For as long as I have been in the audio industry, there have been active speakers. But they
mainly found their way to the studio world. It is only recently these get acceptance outside
of the studio environment and then mainly the speakers that can be driven wirelessly.
Like the Elac Navis speakers on review here.
Elac is a well established name in loudspeaker design and manufacturing, at least over here
in Europe. A few years ago Andrew Jones was hired as head of speaker design, a remarkable
step since Jones is a big name in the American loudspeaker design world. Coming from KEF
and Infinity he worked for TAD, where he made famous high end speakers and Pioneer, where
he made famous affordable speakers. In 2015 he joined Elac and started off with the Debut
series. And now he designed two active speakers with a wireless option. In this review the
monitor speaker but there also is a floor standing model. By the way, the speakers do
need to have a power cord connected to a wall outlet, only the audio connection can be wireless
if you want.
Jones has a different approach to active speakers than is customary today. He starts off with
an already fine acoustic design and then adds an active analogue cross over and an amplifier
per driver. So there is no digital signal processing compensating for acoustical shortcomings.
I like this approach for doing good sounding digital signal processing at a budget is hard.
DSP can deliver very good sound quality as can be heard from active speakers by Grimm
Audio and KII, for instance, but these are high end products with a matching price tag.
If you want to hear how it can go wrong, listen to the plastic multi-room speakers many brand
offer today. They attempt to correct the shortcomings of the cabinet and the drivers by cheap digital
processing, which leads to a - at least to my ears - unpleasant sound where time smearing
and other distortion often leads to sharp highs, aggressive mids and boomy mid-lows
while real lows are missing. Now, these Elac speakers fall in neither category: they are
twice the price of those multi-room speakers and only 10 to 20% of the price those very
good active speakers go for.
The Navis ARB-51 is a monitor speaker, intended to be placed on a stand. Elac offers bespoke
stands while the ARB-51's have fixing threads on the bottom to firmly attach them to the
stands. The cabinet measures 345 by 189 by 240 millimetre
and weights 16 kilos. Although it looks like a two way system it is a three way system
whereby the 25 mill soft dome tweeter is mounted in the hart of the 100 mill mid-range driver.
A 130 mill woofer is mounted below. Both the mid range and the woofer have aluminium cones.
The MDF cabinet is constructed as bass reflex system that is specified down to 44 Hz. The
woofer works up to 260 Hz where the mid range driver takes over up to 2,200 Hz. The tweeters
then does the rest up to 28 kHz.
The active cross over feeds three amplifiers: a 160 watts BASH amplifier for the lows, a
100 watts BASH amplifier for the mids and a 40 watts class A/B amp to drive the tweeter.
A BASH amplifier is a combination of class D and class A/B. Class D has the advantage
of very high efficiency and is able to provide loads of current. And it is in the basis very
simple to build. It switches very quickly between 100% an 0% output and the ratio between
the time the output is at 100% and at 0% define the amplitude after a low pass filter is applied.
And there lies the potential problem for that filter will normally be influenced by the
electrical properties of the speaker. The designer therefore can never be sure his design
performs the way he would like. Class A/B normally uses a power supply that delivers
full voltage and the desired current and therefore has a lower efficiency - around 50% against
over 90% for class D. BASH starts as a class D amp but in stead of driving the - unknown
- speaker it drives a class A/B amp of which the input properties are known. That class
A/B amp then drives the speakers. Simplifying things a bit you could say that the class
D amp functions as a variable output switch mode power supply for the class A/B amp.
The Navis has two analogue inputs on the rear, one single ended on RCA and one balanced on
XLR. A switch lets you choose between low and high sensitivity. Just start in the high
position and if the level is too low, change it to the low position. The input selector
lets you choose between the RCA or XLR inputs or wireless reception. You then need to set
the speaker to the left or right channel and pair it to the transmitter by pressing the
PAIR buttons on both for some time. A blue LED tells you the status. Three switches lets
you boost or cut the three amps for high, mids and lows slightly. For use with a subwoofer
- also available from Elac in wireless versions - you can set a high pass filter at 60 or
80 Hz.
There are two models transmitters: a simple one that you connect to the line-out of your
pre-amplifier, streamer or DAC. The second one is a network bridge. It can function as
two Roon endpoints, Bluetooth receiver, Spotify Connect receiver and Airplay receiver. So
you can use it with the Elac Discovery music server or another Roon Core server. It then
offers bit perfect digital outputs up to 192 kHz on RCA and Toslink on one Roon Ready channel.
