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The honest and effective way. All in-house Amphions of Helium 410, Helium 510 and Argon1 shared one signature trait. The writer formerly known as J10 (Stereophile's Jonathan Scull) would have called it pellucid. Regardless of bandwidth where the bigger boxes and mid/woofers obviously made more bass for deeper fuller tone colors, this passage of light went straight through the midrange where the two drivers cross. Amphion's dishy depression formally known as wave guide is far from a fashion gimmick. It's not to stand out from the crowd though it actually does, by creating a very particular crystallization of intelligibility. This can make other speakers in that range sound comparatively hooded, opaque or—audiophile confusion alert!—warm. Ha.


Unless it occurs in a very reverberant acoustic, acoustic live music at least in my experience is rarely warm. It can be and often is sweet. But that merely points at widespread treble problems in hifi. It's not about any added sugar in the real world. There transients simply don't suffer phase shift. Now add the quicksilvery caffeinated lit-up NuForce clarity. Even with the Pure dock's converted analog outputs, the simplest Icon2 amp driving the smallest Helium 410 made for compound pellucidness. Coming off my new do-it-all box + monitor stand (Bel Canto's admittedly far costlier but softer and darker C5i ICEpower integrated with upscale DAC) became instant validation of NuForce's contribution to this light show.

This was a modern and decidely fast sound very keen on the attack. To invoke minor poetry, it danced on the pin pricks of percussive tickles. String plucks had zest, sticks or palms on drum skins cracked and smacked. This was a beat-driven energetic lively focus. It was closer in spirit to sitting in on stage rather than back deep in the hall. On the desk top this lucidity—not luminosity as that would imply an inner glow whereas this merely passed light—tracked very nicely down into the lower levels which I must run to actually get work done whilst also retaining easeful but actual involvement with the music.

It's one of my telltale tests. How quietly can I play without losing interest? This is directly proportionate to clarity as a lack of confusion; and to good timing as the conveyor of rhythmic drive where things hang together and play in the pocket. On Hector Zazou's fabulous In The House Of Mirrors the first track contains noises that sound like a combination of many cicadas and one rattle snake on full alert. Mentioning these critters was deliberate. These rattling sounds had the same jolty charge which has you believe in their realness. The raspy cello bow work, guttural twang of an Indian slide guitar and fog-horn penetration of a muted trumpet - all these exceptionally well recorded ingredients of Zazou's final organic ambient masterpiece had proper spice and pungency.


Playing great white hunter on the upgrade trail, the next step was getting the NuForce HDP involved. Now the Pure dock could exit via digital coax—Black Cat's Veloce cable—and the Icon2's volume control opened up all the way to put the HDP in charge. Whoa! This accomplished a number of things simultaneously. Image density shot way up across the board. The soundstage grew laterally. Black levels increased. Bass grew stronger. The elements of weight, impact and solidity all gained in gravitas. This added grounding and earthiness to the light and speed that were already in place.

The upshot of this exercise was plain. In terms of magnitude this move was far more profound than switching to the Icon amp whose normal speaker terminals naturally also implied upgrading the Cat5 Ethernet-terminated wires which the space-challenged Icon2 enforces. It was more profound than upgrading the Helium 410 speakers to the twice-priced Argon1 model. Having an iPod on hand already, the smart desk-top money would allocate €99 for the Pure i20 dock, €449 for the NuForce HDP, €211 for the Icon amp and €699 for the Helium 410. That's €1.638 plus change for cables, i.e. the price of a 21" iMac. Anything more on the desk top is overkill for 95% of users. With the HDP as crown jewel of the Icon range, this system offers very credible headphone drive plus outboard D/A conversion to go beyond Apple's own. It also adds a USB input should your music library live on your computer; and/or you listen to YouTube music, news feeds or such.


As a career high-ender whose money is spent on audio rather than cars, clothes or vacations—forget owning a house—I can't completely relinquish my stripes when it comes to judging super affordable hifi. Below a certain level of performance I lose interest. That's not arrogance. That's taste buds disagreeing because they've been overexposed to the good stuff. I'd thus not live very long with the Helium 410s if they were driven directly off the Icon2 amp. For my tastes that sound was texturally and tonally too pale and zippy. It suffered high-noon lighting - crystal clarity with too much white in the color palette. I would however live with the cheaper Icon amp in a heart beat if the HDP were in play. The secret weapon isn't moving up in the Amphion range. It's not throwing money at fancy wires or ditching the iPod for a 'better' source. It's the HDP. It adds meat to the bones.

By extending lower than the Helium 410 the Argon1 does too. Thus meat packing can be handled one of two ways - electronically via the HDP or acoustically with the bigger pricier speaker. The Argon1 is more resolved than the Helium but that doesn't necessarily register as enhanced wholesale heft. If money were an issue (and this entire assignment assumes it is), I'd put less of the mean green on the NuForce preamp, stay put with the 410 and consider myself ahead over running the Argon1 with either of the NuForce amps but sans preamp. The HDP simply goes farther with adding body and mass than a speaker change.


That's not selling the Argon1 short. It's the better more sophisticated speaker with deeper hall recovery, more extension and silkier tones. But this is about a clear-cut upgrade path. Bigger returns on investment are handled first. The Amphion/NuForce sweet spot for the desktop is the Helium 410 + HDP combo. Unless you work on the computer for a living doing sound, the Argon1 is overkill. It's a step nobody else needs to take to be happy.

In our small upstairs two-channel video system—no center channel or surrounds required when it's just two of you with a fine hifi—our ears are about 2.5 meters from the speakers. Here none of the Amphions did enough dread. That's the low-level infrasonic stuff which soundtrack producers infiltrate very strategically but unnaturally to manipulate our emotions toward the ominous, foreboding or scary. Never mind blockbusters. This occurs on standard story-driven dialog-heavy fare not with flashy explosions but with subliminal more felt-than-heard atmosphere. With the Amphion Impact 400 subwoofer in the loop, the speaker ports closed with the provided foam plugs and the low-pass of the sub set a bit higher, I preferred the smaller 410 over its 510 sibling for having the edge on general clarity and on the type of low-level ambient stuff which accompanies particularly outdoor scenes behind/around the foreground action for a tacit feel of scenery.


The Argon1 was even more resolved but given our diet of non-bombastic video consumption I'd personally not feel inclined to go that route where it's really about dialogue, i.e. the midrange. The 400/410 sub/sat combo was seamlessly full range and perfectly matched in scale and scope to our 35-inch Sony flat screen. In potency this was again well ahead over running the fancier monitor solo. In general, sub+sat often works best when the monitor is as small as possible but still makes about 60Hz. I'd rather have a lesser 4-inch 2-way with superior sub than a cracking 6.5-incher with a more modest or no sub. For the reader I have in mind, I'd allocate the Argon1 savings toward the mandatory Impact 400 sub—self-powered down-firing 10-incher—and call it a night since nobody has the time to watch telly during the day. Because I'm an audiophile to whom music is wildly more important than video, the final page gets us into the living room for a big-rig system where the Impact 400 would have to make appearances again to get serious.
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