directivity on account of being floor-firing. Above the crossover point at 200Hz, it radiates primarily forward. I do not mean here “forward” in the conventional sense that the drivers are in a box and the drivers face forward. Usually, speakers which are forward-firing in that sense actually radiate a lot of sound backwards, in most cases up to quite high frequencies. The sound bends around the cabinet and a lot of it comes out as “back wave.” If you take a speaker like that out of doors and walk around behind it, you will still hear a lot of sound and not just in the bass. The really high frequencies are not radiated backwards very much, but quite a lot comes back in the midrange. In the 1.4, the response from behind is down at least 5dB from 200Hz on up, and above 2kHz it is down 10dB or more. In fact, only in the octave from 800Hz to 1.5kHz is it less than 10 dB down. Over most of the range from 200Hz up, the back wave is rather low in intensity. In particular back radiation is all but gone from around 300Hz to 500Hz, a range where conventional forward-firing boxes would be putting out a lot of backwards energy.

This behavior is generated by the use of what is known as an aperiodic-venting or flow-resistance enclosure. The back wave of the midrange driver is vented out the back via a port filled with damping material, which delays the back wave the right amount to cancel, to a great extent, the front wave coming around the cabinet. (The high frequencies do not diffract around the cabinet and the speaker radiates primarily forward on that account, as is true for most speakers above the “baffle step.”) This idea was used in early Gradient designs. The Revolution also seriously attenuated the back wave via a similar method. Also, like the Revolution, the 1.4 uses a midrange driver with a concentrically mounted tweeter. The effect is that the speaker generates sound above 200Hz that comes from a single point but radiates essentially only forward.

Why the Gradients Sound Different

Back in the early days of The Absolute Sound, the idea arose of making speakers create a “soundstage” by not toeing them in but by aiming them down the room, with their main radiating axis parallel to the sidewalls and with the speakers fairly close to the sidewalls. While HP would occasionally deny that he wanted to use the sound off the walls, de facto this scheme was definitely using sound reflected off the sidewalls to create a sense of space. This was formalized by studies from F. Toole and others of when the early sidewall reflections could be used to enhance “spaciousness” without altering timbre significantly. And the Archimedes/Eureka project conducted jointly by KEF, Bang & Olufsen, and the Technical University of Denmark studied how strong various early reflections could be without altering timbre. This study showed that minimizing the floor reflection was crucial for preserving timbre—more on this point later.

Gradient from the start pursued the idea of minimizing early reflections. In the Gradient 1.3s (which I reviewed in TAS in 1992), the floor-firing woofer was combined with an upward-tilted dipole mid-driver and a tweeter array that was vertically directional, to give almost nothing off the floor for a long time (the bass off the floor was part of the direct arrival since the woofer was floor-firing). And with the proper setup, very little midrange energy came off the sidewalls because of the large dipole midrange driver, which could have its acoustic null aimed at the first reflection point off the adjacent sidewall. I still have a pair of Gradient 1.3s. Listening to them remains a startling experience.

Later, Gradient backed off this quasi-anechoic approach. The 1.4s have the same kind of floor-firing woofer arrangement, but while the midrange has some directionality, it has its back wave attenuated in the fashion already described, and also has a moderately wide dispersion. But not extremely wide. It is pretty well down in level from 800Hz on up, beyond 60 degrees off-axis.

On the other hand, the flattest response is actually at about 20 degrees off the geometric axis. What does this add up to? Suppose you toe in the speakers or over-toe them, and also tilt the spherical top unit (which is rotatable) up some, so that you are on the flattest response axis. If you do this just right, then practically nothing is coming off the sidewalls from 800Hz up. And very little is coming off the floor, either. 

The sonic result of this is striking. You can then hear into the recorded venue to a truly unusual extent. The sense of your own listening room around you is minimized to an extreme. At this point, you will either be very enthusiastic about the speakers, as I was and am, or you will need some getting used to the sound. This is not what you hear from the average quasi-wide-pattern, narrow-front floorstander. I cannot promise you that you will like this, but I can promise you that I did! And I can surely promise you that you will hear the difference.

