BIG SPEAKERS! elipson® Prestige Facet 34F

I have a bizarre outlook for a HiFi writer/reviewer. As a second generation journalist, growing up with my dad as my mum’s agent/manager and making her into a household name “Like Harpic, Dahling!” as she used to say, she was essentially a medical journalist.

As such, I cannot help but take her set of principles with me in my work, which is a bit much for HiFi. The first is huge and about work/life balance and was always a source of a bit of disagreement between my folks. My dad was the voice of reason, while mama was ready to hit the deck running for a broadcaster at nil notice, any time they called, night or day. Within reason, so do I. But local BBC radio is unpaid and while it all helps for the odd Radio 2 spot on Jeremy Vine, or even the heady excitement of BBC Breakfast TV sofa in Manchester at the crack of dawn, I sometimes say ‘no’ if it is going to inconvenience MeJulie.

The second is about righteousness. As a reader, I need to know that my reviewer is a person of toweringly pompous truth. And I have treated this ‘only ever absolute truth’ as axiomatic throughout my whole career. So when a manufacturer who bought a brand called REL subwoofers, insisted on their chap coming to my house, to interfere with the review, I got upset. (That I adored the original designer Richard Lord and he liked me, had something to do with it. I went to his funeral, they were not there.)

In the end, I had to tell the editor that it was not happening a second time and that on principle, the bloke was not welcome at my house.

So that was how I stopped working for Home Cinema Choice magazine…

Since then, I have kept my hand in, as the very top end of HiFi is as addictive as chocolate.

There was THIS look see at the fabulous stuff at the posh show in Hammersmith. Once called The Indulgence Show and renamed The Festival Of Sound. Complete with a video, here: https://www.adamrayner.net/naim-focal-take-the-laurels-with-a-350000-stereo-at-the-festival-of-sound/

Then there was this visit to a serious high end audio and home automation company, Nintronics here: https://www.adamrayner.net/nintronics-home-of-ultra-high-end/

There have been other things… but when I was sent the release for these speakers, I was awfully keen on hearing a pair as they are a bit ‘me’.

Not cheap at two and a half grand a set, the choices of quality speakers in this bracket is impressive. You could get two way 4321G bookshelf speakers from JBL or the Dynaudio Special Forty or perhaps a pair of Elac Adante AS61 for that. All two-ways. Or if you were looking at wanting big speakers – and the elipson® Prestige Facet 34F are truly hench – then you could have a pair of Focal Aria 936 for that. Those towers have a three way design, are front ported and have a trio of 6.5in mid-basses and a set of two way components (6.5in and HF) above their ports.

WHY THESE ARE GOOD

The same money as that cluster of four Focal six-and-a-halfs a side, will get you much bigger cubic cabinets, rear porting you can tune into your room’s corner to play with, two seven inch mid basses and a brace of mighty ten inch drivers per side. The 300W RMS rating is the same as the speakers I was comparing with but oh boy do these Prestige Facet 34F speakers outperform them for efficiency. These will take a given hypothetical single watt and play it at 94dB when measured at a metre. The other is rated at 92dB which will sound all but half the general girth.

The Facet 34F are efficient.

Then they reach down to a snake’s belly low 25Hz and that will be the ‘F3’ or three decibels lesser output point. So you will feel bass down to the limits of the dual ten inch drivers’ suspensions, even given that porting to the rear. Fact is, you could even use a port blocker to reduce SPL and drop the bottom cut-off, as these tens are wobbly compliant transducers and I am convinced that there is a deliciously wide overlap of passband going on.

Because elipson® (lower case, reg’d and all..) is a company that has been working for three generations and are legendary for their turntables of great sonic beauty and the manufacture of spherical loudspeakers, these folks understand fine sound. Like Anthony Gallo’s ball-shaped speakers and the egg-shaped weirdness of Eclipse, the sphere (and egg even more so) are an incredibly good enclosure for a loudspeaker. Internal reflections cancel out and there is nil enclosure wall-flex since the shape means it cannot ‘inflate’. Elipson truly know their stuff.

Back at the enclosures, the top trio of drivers is the classic and well proven D’Appolito array of tweeter between two mids and each driver has a proprietary rubbery ‘sculpted silicon rim’ edge area surround with facets to break up and thus smooth out sound reflections bouncing off the immediate area around the drivers. This seems to work, as the output was truly even and coherent and is the origin of the range’s name.

It was also muscular, with a properly effortless headroom that reflected what these were connected to.

I had come to the demo room of Musical Images in Edgware, where Mayur and his peeps have been quietly getting on with whole-house automation and home cinema as well as the serious business of stereo speaker and system HiFi for many years.

PERFORMANCE

Waiting for my white gloves approach (like a rock star having a guitar roadie) was a Primare CD32 atop a PRE32 of the same make, with two of their A34.2 amplifiers, bridged to mono. These were rated thus at just over a half kilowatt RMS per channel, so if I wanted to see the four ten inch woofers woof, it was entirely possible. The speakers are equipped with bi-wire/bi-amp terminals but Musical Images chose the Nordost Blue Heaven in a single pair. A ribbon cable, designed for hiding under carpet, I think.

