Use the descriptor “lifestyle product” in the the wrong crowd—that is, a crowd of audiophiles—and eyes will narrow; jaws will set. For them, there’s something frivolous about the term that seems to demean a collective passion for technology employed in the service of art. How dare a manufacturer, especially one that should know better, put style over substance?
T+A elektroakustik of Herford, Germany, certainly qualifies as an established high-end manufacturer, in business for over 40 years. The company has more than a dozen engineers on its payroll and a sizable catalog of sophisticated products, ranging from loudspeakers to electronics to cables. I’ve had plenty of positive experience with the brand, designating the DAC 8 DSD a Golden Ear choice a few years back and giving a favorable assessment of the Talis 300S loudspeakers for a TAS cover story in 2019. But I’d missed the fact that, for over a decade, T+A has made the Caruso—a compact, all-in-one music player that the company proudly identifies as part of its “lifestyle line-up.” The subject of this review is the Caruso’s third iteration, introduced last year at a price of $3990.
It’s an almost-cube, measuring 11.5″ (W) x 9.5″ (H) x 11.5″ (D), that weighs in at a reassuring 26.5 pounds. The Caruso sits on four aluminum footers that elevate the downward-firing woofer about an inch above whatever surface the player sits on. The top is a brushed-aluminum plate; black metal grilles cover the sides and lateral aspects of the front. The bulk of the front-facing surface is given over to a 6″ x 3.5″ touchscreen that provides full operability, though many users will choose to run the Caruso from an app installed on a tablet or phone, or utilize the slim T+A remote control. Above the screen is a discrete slot for loading 12cm discs and an on/off button. As is the case with T+A’s Pulsar loudspeaker line, the Caruso is designed in Germany but manufactured in China, utilizing parts that are locally sourced (including the drivers).
Rear-panel connectivity includes two Ethernet (LAN) ports and three digital inputs—coaxial (SPDIF), optical, and USB. There are, as well, two sets of RCA analog inputs. T+A provides one pair of analog outputs, an output to an external subwoofer, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Near the top of the back panel are nubs to connect the three supplied antennae—a silver, telescoping FM antenna and two short black ones for Bluetooth and wireless (WLAN) access to your home network. Finally, there’s an IEC socket for the supplied AC power cord, with an associated on/off rocker switch.
Packed into the Caruso’s modestly sized but sturdily built all-aluminum enclosure are seven drivers—a ground-facing 6.7″ long-throw woofer (an aluminum cone with a hefty magnet) and on either side of the touchscreen, beneath the black metal grille, a 0.79″ cloth-dome tweeter and a 3.9″ x 1.6″ midrange cone. Completing the driver array are 6.7″ passive radiators mounted on the two sides. James Shannon, T+A’s Director of Export Sales, who was visiting for a few hours to help with setup, commented on the importance of the Caruso’s substantial aluminum chassis. “To get more bass than you would expect out of this size chassis, you can’t have the thing rattling around,” he told me. “It has to have some pretty secure grounding, for the bass drivers in particular.”
As you’d anticipate in a physically small component that needs to run cool, amplification is of the switch-mode variety, a technology that T+A has been working with for a decade-and-a-half. There are three such amplifiers in the Caruso—a 100-watt Class D amp for the woofer, and two 50-watt devices for the midrange and tweeter. Every bit of the Caruso’s “audio architecture” is digital—volume and tone controls, driver crossover, etc.—accomplished by two Analog Devices DSP chips. After that processing occurs, the data is sent to the amplifiers where D-to-A conversion actually occurs. The only standard converter in the product is a Texas Instruments 24-bit/192kHz chip that digitizes signals coming in via one of the Caruso’s two analog inputs. Supported audio formats are FLAC, WAV, ALAC, WMA, AAC, AIFF, OGG, Vorbis, and MP3. No DSD. No MQA.
