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Calling Athena wireless is spot on if we refer to an absence of flying leads. The only cabled exceptions are a short earth connection, the IEC inlet leads and some display ribbons. Otherwise it's board mounting wall to wall front to back.


Due to the mirror-imaged rear panel layout, the outputs sit unconventionally at the very edges of the device. Enter mortal bedding attempts. My Zu Event RCA and XLR cables unite both channels in a single sleeve. This didn't split wide enough at the ends to reach. Only a 6-meter backup cable of the conventional sort managed. Else I'd been up river Styx without a paddle. Do goddesses curse? Mortals sure do!

Asking Flemming Rasmussen for further details, I was referred to an engineer just as I had been for the review of their small Mojo speaker. Tom S. Møller: "The Athena consists of a balanced:single-ended input converter for the balanced input before it enters the volume control circuit. This converter is a zero global NFB fully discrete class A stage using bipolar junction transistors. The single-ended inputs enter the volume control directly. That's a microprocessor controlled 50-step attenuator featuring precision Welwyn resistors and high-quality Pickering reed relays.


"At all times only a few resistors and relays are in the signal path to make this attenuator sonically more transparent than other more traditional attenuators and potentiometers. The signal now enters the linestage. This consist of a dual-differential input stage followed by a second voltage gain stage and current output buffer. All stages are fully discrete and driven in class A without global negative feedback. Transistors in the linestage are all BJTs. The signal path is fully DC-coupled to avoid capacitors. No op-amps are in the direct signal path either but appear only as active elements of the DC servo circuits. The total voltage gain is ca. 16dB with the volume control set to max."

From this description we learnt that the RCAs are the more direct inputs. The volume control isn't balanced to enforce balanced:single-ended conversion for the XLR input. It's only once the signal gets past the attenuating resistor/relay matrix that dual-differential signal processing commences. The most purist employ to exploit Athena could thus be going in on RCA and out on XLR.

With her beefy cylindrical footers front and single pointy cone aft, Athena professes at deliberate resonance control. This makes her ringy top cover doubly unexpected. A single mass-loading/EMI-shielding disc from Spanish firm Artesania took care of that tooth sweet.

How would the sound fall in line? Tout de suit too?