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No one thinks I have a good memory, but I can easily remember a few sentences from my March 2016 review of Elac’s Debut B6 loudspeaker. The sentence I remember best: “I might be able to forgive you for liking Paul more than John, George, or Ringo, but if you don’t grasp the genius of Mel Tormé, only God can save you.” I felt guilty for bringing God into the story, but I sincerely wanted everyone to experience the wonder of the Velvet Fog (Tormé) and to realize how good Mel could sound on a pair of $279.99/pair upstart speakers with audiophile pretensions.

And I can’t forget this one: “Impulsively, I jumped up and put my hands on their cabinets. . . . They were vibrating like sex toys!” I was not exaggerating.

When Elac’s new $1200/pair Carina BS243.4 loudspeakers arrived, I noticed how completely different they looked from the Debut B6s. No vibrating, cheap-vinyl-covered booxes here. The BS243.4s looked sleek, solid, curvy, and moderne, with chamfered front-side corners and a trapezoidal footprint.

The BS243.4’s expensive-looking matte-black finish looked like steel. Curious, I tapped the cabinet sides and top with a small flashlight. It sounded like MDF, but each side surface sounded different. I used the flashlight to peer inside and measure the plastic bottom- firing port (6″ × 1.75″). This bottom port is able to work because the front of the BS243.4’s cabinet is attached to a strong hard-plastic base, making it look like a normal rectangular speaker from the front. However, in the side elevation, the cabinet rises upward front to back about 1.68″—leaving space for the wind from the port to exit gracefully from three sides. I wondered if the cabinet had been designed specifically for desktop positioning, and if my 24″ Sound Anchors Reference stands, which are partially open at the top, would properly load the port. Then I remembered . . .

At audio shows, when I enter the Elac room, I always feel this sort of bouncy energy that makes me smile and perks me up. Then, of course, I see Andrew Jones’s electric grin jutting above the swarming heads. Then, of course, I see the newest Elac speakers. (There are always new Elac speakers.) On one such occasion, I waited for Andrew to finish his spiel and the crowd to disperse, then found a seat next to America’s most popular speaker designer. He laughed as I sat down: “Vibrated like sex toys, huh?”

Moments later, while listening to a song with copious bass, I noticed the curtains behind the left speaker blowing wildly in the wind from the speaker’s rear port. I smiled and tapped Andrew on the shoulder and pointed. We both laughed.

Description
Elac Americas’ Carina series consists of three models: the BS243.4 bookshelf speaker, the FS247.4 floorstander, and the CC241.4 center-channel speaker.

“We are on a nautical theme at Elac, since the Germany office is in Kiel, Germany, an important sailing town,” Andrew told me. “Kiel is German for keel, the stabilizer for a boat. So, Carina comes from the Latin for the keel of a ship.”

For the Carina series, Jones combines an updated (made in China) version of Elac Germany’s famous JET tweeter with a 5.25″ aluminum-cone midbass driver with a com- pound curvature that extends frequency response and allows for the BS243.4’s relatively high (2.7kHz) crossover point.

JET tweeter
My personal experience suggests that the overall sound of any loudspeaker is greatly determined by the designer’s choice of tweeter. For that reason, most speaker manufacturers build their entire line around a particular type of tweeter. Lately, Dr. Oskar Heil’s air motion transformer (AMT) has been the tweeter of choice in several prominent manufacturers’ lineups. GoldenEar calls their version of the AMT a High-Velocity Folded Ribbon (HVFR). Adam Audio calls heirs a Unique Accelerated Ribbon Tweeter (U-ART). MartinLogan calls theirs a Folded Motion (FM) tweeter. And Elac calls their version a Jet Emission Tweeter (JET).

No matter what highfalutin name they give it, the AMT is a simple dipole transducer that squeezes air from the curtain-like folds of a sheet of polyimide film suspended in a strong magnetic field. You can’t usually see it, but these membranes have a thin, continuous conductor deposited on their surface.

My friend, audio-design wizard Jeffrey Jackson of EMIA, believes Heil was a god and described to me how the AMT works: “The voice wire goes up and down and back up again . . . it is the direction of current flow being in opposition to its neighbor (like Coltrane’s “One Down, One Up”) that makes it squeeze or push.”

We call them “air motion transformers” because they move air at a velocity several times higher than that of the diaphragm moving it. As a result, the AMT tweeter’s sensitivity and transient response are improved.

The sonic effect of all this high-speed, high-volume air movement is, to my ears, one of quiet, fatigue-free detail and apparently low distortion.