The near elimination of floor bounce, in particular, is really important. As the Archimedes/Eureka project showed, floor bounce is a major source of speaker coloration in rooms. Getting rid of it is a big step in the right direction.

One of the things that arises from this is that the Gradient 1.4s considerably reduce the sense of the place of the speakers being a boundary of the sonic image. The position front to back of the recorded sound sources is much more dependent on what is on the recording and less dependent than usual on the position of the speakers. Everyone expects speakers to vanish in the side-to-side sense, and the 1.4s do this extremely well. But you will likely be surprised—and you should be pleased—at the extent to which they vanish front-to-back, as well. Many years ago, Gunther Thiele argued convincingly that the tendency of stereo to locate the front of the soundstage in the plane of the speakers was a serious defect. This is related to floor bounce, which tells the ear/brain where the speakers are front to back. In theoretical stereo, the front-to-back position of sources is determined by where the source was, not by where the speakers are. To a surprising extent, this fault of stereo localization, of making front to back dependent on the distance to the speakers, is minimized, as one might expect from the reduced floor bounce.

It all adds up to something unusual and something unusually good in terms of the spatial character of the sound. This characteristic of the 1.4s may well sweep all else before it for some listeners. Reproducing the original venue and erasing your listening room acoustically is after all a major goal of audio. And here it happens to a remarkable extent.

What the Gradient 1.4s Sound like Otherwise

Concentric mid/treble drivers have long been a source of fascination, going back to the days of the Tannoy Dual Concentric, decades ago. Gradient started using such drivers in the Revolution back in the 1990s. The 1.4s also use a concentric mid/treble driver, made by SEAS in Norway. Now, concentric drivers have clear advantages from the viewpoint of geometric naturalness, as it were. Stereo sound is supposed to come from point sources (or line sources). But in practice, it has proven hard to get such drivers absolutely as smooth and “flat” as separate midrange- and tweeter-driver setups on and near their best axis. The 1.4 concentric is quite smooth and well balanced as such drivers go. But it is not completely smooth and flat, having in particular some extra projection around 1kHz. This diminishes off the main axis. One can hear the change easily on pink noise through one speaker. And to get the 1.4s to sound completely natural on pink noise or, indeed, on music, one needs to pull down this 1kHz area a bit with equalization.

A few small irregularities happen above and below the 1kHz region, but these are comparatively inconsequential. And the rise on-axis up to near 20kHz, presumably due to the metal dome tweeter’s resonance, goes away at the preferred, somewhat-off-axis position, the maximally flat position being something on the order of 15–20 degrees off-axis. This can be either horizontal or vertical or some combination of the two, since the round driver mounted in a spherical enclosure has behavior that is rotationally symmetrical around the main axis. So, with the slight EQ tweaking referred to, one can get very smooth response, Historically, Jormi Salmi was intent upon smooth pink noise response, and that is available here with the correction of the 1kHz region and very small tweaks otherwise.

Once this is arranged, the 1.4s are very close to neutral sounding, aided one supposes by the absence of reflection-induced colorations, especially from the floor. This all seems, no doubt, a little “techno-nerdy” in description. But the musical effect is conspicuous. You hear the timbre of each instrument as it was recorded with real truthfulness.

The bass is extended for a speaker of this size, but tends to be slightly down in perceived level overall if the speakers are out in the room, where one usually places floorstanding speakers. One can experiment with placement closer to the corners, but toed-in. This avoids reflection off adjacent walls above the bass and lower midrange, since the speaker has essentially a cardioid pattern from there on up. Really close to the corners brings the bass up too much, in fact. But this can be adjusted by choosing just the right distance and/or pulling the bass down a bit with electronic bass correction. You can get the bass level you want with some experimenting.

