This review page is supported in part by the sponsors whose ad banners are displayed below

Intermission: Back on the unavoidable money aspect, Stephen Mejias' Stereophile reaction to the HB-1 at the 2011 Las Vegas show is representative. "I was sort of shocked to see the Kiso Acoustic HB-1. While I’d never heard of Kiso Acoustics, the speaker looked so darn familiar. The HB-1 is nearly identical in size and shape and design philosophy to the Onkyo D-TK10... that worked well with recordings of acoustic guitar but failed to impart the natural tones of almost everything else I typically listened to such as drums, voices, brass and electric instruments. The Onkyos did all that for $1999/pair. Perhaps it’s unfair of me to make any comparisons between the two speakers—I don’t really know anything about the Kiso Acoustic HB-1—but what I found even more surprising about the HB-1 was its price: $16,000–$24,000/pair depending on finish. And that finish is extremely pretty and a major upgrade over the more modest Onkyo D-TK10 but it’s not $14,000–$22,000/pair prettier. A hypothetical question then: If the cabinets and internal bracing are basically the same, can different drive units and crossovers justify such an extreme price increase? Has inflation been that relentless over the last four years? I listened (for a few dazed moments) and didn’t hear any gross coloration but did I mention I was shocked?"
I think Stephen would have plain plotzed over the €4.600 sticker Acoustic Revive wanted for their stand. For context, consider Paradigm's $1,798/pr 6-inch two-way Signature S1. That runs a 25mm Beryllium tweeter in a die cast aluminum enclosure that's finished on the outside in Cherry, Natural Maple or Piano Black.

The mid/woofer uses a Cobalt-infused aluminum cone with over-molded NLC surround and a 38mm split voice coil and dual super-neodymium ring magnet motor in a die-cast heatsink chassis. F3 of this speaker is 43Hz, sensitivity 87dB anechoic. Dimensions are 27 x 17 x 22cm, weight is 5.8kg/ea. The matching GS-30 stand sells separately. Without any commentary on sonics, the Paradigm monitor clearly benefits from serious transducer and enclosure tech for a retail price that buys two complete speaker pairs for what Acoustic Revive dared charge for just their stand. Here 'esoteric' turned highway robbery. At €2.500/pr for Kiso's own Podium replacement you're still looking at more money than many quality monitors cost. As a real speaker company—which Kiso Acoustics clearly isn't—Paradigm doesn't pay double for off-the-shelf drive units by rejecting more than half, then rebuilding what's left. Companies like Paradigm manufacture their own drivers purpose-designed for their applications. Buying into Kiso buys into many manufacturing inefficiencies.


Of course comparisons between corporate and artisanal operations always stumble at this juncture. The HB-1 is simply extreme. Ryan Scott, artisanal US speaker maker of Vapor Sound can start selling his Cirrus monitor for a very attractive $3.495/pr—outboard crossover version as shown at lower left is more—whilst offering Magico Mini-type stacked Birch Play construction with sand-filled wall cavities and a Raal ribbon tweeter and Audio Technology C-Quenze mid/woofer. Then he adds any imaginable wood or lacquer finish and serious crossover component options from fully customizable menus.

At Kiso's chosen price point meanwhile there are alternatives like ASI's new BD5 and BD7 monitors, €10.000 and €12.300 a pair respectively. Those combine 18mm vertically stacked Birch ply construction with 35/18mm aluminum front/rear baffles which are tension-torqued around the wood carcass with a minimum of eight horizontal bolts to create a non-resonant constrained-layer construction.


Drivers are a custom 1-inch diamond tweeter and 5- or 7-inch Audio Technology mid/woofers. The BD5 is a 5-inch 2-way with 89dB sensitivity, 8-ohm impedance, a 3kHz crossover point, 46Hz - 55kHz response, dimensions of 22 x 18 x 35cm HxWxD and weight of 14.5kg/ea. The BD7 becomes a larger 7" 2-way monitor with an F3 of 36Hz, a crossover of 2.8kHz, 91dB sensitivity, dimensions of 42 x 26 x 40cm HxWxD and 26.5kg/ea. of weight. The hand-wired crossovers are tightly pair-matched on a Ply substrate and each finalized speaker pair is tested in an anechoic chamber. The crossovers use custom-made copper and pure aluminum foil capacitors and hand-wound copper foil inductors.