Setup
Unlike dome tweeters, folded ribbons allow designers to control both horizontal and vertical dispersion. Therefore, AMTs usually provide wider horizontal dispersion than domes. Andrew Jones told me in an email, “The Carina BS243.4 has virtually no change in response at 15-degrees horizontally right out to nearly 15kHz and still not much change at 30 degrees. Therefore, you cannot easily change the speaker’s tonality by how much you toe it in.

“Facing straight forward will give a broad but not super-focused image; a little toe-in will give you a little more focus. What really matters is how close your side walls are. Toe them in further if you are too close to your side walls.”

When I asked about how far they should be placed from the wall behind them, he replied, “Twelve inches from the [front] wall is about right in general, but this can be very room dependent. As usual, move them around until they sound good to you.”

The BS243.4 is biwireable via rugged-looking binding posts but does not include grilles.

Back in the fog
The first record I listened to critically through the Elacs was by that most artful of singers, Mel Tormé: Live at the Crescendo (LP, Affinity AFFD 100). I wanted to see how the BS243.4 compared to my memory of the Elac B6.

The first songs I played were “Autumn Leaves” and “It’s Alright With Me,” and the first sonic thing I noticed was a distinct lack of saturated Mel-tone. Standup bass was finger- snappy and flesh-on-strings detailed. Assorted room sounds and applause were well-described. Rhythm-keeping was better than first-rate. But overall, the sound was slightly dry, and some measure of Mel-harmonics were missing.

The world’s a place of horrors
Because each man thinks he’s right—Loudon Wainwright III

As a teen, I loved spending time in musical-instrument shops. Now, with exceptions, the experience is reliably depressing.

Last Saturday was exemplary: I walked into my local supermarket of sound to buy a set of guitar strings, and was at once assaulted by the racket of two gunslingers trying to outshoot each other. Combatant No.1, a fiftysomething male with an elaborate dye job, had hold of a new Martin dreadnought acoustic guitar, on which he aggressively demonstrated his repertoire of Stephen Stills licks. Combatant No.2, a younger and more reserved-looking male, also armed with a new Martin, alternated between playing along with No.1 and trying to drown him out, the latter no easy task. It was impossible to tell if either player was any good, because both were wielding music not as art but as truncheon.

It occurs to me that many audio enthusiasts do the same.

Man the Lifeboats
Between 2004 and 2010, my family and I made three trips to Florida, primarily to visit Walt Disney World. During our stays there, which I enjoyed, I spent idle moments watching the anoles (footnote 1) that lived in the palmetto trees outside our lodgings.1 The adult males, typically a brighter green than the females, would challenge one another by inflating their dewlaps—pouches of strawberry-red skin that extend from their throats—and performing a stationary dance that made the animals look as if they were doing push-ups. The one with the smaller or less-red dewlap, defeated, would slink away, presumably toward permanent bachelorhood. There are worse things, I suppose.

In more recent years, I’ve been unable to look at male customers in music stores without imagining them as anoles with denim and hair. Sadly, a disproportionate number of male audiophiles seem destined for the same transformation—sadly because, unlike their guitar-wielding cousins, the far greater damage done by those audiophiles is to themselves. They conceive, assemble, and adjust their systems not to find the colorful truths hidden away in their records but to do battle with other men. They do this on a playing field defined by two axes:

1) My soundstage

2) My bass

The man whose soundstage is more impressive—typically defined in terms of its detail, the wholeness of the images therein, and, most of all, its depth—is the winner. Similarly, extending and enlarging one’s bass range is literally indistinguishable from doing the same to one’s dewlap. Redness may also play a role.

The real loser in these scenarios, daily played out in the virtual listening room of the Internet and at numberless audio shows, audio stores, and audio-society gatherings, is music itself. Otherwise, the players do little harm—again, except to themselves.

Less harmless are those audio enthusiasts who are least secure: those whose toxic rage at a world that does not accept the authority of their opinions—a world that persists in enjoying recorded music in ways of which they do not approve—accomplishes nothing other than making our hobby seem repellant. Their playing field also has two axes:

1) My dick

2) My dick

In a recent thread that showed up on my Facebook feed, I saw a number of posts from an evidently well-known audio maven who stated, without apparent irony, that it is his “duty” to educate audio enthusiasts in the foolishness of preferring LPs over CDs or music files, and to save them from spending money on expensive electronics. “Wire makes no difference,” he wrote: “It’s all about the speakers and the room.”

The question that would enter the minds of most intelligent, well-adjusted people is: Why should he care? If, as a consumer, he’s satisfied with digital sources, op-amp–based electronics, and lamp cord, then he’s a wise man to avoid buying anything else. But I can’t work out how consumers can or should be “saved” from buying perfectionist-quality goods that they have either auditioned at length or purchased with a home-trial policy—things that currently seem to characterize most purchases of audio gear. It’s not as if these people are being asked to blindly spend a three- or four-figure sum on a bottle of wine to which a reviewer they’ve never seen in public has awarded a 91—something that happens every damn day.

