Speaker designer extraordinaire Andrew Jones was at CES this week unveiling his new line of speakers from Elac. Their new Uni-Fi speaker line was the talk of the show, and with a designer with 40 years of experience headlining the demo room to personally talk about his products, I definitely took time out of a busy show schedule to listen.
Andrew was kind enough to take a few minutes for an interview to help us get a better understanding of the behind the scenes design goals of their new Uni-Fi Speaker line.
Elac Uni-Fi Speaker Line Interview with Andrew Jones
“My goalwith the Uni-Fi series was to create a line of speakers with technology andperformance normally reserved forspeakers costing significantly more,” Jones said. “By going with a 3-way design andemploying a new in-house developed concentric driver I’ve achieved a sound thatis more true to the music than similar priced products."
Elac 4" aluminum concentric driver - the heart of the Uni-Fi speaker line
The Uni-Fi seriesconsists of a bookshelf (UB5), a Floorstanding (UF5) and a center channel speaker(UC5). Each model has incredible performance for speakers at their pricepoints. The Uni-FiSeries is based on their Debut Line of speakers. The most significant changes being the addition of a newly designed 4” concentric driver consisting of a 4”aluminum midrange and 1” soft dome tweeter. Elac claims that by mounting the tweeter at the centerof the midrange driver the audio reproduced is perceived as coming from the samepoint in space. This results in improved directivity throughout the crossoverregion and better off-axis frequency response. Bass is handled by a newlydeveloped 5 ¼” aluminum woofer.
Elac UB5 Bookshelf (left pic); UF5 Tower (right pic)
In the demo room, we found a single pair of Elac Uni-Fi UB5bookshelf speakers in a 2.0 configuration. Many designers would haveshown the bookshelf speakers with an accompanying subwoofer to fill outthe bottom end, perhaps the Elac S10EQ ($500), or at the least, gonewith a pair of the bigger UF5 towers. It takes a lot of confidence totry to impress half-a-dozen critical listeners in a 500 square foot roomwith a $500 pair of bookshelf speakers.
Thedemo began with a little introduction from Andrew Jones describing whyhe designed these speakers. You can hear something similar to that, andmuch, much more in our extended video review with Andrew embedded aboveand available on our YouTube channel. The first track was dominated bya female vocal and guitar played in a percussive style. The trackpresented a clear midrange, detailed high frequencies, and broad imagein the room which had a little absorption at the sidewall firstreflection points. That said, we couldn't get a sense of thelow-frequency impact of the speakers because the thumped guitar, whileit sound quite weighty, also utilized much of the UB5's sufficientmidrange.
The second track came up, almostidentically instrumented with the same percussive guitar, but with amale voice. Again, clean, detailed, and spacious reproduction, but noway to accurately judge the low-end of these speakers. We startedgetting suspicious; was Andrew avoiding demo tracks with any reallow-end to hide a deficiency in the speaker design. We shouldn't haveworried. The next track was by Canadian EDM star deadmau5, and featuredcopious amount of low bass. As soon as the first low synth swelledout, and the low percussion kicked in, the room went giddy. Thesemodest bookshelves were filling the room with clean, musical, plentifulbass in a way that was expected in a set of full-sized towers, but veryuncommon in $500 bookshelves. People started giggling, taking turnsoffering up the single sweet-spot in the front of the room, and askinghow they could get a pair.
With a pricepoint of just $499/pr for the UB5 bookshelf, $499/ea for the UF5 floorstanding, and $349 for the UC5 center channel it won't be a issue of "IF" we do a full review on these, but "When".
The Uni-Fi Series ofspeakers will be available in Q2 of 2016
ABOUT ELAC
For 90 years, ELAC has builtinnovative products that deliver superior performance and value, driven by acommitment to making the best sound in the world. Today, LAC offers a widerange of speaker and electronics products. ELAC has earned its reputation –fromthe beginning –with advanced technology, uncompromised build quality and modernEuropean style.
Unless otherwise indicated, this is a preview article for the featured product. A formal review may or may not follow in the future.
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