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Sushi interlude. Our friends Nino and Babette had come off the mountain for sushi in our village's hole-in-the-wall 4-table eatery which annihilates the posh competition in Lausanne and Geneva. When they entered our living room—the last time I'd had the German Physiks HRS-120 up—Babette gravitated like moth to flame to the Albedos. She circled them ooo'ing and aaa'ing, wanting to know what they were made of and where they were from. As Ivette shared afterwards (both speak primarily Spanish which I don't understand), lustful comments about the Apticas went on throughout the evening. Nino is a voracious music lover but utter non-audiophile. Babette likes music she likes but otherwise could care less. For both to chat up speakers spoke volumes. Desire for fine audio often starts with the eyes. Those who put sound first and disregard this basic mechanism cheat themselves out of sales with 'ordinary' folk. To close that subject, my wife called the Albedos exclamation marks because that's what they reminded her of.
Villeneuve's splendid but (or because?) tiny Huit Sushi
Ripening. Guido Corona's Merrill Audio Veritas review on PFO chronicled the sonic pit stops of those Ncore monos over a colossal 1.000hr break-in period. I'm made of less stern stuff but did note that about three days into it, the midbass below 70Hz began to make a more committed appearance. Listening to Deborah Henson-Conant whose website's Steve Vai quote calls her the world's finest Jazz harp player, I was very impressed by how wiry and controlled her long strings integrated without textural breaks into the overall bandwidth. Without a piano's sound body a properly rendered harp is all about well-damped pizzicato and a natural steeliness—different to a spinet but loosely related—which readily outs speaker-induced bass resonances. Massimo's V-shaped line loading effectively delayed its driver's natural roll-off but didn't add any dreaded port-related bloat or blur.

This wasn't about ultimate mass—for that I'd add the giant Submission—but nails-on-glass exactitude. The technical term would be transient rise times. Contributing factors should be very tight mechanical driver coupling and excellent system damping. For even bassier harp escapades via addition of gnarly electrified bass guitar and big drums I switched to Asita Hamidi's Bazaar and tunes from Bazaar and Blue Ark before giving the equally Swiss tribal elder Andreas Vollenweider his due spin. Though piling up on low-frequency data, this succession didn't derail my earlier impression. Whilst this wasn't big bass like the Prime had made, it was tauter and springier to emphasize rhythmic spikes like an EKG monitor.
This broadband articulation included rapidly damped cymbal strikes, tchicky-tchicky rattles and assorted clicking, clacking, hissing, percolating and clanging percussive noises. If with quintessential triode sound we talk of a certain connective tissue which binds together various sounds, this wasn't that by a long short. This stripped out the connective tissue like cobwebs and emphasized the separation and simultaneity of discrete sounds. If forced to label it, I'd call it a drier high-feedback high-power transistor sound with beaucoup damping factor. You could obviously run Rogue or VTL tubes on the Aptica and introduce a different flavor. What I've described here is how the speaker performs with neutral electronics.


Speaking of which, I had no actual power valves but EJ Sarmento's mAMP monos. When driven from the matching mPRE which acts as a fully balanced actively buffered passive within my SPL envelope—or an actual passive like my Bent Audio Tap X—these ICEpower amps move a bit closer to the Albedo sound. Driven from my tube Nagra Jazz preamp however they get warmer, cuddlier, a bit fuzzier and on those counts closer to valves including a thicker less illuminated treble. By adding my upgraded tube-coupled APL Hifi NWO-M universal player as streaming DAC, it further fattened up and decelerated the sound. It added a good dose of earthiness and em-body-ment but also diluted what had so specialized the sound before. That's were personal taste and system tuning enter.
With APL Hifi NWO-M, Nagra Jazz and Wyred4Sound mAMP monos
In search for middle ground I next disconnected my Metrum Hex, ran AURALiC's Vega mAMP-direct and swapped PureMusic for Audirvana 2 set to 32/352.8kHz upsampling and integer mode 1. By hovering between 20-30 on the Vega's volume display, I was way deep into digital attenuation. This incurred some dulling and flattening whilst the sound grew bassier. Bassier got even more so when the hi-gain Job 225 replaced the D-class amps. It also pushed the Vega into ~15 on its scale. Despite Sabre's claim to the contrary, into such attenuation values their on-chip volume is clearly lossy. To reset the Vega to full tilt I now parked Khozmo's shunt-resistor passive with remote atop the Job 225 for the tidily short interconnect its breed wants. (For those keeping track, the Khozmo's readout now sat around 7!) Over the Metrum Hex with PureMusic in 176.4kHz NOS upsampling mode, the Vega/Audirvana combo played down PRat and upped tone colors. Quasi DAC-direct drive via the Polish passive beefed up LF heft and impact over the active valve-powered Nagra preamp. From my options on hand, I felt this best suited Albedo's special talents without spotlighting them in too stark a white-light manner.

