Amphion Argon1 Bookshelf Loudspeaker

I’ve never been to Finland, the land that gave us Jean Sibelius. Never experienced the ice, the soil, the landscape, the people. Perhaps, one day. But growing up in the 50s, my brother and I befriended a lad who, with his family, had migrated from Finland to Canada. Our Finnish friend had an aunt who had arrived earlier in Canada and built a sauna in the basement of her home. Up to this point in my life, I had never heard the word ‘sauna’. I was 15 or 16, my brother modestly younger, but we were offered a cultural rite of passage—Finnish style. We would gather at the aunt’s house—towels would be provided—we’d strip and bake our brains in the sauna’s heat, eventually trying to outdo each other with even greater and greater baking times. Then we’d go through part 2 of the Finnish ritual and shrink our blood vessels and our testes with an ice cold shower. Who needed mescaline when you had this high? Finally, the aunt would bring us steaming black coffee and a Finnish pastry called boula after the cold shower. This, for me, was the apex of adolescent pre-sex rapture—it never got better than this. Any people who could construct this type of blood-purifying experience deserved my respect. And, so, here I am, so many, many years later, offering my respect, once again, to a group of Finns who create a different type of rapture, one cerebral, musical and visceral, but no less remarkable and meaningful. I’m talking about the makers of Amphion speakers, and for this review, the bookshelf size speaker, the Argon1 ($1400/pair).

The man who heads up Amphion is Anssi Hyvönen, an interesting man and a man who comes through as a bona fide visionary. Anyone who produces and survives in the Hi-Fi industry must have some ideal, some north star to follow. Amphion’s ideal is to create speakers as ‘acoustical portals’ of sound, something ‘..to disappear and to be forgotten.’ Or, as Hyvönen has said in so many interviews, ‘...we want to build an open window into the music.’ Clearly, a noble ideal. But how do you go about achieving this?

Anssi Hyvönen, Founder/CEO Amphion Loudspeakers Ltd.

One way of achieving this goal is to recognize one of the central problems pointed out by Floyd Toole in his classic Sound Reproduction: The Acoustics and Psychoacoustics of Loudspeakers and Rooms (link not affiliated with Audiophilia). Toole stated what the listener heard through his audio system in his domestic space may or may not be the sound the artist created in the studio. Between what the studio engineer heard back through studio monitors, the quality of which is unknown to the listener, and how the engineer mixed the final tracks, one could have an outcome that is predominantly the construct of the recording engineer. Floyd Toole called this ‘the circle of confusion’. Furthermore, except for the symphonic orchestra’s tradition of performance, evident in all of the great orchestral halls in Europe and North America, there was/is no acoustical point of reference when it comes to ‘studio recordings.’

Amphion recognized this problem early. Hyvönen believed if he had access to the studios where the music was recorded, mixed and mastered, he would have a pretty good idea what the artists and producers were listening for. Build a studio monitor speaker that faithfully reflected the studio sound, then apply this insight to a speaker for domestic use. And this is precisely what Amphion has done.

The Amphion Argon1 ($1400/pair) is a two-way bass reflex, rear portal design speaker with a 25 millimeter titanium tweeter housed in a substantial wave guide—more on that later. The speaker’s mid-bass woofer is a 133 millimeter aluminum woofer sitting in a speaker box measuring 315 millimeters high, 160 millimeters wide and 265 millimeters deep. Each speaker weighs 15 pounds and comes in black or brilliant white finish. For a few extra dollars, you can get the nicely done walnut finish.

I’ve got the stunning white Argons—very elegant, clean and unpretentious. To add further to the already heightened concept of chic, Amphion offers the speaker grill in a wide assortment of colours to complement your specific domestic space—very cool.

Here’s brilliant White with the ‘Traffic Red’ ‘grid set’ ($40). Sets also come in Blue, Violet, Yellow, Green, and others.

The Argon1 is a passive speaker with a titanium tweeter and an aluminium mid-bass woofer. Experienced readers of Audiophilia will know the issues with any speaker with a metal cone driver. On the one hand, they are stiff and light and offer good low bass frequencies, on the other, they are not particularly suitable for mid range application. High volumes can create a most unpleasant form of ringing in the driver and one of the few ways to ameliorate this nastiness is to lower the crossover point. Not an easy task, by the way.