Again: Why should anyone care? Again, the answer is: They should not.

Unless, of course, such a person is a male who believes it’s flatly, unacceptably wrong to enjoy certain products, and who considers the work of every prancing, preening, purple-prose-penning audio reviewer who extols the virtues of such products to be an assault on his rightness. I mean—how dare they?

Girl Talk, or, The Chicken Curse
In the December 2018 issue of Stereophile I wrote about the evening when a review sample of a power amplifier caught fire and filled my little house with acrid smoke. It happened just as I was about to put a chicken in the oven.

Today, a Sunday in January, was the first time since then that I’d set about roasting a chicken. I put it in the oven at 4pm, then went upstairs to take a shower. While I was in the shower, the power went out. Swear to God.

I came downstairs and conferred with my wife and daughter, the latter home from college, who shared my suspicion that ours was not the only house affected. I stepped outside and found a couple of neighbors wandering the sidewalks with dazed, expectant looks on their faces. By the time I came back inside, my daughter, Julia, had used her phone to visit the local utility’s website, and learned that ours was one of perhaps 20,000 households affected. There was nothing we could do.

Footnote 1: Anolis carolinensis, aka the American chameleon, which made a surprise cameo appearance in the February 2018 issue.

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This is the 100th and—surprise!—final edition of Music in the Round. MitR began in mid-2003, shortly after SACD and DVD-A discs made high-quality multichannel music convenient and widely available. At the time, I was convinced that multichannel reproduction was superior to stereo because it was able to reproduce the full sound of the performance—not just the performers. Stereophile‘s founder, J. Gordon Holt, had promoted this idea many times, but the appearance of the new media finally brought it to a wider audience. I recall that, when then-Editor John Atkinson and I floated the idea of a column on multichannel audio, we had to promise our publisher that it would not deal with anything having to do with video or home theater, lest it impinge on the territory of sister publications. We readily agreed: In keeping with Stereophile‘s mission, the column has always been about optimizing the music-listening experience.

Back then, we were so grateful for every new music release that we gobbled them up, sometimes regardless of whether the content exactly suited our taste. We sought hardware to play the discs, even if integration with the rest of our components was clumsy. We foresaw a future in which multichannel would supplant stereo, just as stereo succeeded mono, simply because it was technically and aesthetically superior. Multichannel recordings would become the “lingua franca” of the music industry and hardware to play it would be the default, especially for the serious audiophile.

Despite all that, even today, nothing more than casual references to multichannel music playback appear in the pages of audio magazines. Even in Stereophile, Music in the Round is a niche: too easily passed over and possibly beyond the notice of many readers. This contrasts with the interest and attention paid to it all over the Internet and in my email inbox. General awareness requires general exposure.

To this end, Stereophile will now integrate multichannel products and recordings into the main editorial content of Stereophile. Jim Austin decided to make this change during a long discussion on the eve of his elevation to the position of Editor. Our conversation acknowledged multichannel as a valid and important facet of high-quality music reproduction, both scientifically and aesthetically, even as it remains a small niche.

Intrinsic to this change is the idea that multichannel product coverage will now be offered in full equipment reports and will be subject to measurements and analyses by Technical Editor John Atkinson, something for which I and many readers have long wished. It may even result in other reviewers venturing into multichannel—who knows?

I know many may miss this platform for advancing multichannel audio, but I’m glad to be free from the yoke of the bimonthly cycle. With the editor’s encouragement, I will now investigate and report on new technology as it applies to all aspects of audio. I have new equipment reviews loaded into the pipeline, including stereo and multichannel products. Equally important to me is the time flexibility to explore and listen to music. At this moment, my music collection consists of about 40,000 multichannel files/tracks, plus another 30,000 stereo tracks. I’m adding new releases all the time.

“Best sound of my life” is what a good friend of mine recently posted about his own multichannel experience. I second that. I hope that many more of you will feel the same way as Stereophile moves multichannel into the mainstream.

Looking back and looking forward
During the 16 years my column has been published, Apple’s iTunes and the rising popularity of portable personal players fostered the mass market’s drive toward the cheap and the convenient. This may have been good for most of the world, but it diverted aspirational interest away from high-quality audio and resulted in the commercial failure of such physical media as DVD-A, SACD, and ultimately CD. On the other hand, it planted the seeds for the explosion of interest in quality headphones, music streaming, and downloading.

