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Delivery was by Dachser in Albedo's familiar compact cardboard boxes wrapped together in black shrink to enforce more careful handling with a bigger heavier package. The high-mass plinths bolted on quickly with three bolts each. The speakers' compact stature took up less space than the soundkaos Wave 40.
At 85dB, the 25-watt FirstWatt F6's lower voltage gain driven direct from Nagra's HD DAC naturally left lower headroom. That reset to more than plenty once the Crayon Audio CFA-1.2 replaced it. To run the F6, I'd use the Nagra Jazz preamp. For best bass response, I will stick with the Crayon or AURALiC Merak monos.
To insert the Zu Submission during the 100-hour break-in period whilst the Accuton mid/woofer was still developing its final reach meant a 20Hz high-pass. Otherwise there already was undesirable overlap above 50 cycles. The relative sub contribution on amplitude would diminish over time to become purely optional.
Whilst its low sensitivity spec would suggest otherwise, the Aptica actually is a good choice for whisper sessions. That is very important for our household. Presumably it's because Massimo Costa very strategically banished box talk with his ultra-rigid coupling recipe and concealed metal spine to sink remaining resonances into the plinth. It's quite the precision instrument. It continues to magnify without relying on high volumes to do so.
Contributing factors are keen timing from mechanical alignment and minimum-phase filters; and the ceramic drivers' signature transient articulation. These intelligibility advantages remain intact way off-axis on my work desk. Listening to the Apticas from this far-field perspective is as satisfying—and obviously scaled up—as is switching to my Boenicke W5se which bracket my 30" monitor on their custom-height stilts to float above the glass.
Here again the early riser habit of the Aptica—Tai Chi on the lawn well before breakfast whilst the neighbours still sleep—is a major asset. If the main speakers only sounded good at high levels, I'd never use them from the desk. Good sound here is code for intelligibility and density. A pale thin washed-out sound always elicits that Charles Dickens cry of "can I have more". Bleached and ghost-like are simply not satisfying. Here the Italians stand the old ceramic reputation on its very head. Naturally the Fletcher Munson curves as a function of human hearing remain in effect. With these speakers the linear threshold simply seems to remain in effect longer.
Reviewers fond of bleeding levels have traditionally complained about ceramics shutting down prematurely over their paper-based competition. We simply don't play anywhere loud enough to trigger such behaviour.
It's back to an aspirated 4-cylinder engine doing a brilliant job if you're not towing a horse trailer and only seat two.
The flip side of the same high-resolution phenomenon is that this speaker sounds 'prematurely' loud. Things get massive, big and chunky earlier on the dial than they do with boxes where the arrival of proper fullness for both hear-everything detail and feel-everything density is delayed. Objectively those get just as loud. Subjectively something simply remains either obscured or hollow to ask for additional clicks. And that's often impractical, impolite or gets tiring otherwise.
On the topic of so-called hi-rez music—delivered above 16/44.1 Redbook specs—and to maximize the delta between its best examples and those of standard CDs, the Aptica clearly makes more of a difference than my solid-wood boxes do. 352.8kHz DXD files exhibit more audible space or recorded venue cues. The advances which a costly converter like the Nagra HD DAC embodies over the best of the quarter-priced lot like a Metrum Hex or AURALiC Vega become clearer. It's obvious that the promises of higher data densities for music rely on higher playback resolution to manifest fully. The challenge as I see it is simply that to ratchet up such aural visibility tends to come at the cost of tone mass and overall substance. How to walk the middle path between these two polarities whilst actually ascending becomes the task.
Here Albedo Audio's Aptica surrounded by appropriate ancillaries scales this balance higher than many. That it manages to do so in a cosmetically gorgeous compact form factor is what makes it my new super speaker and also the sharpest pencil in my transducer tool box.