The Argons have a surprising crossover point of 1600 Hz, rather than the 2000 to 3000 Hz crossover point one would expect to find in a regular two-way design. By lowering the crossover point in a speaker, you cure the ‘ringing’ problem, and you also move the transition point from mid-bass to tweeter out of the direct and most critical area of human hearing—the 2000 to 5000 Hz zone. A 2000 Hz to 3000 Hz cross-over point is like creating a sofa cushion with the seam right in the middle of the cushion, an analogous argument Hyvönen is fond of making. However, just lowering the crossover point to 1600 Hz alone cannot fix the problem. You might make your woofer quite content, but you put undue stress on the lower range of the tweeter. Make the tweeter larger? But, sure as the earth turns and we see the sun again, this solution creates further engineering problems. So, if you lower the crossover point, one option is to set your tweeter into a wave-guide. Now the tweeter acts like an acoustic amplifier boosting the lower frequency of the tweeter, making the transition from the upper frequency wave of the woofer to the lower frequency wave of the tweeter much smoother. All of this is further assisted by an efficient first order crossover that offers a gradual frequency roll-off with a wider band of frequencies shared by both the woofer and tweeter. A well designed wave-guide will control the directivity of the tweeter at this critical crossover point, narrowing the dispersion of the lower end of the tweeter to accept the narrowing upper dispersion range of the woofer. This increases the area that the tweeter couples to the ‘air width’ of the woofer, expanding the area of commonality between both speakers. Voila, an ultimately smoother coherence of transition and ranges of sound. Much closer to how humanity hears sound. This is the theory. Easy to describe; inherently difficult to construct. Amphion, however, has mastered the theory and its practical application. Wave-guides and lower crossover points have been part of Amphion’s tradition right from the beginning and their experience clearly shows.

One final thought before we begin the taste test. We all know one of the difficulties with our industry: its reliance on measurements. Measurements sell. Do they tell the whole story? Of course not. Every speaker manufacturer is acutely aware their speakers end up in all sorts of domestic spaces; L shaped rooms, low ceilings and significant reflective surfaces, to name just a few. With the onslaught of Agenda 21, renamed Agenda 30, homes, or living spaces are becoming smaller and smaller. So, the question becomes, how do you mitigate the geometry of an increasingly smaller domestic space, with differing reflective surfaces, where the speakers can not sit in the middle of the room? Indeed, the listener may be unable to create for him or herself the perfect equilateral triangle listening position. Well, the Finns have traditionally had smaller homes than North Americans. In any small home, speakers have to sit pretty tight up against the wall and still be able to load the room with predictable acoustical outcomes. This is another real world problem Amphion saw from their own domestic market. So, they made point source technology and controlled dispersion top priorities. Lower the crossover point, create the best wave-guide, work on a liberal off-axis listening capability and even timbres from anywhere in the room and you can overcome the eccentric nature of much of the domestic space. After listening to the Argon1s for a number of months now, I believe Amphion has achieved this much sought after sound ideal. 

Specifications

Operating principle
Two-way, vented

Drivers
1″ titanium tweeter
5¼” aluminum woofer

Weight
7 kg (15 lbs)

Crossover point
1600 Hz

Sensitivity
86 dB

Frequency response
45 – 25.000 Hz -6dB

Power recommendation
25 – 150 W

Handmade in Finland

If you prefer a wall mount installation, specific Argon wall mount brackets are available for $180.00/pair. Each bracket can support up to 15kg and angle to your listening preference. Available in black and white.

Sound

I started my listening adventure with Hans Zimmer’s Interstellar film score played from Tidal through my Tri-Art Class D Integrated Amplifier. Upline from the speakers is the Sutherland KC Vibe Mk2 phono amp (review forthcoming), the Shelter Model 501 III MC Phono Cartridge, the Mytek Manhattan DAC II, the Tri-Art Class D integrated Amplifier with 12V DC Linear (Tube buffered) Power Supply and, alternatively, the NAD M10 Streaming Integrated Amplifier (review forthcoming), all integrated through the super energy-clean cables of Rob Fritz’ Audio Art Cable (a loom kindly supplied on long term loan). Let’s have a closer listen to these elegant miniatures. 

Zimmer’s score is conceived with full sampled orchestral sounds, various environmental sounds with an innovative layering of digital sampled musique concrete sounds and high levels of studio created compression. The music spans the range of minimalist to extreme dense textures with a surprising and prominent use of a full cathedral pipe organ to fulfill the most dense moments—the organ, no doubt, is sampled. One can hear Philip Glass in parts of his score—the use of the incessant repeating obstinate melodic/rhythmic material building from small cells layered to extraordinary fortes. It is an impressive score with much to admire. I played the recording many times through the Argon1s and marvelled at the bristling clarity that filled my odd-shaped room, even in the thickest of textures. At many points in the score one hears very low pedal electronic pitches; the Argons handled these low electronic pedal notes admirably, utterly clearly—very impressive. 