The Caruso’s designers wanted their product to welcome (most) any music platform sent its way. A “Source” menu allows easy access to whatever’s connected to the coaxial, optical, or analog inputs, as well as the CD drive, FM and Internet radio, and the Bluetooth connection to a smartphone or a home network. Selecting “Network” brings up a screen where you can choose among Tidal, Quboz, or Deezer (obviously, you must have a subscription to one or more of these streaming services to partake). Caruso also supports Spotify and Apple AirPlay, when the T+A is on the same WLAN as the phone or tablet hosting the corresponding application. The player is “Roon-ready.” There’s also a button for USB on the Network menu—around back is a Type A USB port that allows you to play music from a portable hard drive, but it’s not for connecting a server. Shannon is realistic about how consumers are actually using the product. “Most of the folks who purchase Caruso are using it for FM, CD, Internet radio, and one or more of the streaming services,” he said. “Caruso owners might use the rear-panel USB input very occasionally—perhaps when a friend visits with some new music to share on a USB stick—but virtually none of our customers today are reporting that they are using a USB drive or USB sticks for any significant amount of time. Honestly, we would not expect this to be a typical use for the Caruso.”
The “Audio Menu” features treble, midrange, and bass tone controls, plus old-fashioned loudness compensation. If an external subwoofer is in use, you can set the level and crossover frequency. The user also encounters a pair of controls called “Contour Fundamental” and “Contour Presence,” about which I’ll have much more to say later.
Beyond its size and functionality, in which ways, then, does the Caruso declare itself to be a lifestyle product? There are a few features that may be cringe-worthy to those of the audiophile persuasion. First, the Caruso is not only Roon-ready but also “Alexa-ready”—you’re good to go if you have an Amazon account and are into ordering your stereo around. (“Alexa, play Def Leppard!”) Also in the lifestyle category are ambient lighting controls. A circle of light—red, green, or blue—emanates from the bottom of the player. You can assign a color to a given source, or have the light color continuously change at various speeds. Best of all, you can turn it off.
Oh, and the Caruso can function as an alarm clock. I’ll spare you the details.
Easy stuff to joke about. But there are some more substantive aspects of the Caruso’s design that can make for a kind of tension between lifestyle and audiophile priorities. One is the decision a user must make regarding a wired as opposed to a wireless network connection. High-end computer-audio types come down firmly on the side of a physical Ethernet connection. It’s faster and, especially if others in your home or building are hogging available bandwidth, there’s at least the potential for dropouts that can have audible consequences. For many, however, the Caruso will be sited distant to a home’s modem and router, in a room where there’s no Ethernet port. Getting a wired connection for the Caruso from an electrician could be expensive. Another option is to use a “HomePlug” powerline communication system, sending the data stream to the Caruso though your home’s existing electrical system. But there could be more visible wires with this approach, causing lifestyle distress. Myself, I tried it three ways: wired, with a 75′ cable running from the Fidelizer “audiophile switch” in the listening room to the Caruso, with a HomePlug, and with a WLAN connection. There were no problems with latency and no differences in sound quality that I could hear.
I deployed the Caruso player in two spaces in the condominium my wife and I have lived in for a dozen years, both of them away from my dedicated listening room, which has a small attached office where the router is located. The first was the 12′ x 14′ dining room, where the Caruso sat atop a 42″-tall, iron wine rack with a square marble top. The second was the open-concept living room/kitchen area, a space of approximately 500 square feet, where the player was sited on a sturdy oak china cabinet. In both instances, the back of the Caruso was only a few inches from the wall behind it.
With dynamic musical material played at enthusiastic levels—the orchestral climaxes of a Shostakovich symphony or a big band playing full-out—sonics remained open and coherent. Clearly, the T+A Caruso is capable of delivering room-filling sound in some pretty big rooms. Of course, there wasn’t much stereo spread or image specificity, not unless you sat facing forward a few feet in front of the Caruso, a decidedly non-lifestyle thing to do. The differential scaling of orchestral instruments in the Shostakovich Fifteenth was limited—with the solo turns in the opening movement, the piccolo was pretty much the same size as the flute, trumpet, bassoon, or trombone. With the tone controls in their default positions, bass was boomy and the midrange somewhat soft and recessed. Was this an inherent, unalterable basic character of the Caruso’s sonic persona?
Actually, it wasn’t. And it was experimenting with those two suspicious settings in the “Audio” menu noted above that saved the day for this product, at least on the audiophile side of the ledger.