This is going to sound corny. I was working for AudioFX ( a studio equipment rental outfit) and then ENTEC (PA. hire) in the same year, just beforehand. I was at AFX when Adamski arrived with his agent to book equipment for recording ‘Killer’. Nowadays the until-then-unsuccessful-due-to-his-acne session singer known as Seal, is kinda better known. (chortle) But I met the lad, his dog and the agent as they arrived, since my test bench was there. My job was checking rental kit still worked when it came back from a studio. I was allowed to go to the rave where the vans with recording kit showed up and again the session at the Bull & Gate pub in Kentish town later. The problem was, nobody was hooting and cheering at the rave. They were all on their own little clouds and a vociferous rentacrowd was hired for the atmospherics overdubs later in the pub.

Anyway, I digress because, let’s face it, I have been awfully interested in Seal ever since. And I have heard the title track of his album, “Crazy” a lot of times.

But I heard stuff in that introduction to the top of the album, the most important few seconds of recorded audio in the entire career to date, that I had not heard before.

Yep, the single corniest HiFi writer stuff. “I heard things I never heard before…” Goosebumps after that many years was amazing. That voice, is not chorussed (or repeated a tad sideways electronically) but rather another vocal multi-tracked with great art because his voice and performance really was that good and he was a session singer after all.

The high frequencies of this system could go loud without stress and harshness. The big test of that is Pink Floyd’s ‘Money’ with all the clangourous cash-coinage tinkles at the start. Some might want that to hurt and may find these speakers a bit too smooth and grown up in that respect but if you feel the urge and have that power, a kilowatt through four deep breathing tens is more like a description of a massive car sound system, rather than a HiFi. It was f*****g epic.

But high end HiFi it most certainly is, with this being more of a what they might call an SQL or ‘Sound Quality, Loud’ system concept. We played an ancient John Lee Hooker recording so clearly, you could hear the 1950’s sound of the microphone capsule on ‘Boom Boom’ recorded in 1962. Awesome.

They were not ‘loud’ like say, the daftness of cheap end Cerwin Vega, they were simply potent. Back at the start of Seal’s album and the thing that struck me was how close it felt to experiencing a set of recording studio main monitors. These often have paired bass drivers up to fifteen inches. It was like the level was not the issue, for the sound was just so effortlessly dynamic. The phat amps help, of course but the speakers could take huge sudden increases in power and have so much voice coil to fill up and heat up, that they do not get hot and thus the joy of low power compression becomes clear. You don’t even know quite why unless you are a geek, but it is all about that excitement. A bass line, a gun in the 1812, a sudden scary velociraptor or the machine guns of a Japanese Zero fighter plane. All these can get so exciting, so fast it can give you goose bumps such is the ability of the elipson® Facet 34F.

The smoothness of the output was also part of this and I gather it is to do with the seriously component-rich passive crossovers inside the enclosures. With steep 24dB per octave slopes, they can avoid constructive interference at the crossover points that can cause humps in the curve as the two drivers’ outputs are added together at overlap. This adds up to that grown-up smooth curve, uncoloured and ready for your taste, not what it wants to play the best.

One thing, I did enjoy the system in stereo but the range also comprises two sizes of bookshelf speakers, two more smaller floor standing speakers and best of all, a rash of dedicated home cinema speakers. These are a small add-on ATMOS topper-box to shoot at the ceiling, the Facet 14F with the same ATMOS set atop it to act as an ATMOS floor stander and then two sizes of centres and two subs, plus an L/C/R design and the 7SR surround speaker. Lastly, they even do a Bluetooth version of the smallest bookshelf two-way and the smallest tower.

If you are in this market and want scale and serious efficiency, then elipson® and the Facet 34F and whole Facet range are incredible value for your high end pound.

VERDICT

elipson® Prestige Facet 34F bass-reflex floor standing loudspeaker Price £2,499.00

HIGHS: Smooth and rich with astonishing high end Value For Money, these are a potent speaker of serious high end heritage and performance.

LOWS: Not small, not best played as a background but rather as a main event.

Performance: 5
Design:  4
Features: 4
Overall: 5

SPECIFICATIONS
elipson® Prestige Facet 34F bass-reflex floor standing loudspeaker: £2,499 (per pair)

Drive units: One 25mm (1in) soft dome tweeter, two 170mm (7in) midband transducers with solid phase plugs at their centre. Two 250mm (10in) bass drivers. All with sculpted silicon rubber rim areas to aid directivity and smoothness of midband coverage.
Enclosure: Three-way, front-firing D’Appolito array. Internally braced, front gloss baffle between 21mm and 39mm thick. Dual rear ported. Vinyl veneer finish to rest of enclosure. Magnetic fit cloth grilles. Base is optional-use.
Power handling: 300W RMS
Sensitivity: 94dB 1W/1m
Impedance: 6 Ohms
Frequency response: 25Hz-25kHz, ±3dB
Dimensions with base: 1211 x 355 x 420mm
Dimensions without base: 1190 x 295 x 360mm
Weight: 42.4Kg or 44.6Kg with base
http://www.elipson.com/gb/14-prestige