WE HAVE BEEN AWARDED THE COVETED XFI 2019 BEST SOUND OF THE SHOW!
“The Aequo Audio / Taiko Audio room really surprised me with its airy and transparent sound. The speakers were unknown to me until this point, as were the amplifiers. The rest of the system was comprised of the Taiko Audio SGM Extreme Server, TotalDAC D1-12 mk2 DAC, Vermeer Audio Two preamp, CAAS Audio Elysian 100 mono power amps and the Aequo Audio Ensis loudspeakers.”
“The two pictures below seem identical but look closer… The top picture was taken by me using a Canon EOS 750D camera with a standard lens. Not high-end but definitely also not entry-level. Below it is the same picture taken by Niels with his Canon EOS-R with a full-frame sensor and a 24-105 f4 L IS lens. Even with these scaled-down images, I’m afraid that the difference is clear. Yup. I should upgrade…
Based in Eindhoven, Aequo Audio is a Dutch brand who develop and produce their loudspeakers in-house. As I understand it, the brand has been received enthusiastically abroad but needs to be picked up more widely in the Netherlands. Well, I for one am impressed and hopefully, I can help bring more attention to this brand with an upcoming review.
So, why am I so impressed? Well, for starters, being small and narrow, these speakers have an unassuming appearance. Further, they are a part active, part passive design which automatically leads to certain presumptions and finally, I never read anything about them and as the Dutch say: “onbekend maakt onbemind” which broadly translates to “what’s unknown remains unloved”.
“But never mind all that. Evidently, this room’s acoustics were complimenting the system rather than working against it, and all the components of the system were clearly working well together. These speakers have immense transparency with superb focus and soundstage depth along with a room-filling sound bubble, combined with fast, articulate, deep, and remarkably powerful bass. The latter, of course, is not unexpected from an active woofer section with adjustment controls but in this case, there is something special going on.
These speakers deviate from the norm by using purely analog circuitry for the room size and placement adjustments. So, there is no DSP and no digitizing of any sort. The makers claim that digitizing the bass part inevitably leads to phase issues that translate to sacrifices in terms of the coherence and soundstaging. If the performance of this system is anything to go by, then there certainly seems to be validity in that statement.
There’s a lot more to say about Aequos and all the different configurations that are possible with their speakers but I’ll leave that for the review”
The article is here.