Either way, the more room-filling immersive staging from more diffuse sound components is one highlight of box-less panel speakers which their fans celebrate. It is only logical that our room acoustics and speaker placement would have a much stronger say. My own room is optimized with specifically positioned absorbers but I deliberately did not tune it as dead and dry as a classic recording studio. Almost all loudspeakers that arrive at my place end up with at least one meter clearance from the nearest walls. For good results it's also important not to orient the ATS01 directly on axis. In my case they sat almost parallel with the front wall to not aim straight at my ears. Vertical beaming is clearly heard when we stand up. This can be advantageous at minimizing floor and ceiling reflections. In general however, I found the Airtech panels comparatively uncomplicated of placement and millimetre obsessing over a single location seems quite unnecessary.

The hemispherical stainless steel feet are of course individually height-adjustable.

I now want to lead with something that will be obvious to most readers. Speakers like the ATS01 neither can nor want to perform as 'featureless' or dead neutral as typical studio monitors. Put plainly, if we want a flat-lined transducer that's calibrated for zero deviation across all performance parameters, we should look elsewhere.

The Airtech ATS01 in the two standard colours silver and black as well as green for a surcharge.

That said, there's an almost immediate pushback when actually, these Italians proved to be all'rounders in their own way. During their seven-week stay, I fed them with everything the hard drive of my Melco N50-S38 had to offer. That spanned the gamut from crude Metal to infernal Industrial to Jazz and Classical. Always I sat spellbound and captivated in front of these two Italian flounders. Despite their distinctive sound profile, they proved surprisingly omnivorous about musical genres. Let's get right to it then with a sonic criteria that'll probably have lovers of flat-panel radiators on tenterhooks: dynamics. As readily as I can type this word into my keyboard, relative to the Airtech's behaviour it's rather more difficult to describe. I could certainly pull a few energetic tracks from my audition logs then reference them against some of the most dynamically agile speakers in memory to finally pit them against my Sehring 903 and Wilson SabrinaX in the here/now. All of which I did. The more decisive thing to say however is that for musical enjoyment, it was quite immaterial that the Italians had even superior acceleration and stoppage. That was rather expected and would be far too limited a statement to do the ATS01 justice when their entire 'driving experience' was so different.

You've probably had the experience of hearing music outside whilst turning a corner. Without seeing anything yet, you immediately sensed whether it was live or canned sound. The latter too can unleash impulses at lightning speed but for me the feel of the real relies on dynamics which typical playback won't fully track. And it's exactly this experience which again and again flashed through my mind with the Airtech like on the staccato guitar licks and rough drums of Shellac's "Mama Gina" from 1000 Hurts or the virtuoso solo violin of Stig Nilsson (Solo+) or Download's densely woven electro fiddling on Helicopter Wookie Wall. It felt so rude, immediate, turned on and 'live' as never before in my room. Even with purely electronic music this kicked in. And that was already fresh out of the crate when the already well-played Airtech still played a bit stiff from lengthy transport. By the way, treat these hybrids to one or two minutes of warm-up after which to my ears they get just a bit more harmonious. If you conflate dynamics with fast, faster, fastest, forget that. It's not something you'll ever think of. This speaker has mastered micro and macro dynamics with such aplomb that rather than effortful Olympian record breaking, it projects as the easiest thing possible. It's no exhibitionist quality but simply in the service of musical energy. Truly spectacular. "Yeah but… does this apply to the bass as well" I hear you wonder suspiciously. We'll come back to this.

The backside with the crossover enclosure and downfiring woofer.

First let's talk about a close relative of microdynamics: resolution. The Airtech underlines this relationship in such an exemplary way that I could write very similar words about their detail reproduction as in the last three paragraphs. Basically my Wilson and Sehring make little things like the quiet 16th-note ticks of a synth hi-hat in Clock DVA's "Final Program", the super-delicate guitar chords in Kasabian's "Where did all the Love go?" briefly audible in the right channel at about 0:50 or the quiet shattering of glass in "Am I" of code 9 at 0:48 just as audible. Much more important than the 'what' though is the 'how'. The ATS01 doesn't necessarily make such subtleties more explicit as though on the proverbial silver platter. Instead we hear more complexity. Instead of faint inherently data-starved 'somethings', we suddenly hear more textures that make micro details more concrete and elaborate. This speaker is thus particularly concerned with a perceived increase in textural nuance. It's not so much about being able to count more peas than seeing what the individual peas are. Again, this is no resolution freak show but musically relevant. A little extra applause will come from those who prefer listening quietly. All the described virtues apply at even low SPL. The dynamic twitch and faceted resolution profiling is active already at whisper volumes and notable even for someone like me who is a notoriously loud listener.