These arbitrary examples from Paradigm, Vapor Sound and ASI demonstrate the type of advanced construction, driver quality and related specifications which the Kiso Acoustics HB-1 monitor must compete against if prospective buyers have a well-informed grasp on what else the global market has to offer.
 


   

Sakuji Fukuda's $3.100/pr Micropure Kotaro with muRata piezo tweeter and 4-inch widebander in thin-walled Tiger Maple/Mahogany cabinet.
   Given my acceptance of today's assignment which isn't an editorial about hifi pricing conventions, I considered this brief intermission the simply obligatory extent to comment on money matters.


Only where money doesn't matter (which seems unlikely at this stage of cost vs. material returns) will the above seem redundant.


Which gets us to audible performance. First a few more comments by Stig Bjorge on the two new stands however: "Our Kiso Acoustic Podium stand is made in Japan and estimated to cost about €2.500/pr in Europe.

"The top plate duplicates the footprint of the speaker. The top and bottom plates as well as single sand-filled pillar are made from aluminum but on the underside of the top plates there are strips of brass and on the underside of the bottom plate there is a large plate of iron. The rear side of the bottom plate is shaped like a half circle and there are three adjustable rounded feet—instead of sharp spike points we decided on rounded half spheres—machined from solid steel with adjustable closed top nuts with knurled grips. Invisible inside the main pillar there are two very thick discs with tapped screw holes for invisible bolts (that actually pull from the inside toward the outside). Also the top and bottom plates screw into these discs. Everything gets screwed and glued together so there is no play whatever to be utterly rigid and solid. The stand has been designed to be resonance dead and sonically inert.


"Cliff Orman's Spanish stand is based on different principles. His has two smaller pillars filled with a synthetic damping material and for the top and bottom plates he chose a Porcelenosa material called Krion® (a mixture of ceramic and porcelain). In addition his bottom plate is sandwiched together with an aluminum plate. Cliff's stand will retail in Europe for about €1.500/pr. I have heard and approve of his stand which seems to enable the HB-1 to create a very coherent and continuous soundfield in many ways superior to our own stand. I do however think that the sonic differences of the stands may depend on taste and the particular room and surroundings including floor and wall materials. Since we released our Podium stand it seems Acoustic Revive has discontinued theirs so it may only remain available in limited dealer/distributor inventories."

Spanish show setup of HB-1 on Clifford's stands as captured on Heed Audio's Hungarian blog

Clifford Orman:"My stand is totally different from either the Acoustic Revive or Kiso's own Podium. The HB-1 is no ordinary loudspeaker. The way it treats energy is very different to practically any other. The result is that a highly damped high-mass stand sucks out precisely the energy one is trying to take advantage of. It literally shaves off quite a few dB in efficiency. This approach also destroys a large proportion of dynamics and general information. Another problem with this kind of high-mass stand is that due to its inherent slowness part of the energy returns to the loudspeaker causing phase stability problems and general confusion. It's a bit like putting tractor tyres on a Ferrari!"

From the same blog, this photo shows the recommended extra wide severely toed-in Kiso setup

Cliff pointed at one conceptual incongruence that had bothered me only to create another. Elastomeric interfaces do not conduct energies effectively. Au contraire. They are isolators and decouplers. Stig was adamant that the speaker worked properly only with the provided gel cushions. Those prevent or at least attenuate energy transfer. This would seem to contradict Cliff's assessment that the Podium stand sucks out energies from a speaker which it is deliberately decoupled from. Even so the ultimate approach—and conceptual completion rather than opposition—would seem to be a low-mass stand that duplicates the speaker's live vibe behavior. It too would actively shed input energies rather than attempt to kill them off. Star Sound Technologies with their Sistrum stands had in fact promoted this approach already years ago. They called it the science of resonant energy transfer. I found it peculiar that the speaker's own designers didn't connect those dots to issue instead a still overly expensive but otherwise quite conventional stand.


Stig again: "I am working on a slightly modified version of the Podium stand that will have Spanish Porcelenosa Krion top plates imported from Cliff in Spain. That stand will also be adjusted in height to be at about 63cm like Cliff's. The current stand I sent is our standard stand at 58cm height." Apparently the Kiso's designers were still undecided on the exact height their speaker was to sound best.
Enlarge!