Stratton Acoustics’ Elypsis 1512
Stratton Acoustics are a new loudspeaker manufacturer with a deliciously retro-skewed approach. I learned about them in the midst of the slew of stuff coming from the recent Bristol HiFi show. I don’t repeat the big sites’ news as I tend to specialise in just the outer edges and the fun stuff but this was EPIC. And very me.
I have been in the business a long time. I have been a happy consumer of expert PR for decades and so help me, their job is to know how the writers tick and what will excite them. It’s not rocket science but you do kind of have to read a writer’s output for years to get to that level. The star in charge of the news dissemination for Stratton Acoustics, knows me better than I had realised.
I got his email and as my jaw dropped and I started to ache with desire for these things, I just had to call up the sender. He answered before I could hear the phone ring at my end. He didn’t say hello or greet me by name. He recognised the number and just said, gravelly-voiced, “Your kind of speaker, huh?” I was unable to speak and just giggled like a pillock, utterly corpsed, unable to string a word. It was hilarious. You kinda had to be there…
A brief bit of background. I had a little job path through the pro audio trade in the 1980s. I went to UEA in Norwich that could ‘spend’ £10,000 a term on live acts for the ‘common room’. A venue that was not big at all, it nevertheless held concerts that the next night, would be in Hammersmith Odeon. Only four universities in the land were known at the time for having such illustrious bands in. Everyone from Duran Duran to the Cure, via Motorhead and the Boomtown Rats. Mostly, the uni ents committee turned a profit and so sometimes they felt the urge to offer 50p gig tickets. The GoGos were on a deal where they got a slice of profits and were upset to learn they could not earn anything at all on their UEA show, priced all socially-keenly, at 50p. Belinda Carlisle was in the band. I joined the ‘Ents committee’ and worked as a humper unloading the trucks when they arrived for shows. I would befriend the crews and envied their lives, desperately!
I wanted to run away with Simple Minds when they came, and they had a space on their tour bus…. I had made myself useful as crew to help with the load-in and made friends with the monitor engineer. As a lumping big bloke, I would later tell employers at sound companies that I was a human forklift and could shift mighty things. It was also how come I got to review the hugest home speaker systems in later work, I think. I could unpack and and safely handle the big loudspeakers on my own! Even huge subwoofers, with nary a scratch. So nope, I didn’t run away with the band but I did work as a minor roadie and as a monitor sound engineer and later as test bench oppo for a studio rental company called Audio FX.
And that meant going to recording studios from time to time as help-crew when delivering say a SONY 2324 or 2348 digital tape recorder. Yes, huge tape decks that looked like analogue but were huge DAT technology things. Back then, 1GB of memory cost £1,000 and needed a lot of space and half a pound weight of chips – as used in the AKAI S1000 sampler unit that the Pet Shop Boys so loved. So digital tape was a thing and the Sonys could record in 48kHz sample rate as against mere CD’s 44.1kHz. But they went in a huge flight case and were heavy, so a crew had to be sent to Abbey Road to get them up the stairs. I know they have lifts now as I phoned and checked!
In later life, my experience with the ultimate sound quality of a set of full size professional recording studio monitors, compelled me to hire a studio. As after you delivered a thing, the engineers would sometimes play you a bit of what they were doing. Or just demo the monitors if you asked. I was kinda trade, so I got to hear a few. The studio I eventually hired as a journalist was Townhouse in Chiswick. I asked simply to be allowed to playback stereo to two groups of warm bodies, a few at a time, so they too could have this on their experiential list. Just the control room, ONE set of i/o channels and a solemn vow not to allow anyone to touch the desk whatsoever. The folks who came loved it. The point is, the professionals (myself kind of arrogantly included at the time) felt that the silliness of HiFi aficionados was absurd. Since how could anything be better than the studio? They overlooked that they were sat in a control room designed to sound awesome.
And studios had three kinds of speakers to monitor upon. Ones they called ‘near-field’ which were to imitate “HiFi” or home speakers and a set of Auratone ‘CUBES’. These were a four inch speaker a box that didn’t even get a tweeter until late in the Eighties because initially it was to emulate a tiny wee speaker in a standard transistor radio. And then, as ‘boom boxes’ got better, they grew an HF driver. But the mighty main monitors, were the third kind, able to go VERY loud indeed with improbable depth and upper reach. These had two fifteens, a mid that was a ten or a twelve and then an exotic tweeter. They sounded astounding, were always epic and yet could extract every last detail you recorded, so you could hear it.
And to finally come to the point, a bunch of audio aesthetes have taken the nil-compromise approach of recording studio main monitors and applied a massive slice of proper, sane, provable science to make them incredibly high performance. Then, as they are intended to be the centre of attention, the loudspeaker enclosures themselves are not treated as a tool and just built into the walls of a control room in a studio but rather are configurable into a deliciously high end selection of fine finishes and details. They offer ‘Pure’ for £69,000, ‘Bespoke’ starting at £74,000 and ‘Absolute’ versions of the Elypsis 1512 and they are all gorgeous. The Absolute is when you get involved in every part of the product personally, I think.. and P.O.A.!
I would normally plop all their tech here, but you need to go look.. I know I want to go hear them so bad it hurts. I will have to wait until a room gets set up for a show again.
There is a massive amount of great stuff about the how and the why..but I think I shall save it until I get to experience them…. meanwhile, here is the spec.
Elypsis1512 Specification
System Type: Quad reflex loaded three-way passive speaker
Enclosure: Substantially braced birch ply
Bass Drivers: 2 x 380mm (15 inch) with paper diaphragm and ferrite motor system
Midrange Driver: 300mm (12 inch) with a selectively hand-doped paper diaphragm. NeFeB motor system
Tweeter: 29mm (1.2 inch) waveguide loaded soft dome. NeFeB motor system
Crossover: Part-impedance compensated three-way with asymmetric second and third-order slopes
Crossover Frequencies: 350Hz and 2.5kHz
Frequency Response: 45Hz to 18kHz +2dB
Low-Frequency Cut-off: -6dB @ 28Hz
Midband Sensitivity: 96dB for 2.83V @ 1 m
Nominal Impedance: 8 Ohms (8 Ohms minimum between 100Hz and 10kHz)
Group Delay: <12mS above 40Hz
Amplifier Compatibility: Any
EQ Options: Mid and HF bands ‡2dB
Connections: Tri-wire/Tri Amp Neutrik Speakon sockets
Dimensions (H x W D): 876mm (34.5 in) x 1001mm (39.4 in) x 515mm (20.3 in)
Weight: 140kg (308.6 lbs)