Speakers with concentric drivers tend to sound somewhat subdued compared to wide-dispersion cones, because the mid-driver usually acts as a waveguide for the tweeter, and this gives a narrowed pattern in high frequencies. This narrower pattern makes the room sound have reduced energy in the higher frequencies compared to the wider angle lower down in frequency. The 1.4s are less extreme in this regard than some concentric mid/tweeter speakers, but the effect is still there. The 1.4s get really directional from about 2kHz up—hence the subdued sound. Switching over to wide-dispersion speakers will make this clear. This choice is an almost inevitable compromise: Wider pattern will make you pay the price of more early reflections in small rooms, where the distance to the sidewalls cannot be large; here, the controlled pattern offers a big advantage, and of course the reduced floor reflection is a big advantage in any room. The floor is always close by! But the subdued sound remains a feature of the situation. Of course, totally flat room response, flat power response all the way, is by consensus too bright on most recordings. Don Keele’s CBT (constant beam-width transducer) speakers have an adjustment to turn the top end down for this reason. But the 1.4s narrow down fairly early.

And, at Long Last, Music

Jorma Salmi was an ardent lover of music (he and I shared an affection for the music of Gabriel Fauré, a taste perhaps not common among technical audio people). For all the comprehensive technical analysis in Gradient designs, they are ultimately dedicated to presenting music. And so it is with the Gradient 1.4s.

Listening with the 1.4s to the Sicilienne of Maria Theresa von Paradis played by Arturo Delmoni and Meg Bachman Vas on Songs My Mother Taught Me [North Star/Mobile Fidelity MFCD877], I experienced one of those rare moments where reproduced music seemed to all but equal the beauty of the live experience. The purity of the sound (the 1.4s are very low in distortion), the uncolored tonal truth, the sense of not being jammed into one’s own listening room but free in the original venue, all added up to what one is looking for in audio but seldom finds. And it is done without any DSP manipulation at all—this is a purely analog passive speaker.

On material for large ensemble, say the Dallas Symphony/Mata recording of Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances [Proarte CD], an additional virtue was revealed—the ability of the 1.4s to unravel complex textures in dense sonic mixes. I once wrote of the Gradient 1.3s that they were the speakers to use if one needed to write down an orchestral score from listening. This is true of the 1.4s, as well. A kind of sonic fog that tends to envelope the lower mids and upper bass with most speakers is lifted. The suppression of the back wave in the 300Hz region seems to clear up the sound in this range, without taking any substantial toll on tonal character. Real transparency is in view. And on the Telarc Ravel-Borodin-Bizet CD Bolero [Cincinnati Pops, Eric Kunzel cond., TelarcCD80703], the sense of the hall was exceptionally good, aided by this transparency in the lower frequencies.

Back to solo instrument, or small ensemble, with Freddy Kempf’s Rachmaninoff on BIS and with Starker and Neriki’s Schumann/Brahms/Rachmaninoff, the same naturalness of timbre, purity, and transparency in the lower parts of the piano and cello revealed how extraordinarily beautiful these recordings (and performances) are.

Overall

Lines from Copland’s “The Boatman’s Dance” from Old American Songs come to my mind: “The boatman is a thrifty man; there’s none can do what the boatman can.”

The Gradient 1.4s are thrifty, indeed, in the realm of high-end prices. And there really are no other speakers that I know of that can do exactly what they do. Like their ancestors, the Gradient 1.3s, they present the sound of recordings in a unique way. They are available in the USA, but not very widely as yet. When shows resume, I hope many people will get to hear them. Meanwhile, if you are really serious about getting your room out of your system and hearing recordings as they actually are, the Gradient 1.4s are, in the words of the Michelin Guides, worth a journey.

Specs & Pricing

Drivers: 220mm long-throw woofer, 176mm pre-coated reed-paper cone midrange, coaxial Al/Mg 25mm dome tweeter
Frequency response: 45Hz–20kHz ±2dB, 27Hz -6dB
Crossover frequencies: 200Hz and 2.5kHz
Impedance: 4 ohms
Sensitivity: 87dB/2.83V/1m
Recommended amplifier power: 50–250W
Dimensions: 32 x 92 x 32cm
Weight: 15kg
Price: $7650

GRADIENT
Kisällintie 8
06150 Porvoo, Finland
info@gradient.fi
+358 19 372 374

Tags: FLOORSTANDING LOUDSPEAKER

Robert E. Greene

By Robert E. Greene

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