Some of the most engaging moments in the film score are the quiet moments. The Argons create a sense of space, literally and metaphorically, revealing impressive imaging and a wide horizontal field. ‘Mountains’ is one section of the large film score that begins with an indefinite pitched tapping sound—there is something downright riveting to this sound—that again proceeds with a layering of sound and volume in a dense forte texture. This eerie tapping sound seems to come from the centre of the universe and by the time this movement arrives at ff you feel you have heard the full panorama of the universe itself open up before you. The atmospheric poetry of this film score and its persuasive representation of the vastness of space and man’s drama within this space, is given an honest, faithful and wide horizontal field through which we can immerse ourselves. All of this from bookshelf size speakers!

I am very fond of Sibelius. Great performances abound of Sibelius’ music. But I’ve picked the French conductor, Paul Paray, with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra on Mercury vinyl to illustrate, again, what these small portals of sound are capable of. No need to school this audience on the brilliance of the Mercury recordings from the ‘50s. The sound is legend and the efforts made to record the Detroit Symphony is a legend in itself. But all of this would have been for naught without the lead and exemplar of the French conducting tradition brought to America through Maestro Paul Paray. Play his Sibelius Symphony No. 2 and sit back and marvel at the essence of the French sound, the clear orchestral textures, the firm, muscular rhythmic articulations and the lively solo instrumental playing. A sound ideal, by the way, in complete contrast to the Karajan-homogenized-Berlin sound. 

The vinyl of this great recording needs no further elucidation, other than to state its stunning sound is still a legend. The Argon 1s translate Paray’s Detroit Symphony with clarity, allowing all areas of the orchestra to bristle with a wide soundstage and vertical coherence. Mid-range instruments have no problem being expressed and this will become even more clear with my next example, Schumann’s magnificent Konzertstück for 4 Horns.

Almost unplayable when it was written, the Konzertstück fur Vier Horner must be in every Schumann lover’s playlist. What an extraordinary musical adventure for 4 advanced horn players, filled with the most rapturous themes for both orchestra and horns; this piece puts to rest any critique of Schumann’s inability to orchestrate. I get the same sense of unbridled joy from the Konzertstück as I do from the first movement of Schumann’s 3rd Symphony, and at this point in the world right now, I need both pieces more than ever.

Worked on in 1849, Schumann’s most productive year since 1840, and premiered in 1850, Schumann wrote the 4 solo horn parts for the newly created chromatic valve-horn. There are a few great recordings of this piece out there, but for me it’s the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra under Sakari Oramo that captures the sheer ‘sehr lebhaft’ of this piece. Tempos are brisk, phrasing is nuanced and sculptured brilliantly. The horn playing is a technical tour de force and the first horn player, Markus Maskunitty, must be given heaps of praise for his performance. The Argons push through with a full detailed exposure of the 2nd, 3rd and 4th horns parts—the mid-range. Once again, the overall soundscape is impressive and far reaching no matter where I seem to sit in my space. Finally, the full glory of Schumann’s orchestral writing is given a clear vertical coherence from the double basses to the upper register flute part and I have to keep pinching myself that I am hearing all of this sound through these little guys.

Summary

Let’s end this review by stating as clearly as this reviewer can, the Argon 1s are a formidable contender and perhaps a prize fight winner in this class of bookshelf speaker presently on the market. For the retail cost of $1400/pair USD, you would be hard put to find ‘portals’ as expansive, offering such full range clarity—the bass woofer sound, both fast and super-clear—as these guys. The off-axis capability of these speakers is almost impossible to match and if you throw in their tonal uniformity, you are hard-pressed to find competition. Although the mid-range can be a disputed area in a small woofer/tweeter speaker, I could not detect, one bit, any difficulty with any coherence with the examples of music I poured through them. I even threw on Al Jarreau Live from London, sometime in the 90s, and the overall presentation, from the fast and clear bass line to the back-up band with synth and piano, to Jarreau’s vocals, was excellent.

Amphion, with its north star as ‘…an open window into the music’, has achieved its goal in spades. For the second time in my life, I am indebted to the Finnish people in all of their manifestation, one physical and one musical. I award the Audiophilia Star Component Award to Amphion’s Argon 1 for their outstanding contribution to the audio industry.

Further information: Amphion Loudspeakers