Bigged-up space, brawnier sub, beefier SPL. Unlike upstairs, this hi/lo-pass division of stereo 2.1 sits at 100Hz/4th-order. That's because upstairs the sub is sealed so radiates omni. I run it only over the minimum necessary bandwidth to reduce the resultant room interaction. Downstairs the subwoofer's dispersion is 'super' dipole aka Ripole aka cardioid. Now I want maximum-reasonable bandwidth to exploit its lateral nulls and reduced front-wall gain. That pattern noticeably shrinks the magnitude of 35/70Hz room modes without massive bass traps or DSP. My solution is quasi mono because each 15" woofer has its own outboard Gold Note PA-10 Evo amp and channel-specific signal. The drivers' face-to-face loading obviously isn't classic stereo spacing. But neither is it mono summing. More decisive for v5 was winning nearly an octave's worth of LF outsourcing. Being already down 6dB at 100Hz, the upper bass now split between 3"+15" drivers. Much better punch and body. With the upstairs 60Hz handover, the puny drivers had been squarely in charge of the upper bass. Strictly speaking, for that job they're seriously undersized. Also, now their load was lighter still. This netted all the obvious benefits.
The H bomb of 'however' was the speaker v5 replaced: Qualio's IQ. That unconventional 3-way from the widebander experts of Cube Audio combines a 6" SB Acoustics papyrus midrange and Mundorf AMT both on an open baffle with a classically rear-ported 9½" SB Acoustics Satori woofer. Unusually the midrange with 1st-order filters on each end runs well beyond 8kHz to put that crossover purely into overtone land. More cone surface plus a dedicated premium open-backed tweeter bolt on gush, scale and airiness which v5 can only dream of. Relative to 'would I', not. Here the Audience hit the immovable wall of superior being the enemy of good. Only magical thinkers would feign shock. Don't bring a Swiss army knife to a tank duel. But that really wasn't the point of my exercise. The question had been, would v5 prove equal to higher output demands which arise when a transducer must energize bigger cubic volume. Being crossed out fast at 100Hz, the answer was yes. It was equal to my SPL demands. What's more, adding at that frequency a 15" woofer to each channel gave the upper bass/lower midrange transition far more gravitas and impact. If it was me and I built a 2.1 rig around v5, I'd use a 100Hz transition where even pure mono bass remains appropriate.
In this bigger space v5's more genteel demeanour rubbed more against my odd-order grain. I wished for more microdynamic jump factor, incisiveness, brilliance and air. Given what I usually listen to here, that was virtually foregone conclusion. It's what happens whenever a reviewer already has something from an undeniably higher tier. Where Raidho's TD-1.2 flagship monitor had tempted me, in this application v5 did not. Were customs and Audience to forget about this temporary importation, I'd put v5 on my desktop to look at less oversized office coffins and except for bass reach and associated fullness enjoy better sound. With my other systems already immune to v5's charms, my office would be the logical destination. As is, v5 will jump back into its compact shipping carton and hoof it across the pond to the American left coast whence it came.
Kinki EX-B7 mono on speaker, Gold Note PA-10 Evo bridged to mono on one 15" woofer of the sub.
Conclusion. With their 5th iteration of the 1+1, Audience have tonally domesticated the puny single-driver widebander with passive compensation parts, added raw output like a single-ended 300B SET does when it parallels its solo glass with a second even third bottle and converted classic port loading to horizontally opposed auxiliary bass radiators. Whilst it lacks the extra octave Oleh Lizohub's Camerton Binom owns as a super-premium example of the small one-driver speaker art, it also wants a whole lot less bread; a bagel not baguette. The fact that Audience themselves are prototyping a companion subwoofer shows they're keenly aware of v5's remaining limitation. At present its most natural habitat is the dear desktop. Placing it atop an actual table top rather than my ultra-wide-spaced stands will build in boundary gain. Even without it I felt well served on most fare I listen to in the office. Being passive obviously requires a streaming integrated or other separates. Here a desktop can quickly run out of real estate. For posh dosh Enleum's compact AMP-23R is a natural mate. For more everyman payroll it's the tidy Simon Lee i5. To build streaming into the same box, Gold Note's half-width £2.9K IS-10 ought to be a contender.
Who's the 1+1 v5 looking at? 1/ mature experienced listeners with a dialled main system who still look for a top-notch secondary hifi. 2/ sophisticated desktoppers who are sensitive to time fidelity. 3/ stereo 2.1 aficionados who like me argue that if a sub does all the heavy lifting, why should companion speakers be any bigger than today's. If 1 + 2 + 3 reads like a rather narrow target audience, we're not surprised. v5 was a niche proposition going in. But it proved to have arrived after so many generational refinements. If your needs align, I know of few alternatives. The standard sound|kaos Vox3 is one, the Boenicke W5 another. Our household has the premium Vox3 and 2nd-gen W5. Even after v5's in-review price hike, both of those demand more. Depending on where you went to school, that's still happy math? Minorly pervy is that v5's success ties directly to it relinquishing the original widebander's disdain of electrical compensation or filtering. Whilst pure on the face of it, insisting that zero passive voicing or filter parts are superior no matter what can be outmoded stubbornness opposed by real experience. On that divisive score, v5 is a second possibly even louder success. It gets off the puritanical high horse into the realm of messy reality then deals with it artfully and clearly effectively. How can one not love that? Down with idealistic theory, up with intelligent pragmatism!
Audience responds: "After continued considerations with some of our dealers, we decided to back off a little on the price of the 1+1 v5 to $3'900; in case it comes up. Thank you again for taking the time for your in-depth evaluation of the ClairAudient 1+1 v5 loudspeakers. VBR, John McDonald
