ELAC - Adante... what’s the verdict?

Dave and Troy - just out of curiosity, do you guys consider the average speaker to sound great (80-90% if it’s full performance) with almost any amp/preamp/etc, or do you truly believe every speaker is like this Adante, where you (supposedly) have to seek out the perfect synergy to get them to sound good?

Obviously, I think any good well designed speaker should and will sound 80-90 to its potential with virtually any setup behind it, even cheap gear.  

We don't believe that any speaker will automatically sound good no matter what is matched with.

That is like saying any high performance car engine will work in any car, take a Ferrari F40 engine and put in a Pinto did you accheive the Ferrari's performance?

The reason a Ferrari perfoms like a Ferrari is that it is designed as a system. If you take any part away from it and it you will not get the performance the system as intended to deliver. 

There are really two types of speakers, high resolution designs and low resolution designs.

The two camps can be summed up as Ribbon, Beryillium, Diamond drivers = High Resolution.

Soft domes tweeters, paper cones, bextrine and certain polypropolyne lower resoloution. 

This is where system matching comes in: Higher resolution speakers require complete elimantion of hash, and must be mated with smoother sounding electronics.

VS

Lower Resolution speakers which require brighter sounding electronics, cables etc. 

Hope that  helps.

It is interesting to see how opinions vary, many people who heard the Adante at CES were blown away by them with Audio Alchemy electronics, and the Hifi News review I don't remember what they used with the speakers but they were blown away by the Adantes vs other people's opinions which are widly differing.

We have not yet passed judgement on just how good the Adante's actually are. So far they are intriguing speakers that do certain things well, with our ultimate buy judgement not yet given.

Dave and Troy
Audio Doctor NJ

Another thing Contuzzi, when we went shopping for reference electronics for the Kef Blades, and Personas, we listened to many different combinations of electronics before finding electronics which made the speakers come alive.


On the Kef Blades we tried Parasound JC 1 which were medeocre at best, the Electrcompaniet AW 400 which were better, then the Chord mono blocks which were far better than the other amps, we tried Hegel, Thrax, Conrad Johnson.

The system which sounded the best was the T+A gear which combined the speed of the Chord and detail with a slightly warmer richer more tube like midrange. 

What is evident is that all of our reference speaker systems the Polymer Research a $68k speaker, the Kef Blades a $32k speaker, the Paradigm 9H a $35k set of speakers didn't sound magical on far less expensive electronics, it was only when matched with really good gear, cables and source components did we hear a sound that was really compelling.

So back to the car analogy purchase a Ferrari or Porsche and say it comes time for new tires and you don't want to spend the money on really good tires you won't get the performance the car can offer with cheaper tires. 

The higher the performance evelope the better everything else must be in order to deliver it.

Your 9H on the Anthem separates is a far cry from the 9H on the T+A gear. 

Now if your thinking just because something is expensive doesn't mean you are guaranteed performance either, it is a matching game and we have heard expensive gear that wasn't worth the price.

Dave and Troy 
Audio Doctor NJ

I'd rather listen to a 10K amp driving 1k speakers than vice-versa any day .

You simply have to be joking...