Review

Esoterix Complete Review - Audio & Video Lifestyle - Australia

01 Jul 2004

The indigenous hi-fi manufacturing industry of Australia has always amazed me. Its depth and range is nothing short or remarkable considering the size of our local industry as compared to the rest of the world. All sorts of audio esoterica such as ribbon speakers, single-ended triode valve amplifiers and moving coil cartridges are produced locally, much of it to global acclaim.

While over the years I have tended to mostly use British and American equipment in my own system, I have always invariably used some local product somewhere. And if there is one company which stands out as Australia’s leading audio manufacturer, then surely that company would be Krix loudspeakers of South Australia.

Celebrating 30 years in business, Krix still manufactures all of their speakers from their impressive plant in Hackham, South Australia and exports them all around the world. The chances are that you have already heard a Krix speaker system, even if you didn’t know it at the time. A large part of their business is fitting out commercial cinemas and you can now watch a movie in a Krix cinema on just about every continent around the globe. Certainly, most of the cinemas I can think of in Sydney use Krix speakers. Have a look up on the wall the next time you see a movie and look for the distinctive gold Krix label. But while commercial products continue to form an important part of their business, home audio has always featured, and today they produce a comprehensive list of speakers for stereo, home theatre and in-ceiling use. For review this month, I have a pair of the company’s flagship model, the Esoterix 1 mk2.

The Esoterix 1 is a loudspeaker I am familiar with, having sold them in a retail environment for several years. I remember them as being a model that was well respected and amongst the better speakers in the shop. It has been quite revealing however, having had the used of a pair exclusively in my own listening room for the past month. Physically, they are impressive speakers. Standing 95cm tall and a very deep 43cm, these are large speakers by most people’s standards.

The cabinets are constructed of 25mm fibreboard all around, which is then covered in a real timber veneer. Mine was a very handsome Jarrah timber. The boxes are extremely solid, helped along by internal bracing throughout the cabinet. At 30kg per speaker, the Esoterix 1’s literally rivet themselves to the ground by their won weight. The level of build quality is very high with perfectly matched veneers and gently rounded front baffles. Each speaker sits on its own timber plinth that gently angles the speaker up to the listening position. The idea no doubt is that the tweeter fires directly towards the ear, which is the ideal. As the plinth provides the speaker with a measure of decoupling, I suppose you could just place them on your floor as they are, but after consultation with the Krix factory, I decide to make use of the floor spikes provided which screw neatly into pre-drilled barrels.

The speaker is a full 3-way design. The tweeter is a 28mm hand coated textile dome that uses Ferro fluid to keep it from overheating and to provide a measure of damping. The midrange driver has a polypropylene diaphragm and rubber surround, held in place by a magnesium chassis. The bass driver has a 210mm diameter, which similarly uses a polypropylene diaphragm and magnesium chassis. It is a long-throw unit with a 39mm voice coil. The use of rubber surrounds is a good idea, at least here in Australia where coastal living tends to have disastrous effects on most other materials. Rubber ensures that it will be years before you might require a re-roll, if at all. The drivers are arranged in a logical arrangement with the tweeter and midrange driver sitting one above the other at the top of the baffle.

The midrange driver is actually sited atop the tweeter in an arrangement sometimes referred to as an inverted crossover. Such an arrangement is said to create a more focused soundstage than the conventional set-up of the tweeter above the driver. The bass driver sits below, near the foot of the speaker. The low frequency response of the bass unit is improved by being closer to the floor where the sound waves can interact with the ground.

Both the midrange driver and tweeter are sealed off from the bass driver; each in their own cabinet, thus ensuring they work in the volume of air most suited to their particular task.

As always with speakers, the design of the crossover network is essential to the final sound of the product. Things of course are more complicated in a 3-way design, where there is an extra driver that has to be incorporated. Fittingly then, Krix have attempted to keep the crossover for the Esoterix 1’s as simple as possible, employing quality parts such as low loss polypropylene capacitors. The crossover points for the drivers are at 340Hz as between the bass driver and the mid driver and at 2.2kHz between the mid and the tweeter. The crossover is connected to the tweeter and midrange with silver plated solid core wire. Each speaker is able to be no less than triwired. This allows you to drive the speakers with either three stereo power amplifiers, or presumably six monoblocks, for the ultimate in transparency and resolution. While I would like to think that there is someone somewhere who is using their Esoterix 1’s in this way, the speaker inputs are fortunately connected with thick, gold plated bars, giving you the option instead of just using a standard stereo amp.

The enclosure is a bass reflex type, with two large vents in the rear of each cabinet. In the interests of bass response, it’s best not to cover them up with the vent plugs, which are included. This of course required placing the speakers a reasonable distance away from the rear wall, so as to avoid unwanted reflections. I found speaker placement to be pretty crucial to the sound, particularly the bass. I was still making small adjustments to their placement a week after I had initially set them up. In the end I decided on placing the speakers 410mm from the back wall and 780mm from the sidewalls, each toed in slightly to the listening position. How you eventually set them up yourself is going to depend on the characteristics of your own room and no doubt will involve some experimentation. If you are unable however to get much space between the rear of the speaker and the wall, it is advisable to close off the vents with the plugs provided.

My usual speakers at home are smallish monitors, so it was great fun to substitute them with a pair of large floorstanders. Frankly, there is just no substitute for large speakers when it comes to reproducing the full energy of a recording. On Into My Arms, by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, the tone of the grand piano was rendered from top to bottom. But it wasn’t just the lower notes of the piano that was stronger; it was also the body of the instrument itself. With a larger soundstage, there was a greater sense of the piano’s physical dimensions in my listening room. The position of Nick Cave’s voice in relation to it was pinpoint accurate, appearing to emerge from well behind the speakers. The bass was excellent as you might expect from cabinets with a 65 litre internal volume, but it’s worth noting that they didn’t reach down to the absolute cellar floor. There are in fact very few true, full frequency speaker designs out there and none that are being produced in Australia as far as I know. But bass was string and deep, exhibiting just the slightest amount of bloom that gave it a rounded effect.

To test the Esoterix 1’s abilities further, I listened to Beethoven’s Symphonie No.9, played by the Berlin Philharmoniker conducted by Karajan. If I was looking for justification for such large pieces of audio furniture in my room, then surely here it was. The effect was out of this world. The drama of the massed choir and strings in Ode To Joy was unsurpassed for dynamic impact and realism. The sound filled my listening room, as it never had before. The music appeared to be swirling in from all angles including above and well behind the speakers. Just as with the Nick Cave track before, it was like I was looking at the recording through a larger window, able to see all sort of details for the first time. It is with such sonically rich music that a three-way design shows its worth, better able to capture all the different instruments and voices.

The Krix Esoterix 1 mk2 is a product for real music lovers with the advantage of a price that doesn’t launch it off into the stratosphere of hi-fi esoterica. Be sure to audition them if you’re looking for speakers of excellent quality with few compromises.

- Audio & Video Lifestyle - Australia , Michael O’Connor

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