With the near-extinction of physical discs, the shrinkage in the market for disc players is no surprise. High-end two-channel players survive, for the time being, but analog outputs are disappearing from “universal” players, leaving HDMI as the only multichannel output option. The gravestone of multichannel analog player outputs is marked with Oppo’s withdrawal from the market. In a world without physical media, this was inevitable.

Streaming and downloading, along with file playback, represent the future of the music business and of multichannel. You can still buy and play SACDs and Blu-ray discs, but fans of all types of music are now ripping these and storing the files in collections from which they have near-instant access to everything. I note with pleasure that streaming site Qobuz now has a few dozen high-resolution multichannel albums: You can stream them in 5.1 channels at 24/96 via Roon! It isn’t a wide range of repertoire, but just the idea that it’s on a streaming service thrills me as much as my first file playback (or my first LP).

For a short while during the first decade of this century, the prospect of multichannel music as a new product category encouraged the audio industry to offer up a wave of suitable analog preamps and power amps, but the rising tide of home theater swept that away. We had hoped that the popularity of surround systems for home theater would encourage interest in multichannel music, but the general public never appreciated that music playback could go beyond stereo, even when they already had the ability to play “surround sound” recordings in their homes. Still, many avid HT enthusiasts ask how to play multichannel files through their theater equipment, via connections other than the obvious and somewhat compromised HDMI.

The answer is that AVRs and preamp-processors have become network appliances, and nothing is needed, save a little firmware, to enable them as multichannel renderers on a home network. These are inherently multichannel audio devices armed with networking hardware, yet they’re not set up to accept multichannel audio via their Ethernet inputs. It’s disturbing that most manufacturers don’t seem to recognize how illogical this is. Consider the Trinnov Altitude preamp-processors, which can stream multichannel from my server without complications: We should demand similar capabilities from all such products.

How to do multichannel today
Here’s a quick parting shot on how to get into multichannel music playback.

FILE STORAGE: A high-resolution multichannel track, even compressed, can take up more than a gigabyte, so storage capacity is important. Think in terms of terabytes (TB). Hard drives are essential, and an NAS (network-attached storage) device, which combines and organizes an array of drives, quickly becomes inevitable. Using a NAS also allows you to relocate the relatively noisy storage device to a place outside the listening room where it’s still accessible via Ethernet or Wi-Fi. A remotely located backup copy or two of everything is essential! Eventually, every drive will fail, and without backup you face the horror of losing some or all of your music collection.

MUSIC PLAYER HARDWARE: In choosing storage media, the only distinction between the requirements for multichannel and stereo is capacity. For the player hardware, the big issues are noise and processing power. If you are content to play the music as it is, without any processing, Roon’s compact and fanless Nucleus or Nucleus+ will do the job without fuss, although they are restricted to using Roon software. You can save money and gain flexibility by buying an i5 or i7 NUC computer, or by using almost any quiet but capable processor—including the one built into your NAS—as long sufficient muscle. MacOS, Windows, Linux . . . there is software for all, so you can choose whichever OS suits. In fact, you can start the process rolling with whatever computer you already have around (footnote 1).

Footnote 1: There are a few proprietary packaged servers from vendors like SOtM, Nimitra, and DigiBitwork that will do high-resolution multichannel but, unfortunately, the majority of the excellent music servers reviewed in Stereophile will not—or at least do not support it officially.

We have still not received a pair of these for formal testing, which may be a good thing in view of our feelings these days about “updatings.” (Our feelings about such are clarified in this issue’s “As We See It.”)

We auditioned Ohm Fs in three audio stores, and came away with five reactions. In one store, the two speakers we heard sounded similar to one another, but not terribly impressive. Stereo imaging was extraordinarily good, which has been the case with every truly omnidirectional speaker system we have heard, but the middle range of the Ohm Fs was rather markedly colored, with a vowel-like “eh” quality, and the low end struck us as being overly heavy and way out of proportion to the high end, although it did at least sound fairly smooth.

In the other two instances, the two speakers of the stereo pair of Fs hardly sounded like the same speakers. Midrange colorations were not only marked but different, with the result that: 1) stereo imaging was impaired; and 2) it was impossible to describe the sound of “the” Ohm F.

As far as we can see, the principle of this system has a great deal of promise, but dammit, doesn’t anyone debug new designs these days before going into production with them?—J. Gordon Holt

2019 Editor’s Note: 45 years after this review was published, Ohm Acoustics is still in business and still based in Brooklyn. Stereophile has reviewed two other Ohm loudpeakers in the intervening years, the the Ohm Walsh 5 in June 1987 and August 1988 and the Ohm CAM 16 in April 1989. To judge from our experience in those reviews, the QA problems noted by JGH have long since been resolved.—John Atkinson