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Lloyd Walker's reaction to Ed Schilling's HornShoppe Horns at a NYC show: "Did you hear 'em? They completely fogged me up." His atmospheric condition was spicier of course. Were Lloyd to listen to the Spanish PS3s, he'd be in Scottish super fog. These speakers are a shocker and in a rather different league than The Horns, a pair of which I have. I didn't expect much. A prior pair of Monacor-fitted Polish speakers hadn't exactly rocked my boat. Forum chatter on today's driver model called it nothing special and quite restrained in the midrange. Ahem. Perhaps someone needs to take lessons from Marc Valero. But let's start at the beginning.


Physically, the PS3 speakers are unbelievably lightweight. In that, they recall the half-sized Japanese Micropure Kotaro and far larger Ocellias from the Armagnac region of Southern France. These and a few other designs (Auditorium 23, Musical Affairs, Harbeth) embody a thin-wall cabinet philosophy. Starsound Technologies coined a clever term for the underlying concept. Live Vibe. The basic premise is release, not absorption. Since all loudspeaker enclosures react to their drivers' rear waves, a designer can opt to damp that reaction with sheer mass and rigidity. Or he can stop fighting it, let it do what it will and even assist the process with low mass. It's typical of audio to be filled with contradictory approaches which produce pleasing results regardless. We'll let David Wilson of Wilson Audio argue in favor of inert enclosures and Samuel Furon of Ocellia promote actively vibrating ones. They're the experts on these means. We focus on the ends.

Like my previous encounters with the thin-wall species, the Passion Sound speakers sound out-of-the-box huge with an unrestrained overall gestalt. One could invoke the point-source principle. The lack of energy-robbing filters. I'm inclined to suspect the low-mass enclosure as being chiefly responsible. Naturally, the other factors contribute. It's a team effort. Having heard numerous speakers employing single drivers without crossovers though, I'm convinced that the enclosure carries at least 50% of the credit or blame. Tommy Wong of JohnBlue Audio Art concurs.
The thin-walled responsive cabinet shares conceptual parallels with air dielectric in cables. One wants to avoid storage of acoustic energy with its non-linear time-delayed release bleeding back into the signal. Cupping the PS3 enclosure between the hands during playback, a constant vibratory action is obvious. I'm not talking isolated big pulses but something far finer. Think particle white noise. What a rain stick would feel like if you transposed its sound to a sensation in your hands.
In audiophile parlance, the results are sounds that let
go and fly off. They don't stick. There's no laboring getting out of the box. Instead, things gush, spray and flow. It's a strong and immediate quality. Jan Garbarek's saxophone on In Praise of Dreams [ECM 1880] sounds open-throated. Free. On the air. Kim Kashkashian's viola sings. Bel canto. Even Manu Katché's drums have surprising and satisfying heft. In fact, the midbass is ambitious in amplitude. There is a band, probably bracketing the port's resonant frequency, that's elevated in output and a bit ringy and boomy in quality but -- not so strangely -- fully consonant with the overall gestalt.

I favor sealed bass overall and, wearing the reviewer's cap, hear the resonant nature of ported alignments as is the case here with a very short 2" pipe. But this is a big opulent sound. Its immediacy and gushiness draws you in. With Barcelona boxes, I of course had to spin Ojos de Brujo's Techari Live [Pias Recordings] with its rocking combo of Flamenco, Latin Rap, Cuban brass and Ketama-esque influences including Reggae. Patently sufficient without subwoofer assist, the critical ear could point at excess bass bloom but the music lover ready for her next fix would mostly notice the scale and dynamics and vigor of the presentation.
The PS3 don't do the extreme image lock, full-on holography like my tweaked DX-55 Lowthers. These far cheaper drive units aren't as supernaturally articulate and resolved down into the micro stuff. But, they sound realistic and decidedly un-hifi. They're energetic operators and while not bedeviled with an untoward shoutiness, do have a fresh presence region tilt. It's not an outright bite but has things sound louder than they really are. This could have you turn back the wick sooner than you otherwise would. Thing is, you needn't play these very loud to deliver the goods uncut. They do however have a loudness sweet spot where they sound best. That's a bit narrower than with other speakers on the loud end.
The bucolic Brahms Serenade No.2 [Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra under Slatkin, RCA Victor 7920-2] proved the same exuberant spirit, with great tone on the woodwinds and nice textures on massed strings including fully convincing bass extension in the cello section. Naturally, air displacement in the bass is limited, not in terms of loudness but full-body impact. During complex classical passages, one could wish for more separation but when it comes to organic flow and timing, these stumpy speakers with the somewhat ugly foam grills (one sat slightly askew to not perfectly parallel the enclosure's top edge) put to shame a lot of the more expensive, measurably superior stuff.


The aforementioned Micropure Kotaros have a more refined and extended treble and greater articulation. And, they lack in bass and absolutely demand subwoofer assistance whereas the PS3s do not. Technically, there's nothing much to the Spanish boxes: a short port tube; a sub € 30 driver; binding posts only a mother could love; a phenolic terminal plate; a bare 5-layer Ply box without filler; and some hookup wire. Purely based on raw ingredients, there's nothing here to explain the sheer fun factor or how come something this basic (and probably measuring quite terrible) plays this damn well.

