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Adding it up. Massimo indulged me with a second chance, I paid back with extra depth for the assignment. I began by saying that I'd never really felt drawn to metal-driver speakers from show and other exposure. By default though any well-read reviewer sooner or later becomes an opinion maker. It's very important to at least occasionally break out of one's comfort zone to avoid getting stuck in an exclusionist skewed perspective. To conclude we'll go straight for the jugular: Albedo's very own byline Brightness in Sound. Audiophile lingo despises brightness. Taken on its surface, this slogan wouldn't seem to cultivate desirability as much as undermine it. Sales prevention at work. So we must dig a bit deeper.

The hated bright relates to a forward hard perhaps even steely treble. Albedo's brightness applies to the full bandwidth. That's exactly like my description of Bakoon's AMP-11R being "lit up all over". Say music was a person emerging from the shadows. Aim a narrow spot light at just the face. You'll cause squinting and selective thus partial emphasis. That's a bright unattractive treble. It stands out. It's different from the rest. It makes your ears squint. Now light the entire musical person from behind. Nothing's in the shadows, nothing glares at you, everything's evenly lit. Voilà, Albedo's brightness. Note too that our Italians don't say brightness of sound as though the sound itself were spit polished. They call it brightness in sound. That shifts the meaning. Light filled. Once you explore the linguistic redirection to its end, you'll have the Aptica's essence too.

It's fair to call it a modern sound. It relies on driver diaphragm materials and associated manufacturing processes which didn't exist when tubes ruled. It thus resists the retro trend which favors softer vintage papers and textiles. It pursues the high in high definition. It's not about tone mass or inside-out glow which by definition relies on surrounding darkness. This is about heightened contrast between sound and silence. There is no darkness. It turns up all the stage lights for directness and crispness at extreme nearfield conditions. However proper front-wall distance casts tremendous depth to seem farfield in the visual not textural perspective. Set up thus it becomes a spatially enormous soundfield which has individual sounds within it smaller. There's no romanticism from half shadows or tube talk's connective tissue. There's comprehensive brightness. If from all that you conclude that this presentation ought to be particularly suited to modern music with its hard-hitting wiriness in the lower registers and dry production mixes which capture all their instruments with spot microphones to add faux ambiance merely afterwards, I'd not disagree.

It's a rhythmically prickly sound with angular percussive frisson rather than round legato fluidity. Flamenco not fado guitar. Ancillary choices obviously downplay or highlight these qualities. I'd simply consider it ill-advised to deliberately slow down and gentrify this speaker. It'd throw away what it's been designed to do in the first place with such obvious care and cunning. It's a highly tuned specimen of a particular sonic school which in my case would be lovely to keep around for a just as valid contrast to my warmer looser paper-driver sound.
Designer Massimo Costa & marketing manager Cristiano Bastianelli
I suspect that with properly matched valve amplification (preferably SET for speed but with power) the Aptica would make an ideal middle-path choice splitting those differences to perfection. My audiophile path over the past few years explored lower-power transistor amps. The speakers I've thus felt drawn to played into that with their own compensation to avoid extremes one would soon tire of. One such extreme with the Aptica would involve Tellurium Q's Iridium 20 amp; another one a FirstWatt F5 but already less so. To illustrate how easily these lines shift, an F6 with its uncanny semblance to the SIT amps would be near ideal on flavor but you'd probably still want lower output impedance and more power.

A 50-watt Bakoon would have the drive but could be a bit too alike. Fred Crane's Crayon Audio integrated should be just about perfect. And so forth. The basic points have been made. Season to taste thereafter. On an aside, set to 40Hz Zu's sealed Submission subwoofer made for a truly terrific texturally of-a-cloth mesh. And the downfiring TL proved to be so well executed and self-damped that I had zero room boom even when placed closer into the corners. In hifi there's little worse than lumpy bloated interference bass. Here the Aptica was pure and tidy perfection.

Final date assessment? A sweet dry ajwa date. The sweet surprise was the speaker's low-volume excellence. This doesn't imply that it satisfied less at high levels. Au contraire. Complete lucidity at what to a flat dweller are midnight levels simply eludes the majority of speakers. That an 85dB speaker would ace that task at the top of the charts I wasn't prepared for. My metal-driver beliefs (being transient not bloom centric, drier and more damped) came home to roost though. What didn't? That a few years after my first encounter I would no longer fully enjoy such a presentation as much as the sound I've since 'built'. I'd call this one cooler, more visual/space focused and, again, electrostatic by gestalt.

In headfi terms the Aptica was the polar opposite to my open-backed Audeze LCD-2 but a virtual stand-in for another can I own, the close-backed Aëdle V-1 I run on the go into my RWA-modified Astell & Kern AK-100. And it's just as stylish too. This latest Albedo thus seriously impressed us and a number of visitors. That such an ultra high-performance device could look this good, be this compact and wide bandwidth were the cherry and cream on top. Italians own style. It's so cliché but true here and with a vengeance. That's no longer cliché but cachet and worth every penny. If you can afford it!
 
Quality of packing: Very good.
Reusability of packing: A few times.
Ease of unpacking/repacking: A cinch.
Condition of component received: Flawless.
Completeness of delivery: Perfect.
Human interactions: Good.
Pricing: Luxury class.
Final comments & suggestions: The better value is the HL2.2. It remains available until Accuton discontinues its 5-inch mid/woofer. The HL2.2 has the same dimensions, tweeter and performance specs. It differs only slightly on appearance. Because Albedo's proprietary transmission-line bass loading is exceptionally well damped and its downfire orientation very non-problematic for room setup, a ~40Hz low-passed sealed subwoofer integrates truly seamlessly for 1st-octave extension. With either HL2.2 or Aptica this generates infrasonic bandwidth at half or even less than half of what the top €23.600 Axcentia commands. A benign impedance plot makes amp selection less critical but it's higher damping factor which gets the best from the TL loading. Even my 10-watt FirstWatt SIT1 monos could play far too loud off the Khozmo passive with a 4V-out DAC but their higher Z-out very noticeably softened up bass control and general image outlines.
Albedo Audio website