The volume controlled digital outputs on RCA and Toslink and an analogue stereo output
on RCA are limited to 96 kHz and together form the second Roon Ready channel. This second
channel also sends the signals to the Navis speakers but here the signal is limited to
48 kHz. Signals of a higher sampling rate are automatically downsampled.
The reason for this review was the interesting approach by Andrew Jones and the fact that
they can function as wireless speakers. So I started with hooking up the Elac Discovery
network bridge to my network and the mains, using the 12 volt wall wart that came with
the unit. It was paired to the speakers. The four switches on the rear of the speaker that
allow for small level changes of all three drivers and high pass filtering for when you
want to use a subwoofer, were set to neutral. Now, before I start to describe the sound
quality, I would urge you to keep watching, at least until the wrap for otherwise you
might get a totally wrong impression of the speakers.
In Roon I activated the two channels and selected the Roon channel that does the volume control.,
here called Discovery Connect A/D since it also does the analogue and digital outputs.
The first I noted was the powerful, open lows and the - for this price range - impressive
stereo image. Both are explainable: the lows are due to an optimised and directly coupled
140 watt BASH amplifier and the stereo image due to the dual concentric setup of the tweeter
and mid range driver. The time coherence that results from this leaves the time information
and thus a large part of the basics for a good stereo image in tact. But strings sounded
harsh and absolutely unpleasant. Sibilance control was far off as were high frequency
transients like triangle and glockenspiel. I couldn't imagine Jones would build a speaker
like this. So I hooked them up to the Chord Mojo, driven by the Allo USBridge. Now things
changed completely. All good qualities remained and the mids and hight cleared up as clouds
after a thunderstorm. For the two thousand euros a pair these are very fine sounding
speakers. Powerful with elegance and clearly sounding bigger than they are. Compared to
my setup 2, this sounded clearly better and there was almost no need to hook up the REL
T2 subwoofer.
It was strange, such a good speaker that sounded clearly less when used wirelessly. All kinds
of thoughts ran through my head for it just didn't make any sense. OK, the Discovery
Connect transmitter uses a switch mode power supply. But there is no galvanic connection
between the speakers and the Connect. But I don't know what exactly happens inside
de Connect. Is the volume control done digitally - which by the way can be done properly today
- and then sent to the speakers? I suppose so. Then could the wall wart screw up the
sound like this? That's a simple question that can easily be answered by hooking up
a very good power supply, the sBooster BOTW P&P ECO MK 2. And immediately the sound was
freed of the nasties en sounded almost equal to the situation where the Chord Mojo did
the conversion. Again the cheap switch mode wall wart screwed up the sound. Unfortunately
I don't have mid-range 12 volts power supplies like the iFi iPower but perhaps that could
already be a lot better. That is a switch mode power supply as well, but built properly.
See my review of power supplies.
I only had these speakers for a short while. They have been playing for some time, so burning
in was already done. I noticed some stuttering when streaming over Airplay but had no time
to investigate why this was. I do know that with the introduction of Airplay 2 there were
some general issues. Bluetooth worked fine as did Spotify Connect. The build quality
of the speakers is of very high quality - I have seen true high end speakers with less
attention to detail, like the rubberoid bezel around the drivers on the baffle. Or the aluminium
lower part that holds the electronics. The review samples were in black piano laquer,
called gloss black, but there also is a gloss white version and in February 2019 a gloss
ebony emara version becomes available. All versions come at 1998 a pair and the Discovery
Connect comes at 449. The simple Air-X² transmitter is only 155 euros. If you go for the wireless
setup, do consider at least a better power supply for the transmitter. An iFi iPower
costs only 59 euros, an sBooster will set you back 329 euros. But even if you go for
the sBooster, I challenge you to find equally good stereos for the money. For these are
really very good active speakers. And they are where the future is going to, according
to many. Other manufactures announced comparable products and I will certainly try to review
them as well. So if you subscribe to this channel, or follow me on social media, I will
keep you informed too. If you liked this video, please consider supporting the channel through
Patreon or Paypal. Any financial support is much appreciated and needed to keep me independent.
The links are in the comments below this video in Youtube. Help me to help even more people
enjoy music at home by telling your friends on the web about this channel. I am Hans Beekhuyzen,
thank you for watching and see you in the next show or on theHBproject.com.
And whatever you do, enjoy the music.
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