What did this balancing act entail? Shifting the transient/bloom/decay meter a bit to the right and turning up the tone-color saturation control a few clicks. All this was accomplished with the front end. The high-bandwidth DC-coupled amp as actual driver of the speakers stayed put as my best option. Your personal 'settings' would likely differ. A speaker of such clarity and timing precision simply responds astutely to small adjustments. No heavy handed manoeuvres to park it in just the spot you deem perfect.


Love synth bass? Here the Aptica is a two-edged affair. On the rather bigger plus side its greased rise times do far better at tracking bone-dry violence than slower more indecisive bass systems with heavier bigger woofers. On the smaller minus side it lacks the air displacement or shoulder contact behind the initial kick for that knock-out punch. A subwoofer can help a bit but because it doesn't merit roll-in much above 40Hz, it can't completely address the sock-'em power region higher up. Extension and speed embrace techno and electronica but raw shove—where a Zu Druid V for example collects stars—falls a bit short and the extra wallop from ported alignments is absent too. Considering just how compact the non-vented Aptica is, that's no surprise but bloody impressive. As such it is quite the surprise, simply of a different sort.
Final review system: $3.000 DAC, $650 passive, $1.495 amp. Dollar signs don't always tell the whole story.
Tweets. In Wilson speakers Focal's inverted Titanium dome has received its share of criticism. Equally inverted, Adrian Bankewitz's tweeter attracted none such from me. Perhaps by dint of shared geometry and composition with its 6-inch mate, the transient precision described at length extended into the uppermost frequencies as though (cough) it were made of exactly the same stuff. From this derived the same micro output visibility. It's very common for the treble to 'shut down' as you asphyxiate SPL to barely there. Not here. A BuddhaBar love fest of Tibetan singing bowls, gongs, cymbals and other oscillating metal objects became a fascinating case study of descending into ridiculously low levels to identify at what stage the uppermost treble would stop making it to the ear. Let's just say it was a way-delayed reaction before decays dried out. Whilst I didn't find the Accuton as gossamer airy as my favored Raal ribbons in hosted soundkaos and Aries Cerat speakers, it plainly was ideal here for perfect integration with the main driver which isn't softer paper. The hard convex dome's leading-edge reaction seemed superior to fabric domes.

Friend that soundstage. In quasi Audio Physic fashion I like my speakers spaced very wide but toed in sharply. Not all loaners are equally up for it. With some the center image collapses. Others get tonally lean to need more proximity with each other. Perhaps because they focus brilliantly as time-coherent minimum-phase designs, the Apticas could play the edges of the field for Cinerama panorama without going diffuse or blowing up individual performers to grotesque dimensions. No freeway fret boards, no hole-ridden Emmenthaler cheese, no formless fondue. In many ways—timing, space, pinpoint precision—the performance reminded me of my Gallo Strada 2. Where the latter differ is bass (they can't go as low nor move as much air), dispersion (far wider due to the 180° CDT) and presence-to-brilliance range dynamics (higher due to larger tweeter membrane). Where they overlap is in generally electrostatic qualities. If you love that sound, here you can approach it in a physically far more compact package without requiring arc-welding amps to wrestle panel-type impedance dips into submission.