“Contour Fundamental” is a filter that emphasizes the fundamental tone of a musical pitch to produce a “warmer” sound. A very low setting results in a leaner sonority. “Contour Presence,” according to the owner’s manual, allows one to “improve speech intelligibility in spoken word programs, documentaries, and sport transmissions.” With the default settings, the Caruso’s tonal balance had a degree of what audiophiles refer to as “midrange suck-out”—a lack of definition and harmonic complexity in the midband, the presence region where so much of musical importance goes on. The settings for the two controls range from –5 to +3 for Presence and –2 to +3 for Fundamental, with both set at “0” as the factory default.
With the factory settings, I indeed heard excessive midrange warmth and attenuated dynamics. But with Presence increased to +2 and Fundamental dialed back to –2, the Caruso’s sonic character was transformed into the leaner, clarifying sound I associate with the T+A brand. Well-recorded rock (Donald Fagen’s Morph the Cat) manifested satisfyingly crisp transients and low-frequency slam. The acoustic bass of a small jazz group (Sweeter than the Day, Wayne Horvitz leader) improved a lot, with better control and pitch definition. Both male and female vocals had more immediacy and lower coloration. I have no doubt that T+A’s designing engineers knew exactly what they were doing: the tonally and dynamically reserved default settings—the lifestyle settings, if you will—have the Caruso calling less attention to itself at a given playback level. Shannon agreed: “It really is 100% related to the fact that this is a ‘lifestyle product,’ something you want to be able to place in your bedroom, kitchen, or dining area, and there are different considerations. Linear and flat isn’t ideal for this device.” A few adjustments substantially transformed the character of the Caruso’s sound to allow for critical listening. A nice trick, don’t you think?
Living with the Caruso Multi-Source System was a fascinating experience, as it brought into sharp focus the differences in the way audiophiles and the other 99.999% of the music-consuming world listen to music at home—and how a tension between these two perspectives can develop in a product from a manufacturer with the engineering chops to make the best. It’s a tug-of-war between aesthetic values that must be finessed. Does the Caruso pull it off? Does it succeed in offering a compact design certain to appeal to interior decorators and the impeccable engineering of a famously tech-savvy German manufacturer? That T+A is on to something may be reflected by who is buying Carusos: Jim Shannon told me that the company estimates that, historically, at least 30-40% of them have been sold to women.
T+A has recently expanded the Caruso line to include the Caruso R, essentially a Caruso without any drivers, plus two new loudspeaker models intended to be paired with it. The S10 bookshelf and R10 floorstanding speakers share the design aesthetic of the electronics, while edging us back towards the form factor of a traditional stereo system. But I don’t think one-box audio has ever been done better than with the subject of this review. Some compromise is necessary, but lifestyle functionality and audiophile sonics do indeed happily coexist in the diminutive package called Caruso.
Specs & Pricing
Type: Multi-source tabletop system
Formats supported: FLAC, WAV, ALAC, WMA, AAC, AIFF, OGG, VMAS, MP3
Disc formats supported: CD, CD-R, CD-RW/CD-Text
Inputs: Analog RCA x2, optical x1, SPDIF (coaxial) x1, USB-A x1, Ethernet x2
Outputs: RCA x1, sub x1, 3.5mm headphone jack x1
Streaming services: Tidal, Quboz, Deezer, Spotify, AirPlay
Radio: Internet Radio, FM radio, DAB
Amplifier type: Class D
Output Power: Subwoofer/midrange + tweeter: 100W x1; 50W (Class D) x2
Driver complement: 0.79″ (20 mm) cloth-dome tweeter x2, 3.9″ (100 mm) x 1.6″ (40 mm) midrange x2, 6.7″ (170 mm) long-throw woofer x1, 6.7″ (170 mm) passive radiators x2
Dimensions: 11.5″ x 9.5″ x 11.5″
Weight: 26.5 lbs.
Price: $3990
T+A ELECTROAKUSTIK GMBH
Planckstraße 9 – 11
D–32052 Herford
Germany
ta-hifi.com
By Andrew Quint
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