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Don't reason in haste. Season to taste. Given my off-the-reservation conditions (an overly large space with insufficient boundary enhancement for this design) and their effects (tonal leanness in the upper bass and lower midrange, a kind of compact sound with room to improve room fill), 'twas time to raid our hardware collection. For more colour intensity Metrum's Hex moved out, AURALiC's Vega in. To support that switch, PureMusic left the building, Audirvana took over the lease. 176.4kHz player upsampling went to 352.8kHz. For more warmth and substance from 5 x the power and to level the financial playing field, the Nagra/SIT1 combo departed, the Clones Audio 3some took over. That replaced $25'000 of electronics with $1'450. If that didn't work out as planned, the beefy dense Gato Audio DIA-250 would move down from the mezzanine to go high-power class D the Pascal way. I stayed clear of my Bakoon AMP-12R, Crayon CFA-1.2 and Goldmund/Job 225. Those are all about speed and lucidity over mass and warmth.
Where my older narrower smaller room with normal height had more resonant behaviour in today's key range to inject warmth acoustically, the new one has to use hardware choices to pursue a similar effect if more is desired than the system itself generates. The small black bricks from Hong Kong clearly signaled that I was on the right track. If we apply Eastern chakra theory to tonal balance, the 3rd chakra called manipura in Sanskrit and hara in the martial arts—the belly center of vitality, will, warrior spirit and warmth—corresponds to the 100-200Hz range. If a hifi sounds a bit pale, energetically weak and 'transcendent' rather than earthy (more cerebral than bootilicious), improving this area helps ground the action. And that's what Funjoe's affordable but cunningly voiced small boxes did. There was more acoustic fill or mass in the effective soundstage area. It still didn't do the soundkaos or Boenicke thing of spreading this acoustic energy toward the listener. But that seemed inherent in the design. In a bigger space one could always sit closer.

With AURALiC Vega, Clones Audio AP1 and 55pm as seen from the mezzanine.

Back to the €3'500 Sonus faber Venere, it'd not need this type of help. It's a lower-resolution speaker but on warmth and fullness reaches deeper into the bag. If you're into Rock 'n' Roll as a quasi musical archetype that relies on a strongly developed hara, the Irish Dubh clearly is the lesser choice. But if you're into classical and non-classical chamber music—smaller acoustic formations that don't revolve around upper-bass power like the virtuoso café music of Quadro Nuevo—it rather moves up in the charts.

Whilst you can certainly tack on a sub, it won't come in high enough to build out punch and weightiness in the 100Hz+ band. To blend properly a sub will only cover 20Hz to ±40Hz. That's ideal to properly exploit a proper subwoofer without unsavoury side effects. But because the Dubh goes far lower on its own, it's not suitable for augmentation higher up. That has to be done with room placement. I tried closer front-wall distance. Due to our double-height ceiling above the speaker and the non-reflective side walls (there effectively is no left side wall whilst the right one's wall shelving acts as a great diffuser and partial trap), this didn't do as much as it usually would. You could say wrong room for the job. And timing did play a role. By the time Eist were ready to ship, we'd vacated the Villeneuve flat which would have been more conducive for this assignment. I'll thus not give this more screen time and wrap up with what even in a less than ideal setup were clear strong points.

In no particular order, these were:
• highly layered depth staging even whilst using affordable gain-clone amps
• fine focus and sorting without image bloat or image wander with frequency changes
• high transient precision for rhythmic fidelity
• good tracking of microdynamic amplitude modulations to better enunciate the musical message
• very good off-axis behaviour to maintain a stereo perspective without shift even outside the sweet spot
• as a combined result of the above, a highly developed sense of intelligibility and clarity.

Asking for the bill. Since Eist Audio opted for dealer not direct sales, at €3'500/pr the Dubh faces Sven Boenicke's W5 monitor whose stout long-throw Peerless mid/woofer and wideband mid/tweeter add up to a far more compelling tonally endowed room-filling proposition when you've got a large space to fill. Sven's finish is superior too. Here Fran & Gerry's baffle paint still betrays small rippling and their box finish imperfections to signal an earlier stage in the transition from DIY to pro. On sound meanwhile the Dubh was a far more balanced performer than Accuhorn's Polish Rosso Superiore 175 or Ring Audio's Croatian Horn Master Jazz had been during their stays. It also impressed me more than the American Hornshoppe Horn. Eist's choice of Mark Audio driver and single-bend rear horn thus is one of the finer examples of the small-diameter widebander in a compact living-room friendly box.


But you do want a smaller room. Anyone who suggests that for twice the coin and in my space the above AudioSolutions Rhapsody 200 wasn't easily twice the speaker would be telling porkies. Not only does this 5-driver 3-way from Lithuania carry farther, it's patently fuller, fleshier, has far greater dynamic shove and naturally also is the keener extractor of recorded space due to its 25Hz retrieval of subliminal venue ambiance. By the same token its very butch LF reach and power were a bit too much in my former space. Hence there it got less airplay. 'Twice the speaker' actually backfired as it does so often at tradeshows where the box is too much for the space. That's back to proper tool for the job.

On amplifier diet the Dubh is clearly omnivorous. It's far from locked into the usual SET routine. It happily accommodates semiconductors and power. And unlike the Lithuanians it's not fussy about ultra-low output impedance because there's no wicked bass alignment to wrestle into submission. It's essentially a 5-inch 2-way monitor disguised as a floorstander. It achieves equivalent bandwidth with just one driver. Like most such monitors, it's about soundstaging and an articulate quick small-speaker sound. Mass, weight, impact and in-room macro scale are second, litheness, definition and the micro scale come first. Where the Dubh has the edge over many competing 5-inch 2-way monitors which are good to 45Hz is higher efficiency and perhaps because of it better low-level visibility. If you've been wanting to test single-driver speakers of the kind that bypass whizzers and the high-maintenance diva antics of the more demanding 100dB lot by playing nice with ordinary electronics; and by avoiding shoutiness and raggedness... then the Dubh is a very good place to start. For DIYers it's also solid proof for Mark Audio's Alpair 7.3 though getting this performance from it will rely on lengthy enclosure prototyping to build one that competes with the Dubh. So toast our Irish with an appreciative Sláinte! This is a very promising project...
Eist Audio website