Finding faults is easy. The bass is a bit bloomy. Congested stuff especially down low gets a mite blurry. The presence region has some dusting of paprika. The treble isn't the most suave. That they like to play a bit louder than my Lowthers is due to their intrinsically lower resolution. That they don't like to be played too loud is due to their not fully tamed upper midrange lift which subjectively becomes more prominent when an SPL pusher works the master volume. So speaking objectively -- objectionally -- there are specific limitations compared to text-book multi-way executions.

But finding praise is easier still. The talking drums on Cheikh Lo's Bambay Gueej [World Circuit/Nonesuch] rumble richly and crack hard. His vocals speak directly to your heart. Someone has taken some cotton wadding out of his throat. The soundstage is unplugged and wall to wall. Rhythms are full of certainty and drive. Tone is colorful and rich. Dynamics are lively. Bass is completely satisfying. Trance/Ambient fare works, period. Your eyes tell you 'impossible', your ears tell you to close your eyes so they stop interfering.


The music communicates powerfully into the room though remains well behind the speakers as a virtual stage. In short, so-called limitations are all of the persnickety audiophile sort. The good stuff is smack on the pleasure/energy side of musical persuasiveness. Again, I like these Spaniards quite a bit better than the famous Hornshoppes. The PS3s are significantly fuller and thus tonally better balanced than the Yanks. They work swell in free space and don't need corner loading. They look better though still won't win beauty contests. Magnetized grill fasteners or tiny conventional ones as WLM uses would go a way to improve cosmetics. But then, Passion & Sound's artistic team has unusual design taste. I don't fancy myself a prude but when Marc Valero asked whether he should dispatch a custom-finished amplifier along the lines of the following photos, I vehemently declined. To each his own. That's what custom is all about.

To take the speakers' first measure, I ran Vinnie Rossi's Signature 30.2 review loaner. Sitting roughly at high noon on the dial, the Spaniards produced room-filling volumes and, again, bass extension and amplitude completely out of sorts with expectations and physical stature. After getting the above fix on sonics, I meant to swap in the PSi15 review amp in Bird's Eye Maple which had arrived fully charged. Turning it on with a toggle cleverly placed out of sight but within easy reach on the front right side of the belly casing, the down-firing blue LED lit up and I got equivalent RWA levels at about 10:00 o'clock as indicated by the simple yet clever thru-hole of the volume control against the black face. A constant current source wall wart with user-selectable mains voltage [below] connects the internal batteries to wall power.

Because I had inadvertently opened the shipping carton on the wrong side, I never saw the owner's manual to know that the charger plug goes not into the central but right socket. Firing up the amp in central fashion caused curly smoke and toasted batteries. Because said NI NH batteries are stupidly inaccessible with the deliberately sealed enclosure, I had to request a new amp which worked without a hitch. "Above all, do not try to open the enclosure under any circumstances, it is sealed and must only be manipulated by us. We need you to return it and then we will send you another unit. What happened is that you supplied the amplifier using the batteries load entry. The manual was in the box and now I attach for you an explanatory diagram." David Holgate chimed in then: "I read your PSi15 T-Class review with interest after having just submitted my review of the same amp for TNT-Audio.com. I was amused to read of your failure with the first review amp. I had a similar experience and also felt a bit bad wondering what I had done wrong. I received a replacement which I ran exactly by the book and it worked fine but my review also warns that they need to sort out their rear inputs. That toggle switch at the back to move from charge to power is crazy. Marc told me that they have made some changes now. Anyway, I thought this might make you feel a bit better."


While this mishap can be avoided by reading the owner's manual first, proper silk screen markings or two dissimilar rear sockets would prevent even the possibility of tears and curses. But I do concur with David that the charge/play toggle in the rear will be inconvenient to reach in certain installations. Ideally, the existing power switch would be converted to automatically engage charge in its off position. Eliminate the rear switch altogether like Red Wine Audio has done. It's the most transparent way to subtract battery maintenance rituals in use. And it avoids forgetting to recharge. As is, the batteries won't recharge just because you turned the amp off. You have to move the rear toggle as well.

A bigger issue to my mind is the sealed amp enclosure. Imagine buying a fine Swiss watch which you must return to Switzerland each time you need to replace its batteries. To not enable an owner to access the batteries in the amp seems ludicrous, particularly in light of the poor domestic sales Marc Valero mentioned earlier. If your main business is export, how sensible is it to make eventual two-way shipping to Spain an intrinsic part of the purchase proposition?


To wrap up the PS3 speakers and with an admission of not having heard any of Louis Chochos' Omega equivalents personally, the PS3 Passion & Sound speakers with their tiny drivers are truly widebanders in action. While there's seemingly nothing to their recipe, there's everything to it where it matters. Like few before, these speakers highlight a strange conundrum. They're less fi and more hi than many speakers which ace the usual bench test parameters. You can find fault on the fidelity and absolute honesty side of the ledger but when it comes to - um, getting high, these non-boxes sound far more illegal than much by-the-book stuff. They beg for a new reading on the old high-fi term. As regards fi and its minor deviations thereof, the designers here opted to make their small box full-range. Shy of the bottom octave of course, it really does sound like it, albeit slightly forced and goosed to invoke that fulsome resonant character in the mid bass.

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To give due credit, the PS3 enjoys a precursor of sorts in the Omega Loudspeakers M-5 model which Louis Chochos discontinued as he got involved with his own drivers. However, Steve Monte at Quest for Sound apparently remained so enamored with that model that he continues to sell an M5 which, as the PS3, combines port loading and a 5" dual-cone Monacor, albeit with a rear-firing vent (and I'm unclear whether the driver is exactly the same).