V. It could stand for victory, vapor or value. Some find costly boutique parts à la Jantzen/Duelund vapid audiophilia. Just so, €10'745/pr for a sound|kaos and stand or €12'000/pr for a Kaiser with stand buys them. The €12'400/pr Børresen with stand does not. sound|kaos go further still with 4 x LessLoss Firewall for Loudspeakers passive noise filters to load up their expenditure. Like Kaiser, they also give us eight drivers per pair, not the Z1's four. As to exotic drivers, all hit equally hard. There's a proprietary AlNiCo widebander with bronze basket, Raal ribbon with bronze plate and force-cancelling custom carbon woofers for the Vox. There's a ScanSpeak Ellipticor tweeter, Satori mid/woofer and matching force-cancelling passive radiators in a Furioso. There's a custom ribbon tweeter and carbon-fiber mid/woofer in the Z1. On sheer pedigree, that's a meeting of equals though one does expect cost savings for Børresen's in-house driver production. On driver quantity and cone surface, Børresen come in last. One expects the same for actual build cost including Chinese HDF cabinets. sound|kaos use Swiss-made solid wood enclosures, Kaiser's German manufacture the most complex cabinet geometry then tankwood/carbon baffles.
On value, that's a clear last place for the Z1. Do the Swiss or German win such calculations? Reviewers never see bills of material. I wouldn't know. An educated guess calls out the Swiss bill as heaviest of this bunch. On perceived value including size, the average shopper should see Kaiser as the host with the most. Of course to remain sustainable, all business must generate profit. More employees require higher turnovers with deeper profits. Here the Danish operation is biggest. That explains the math. Does it settle our three V and how they interrelate? Each shopper views that different. Now V equals varied. What can be said purely on specs is that in the high treble, all three should be similar. In the lower treble, the sound|kaos up-to-10kHz widebander applies the most cone surface. That could possibly appear most dynamic. In terms of brilliance and sheen, the Børresen ribbon might just have the others beat. For the vocal range, only the sound|kaos driver doesn't double up as bass maker. Some could expect superior dynamics for its bandwidth. Without argument is that for bass, the cone area for a Z1 is just 4½". The twin woofers of the Vox add up to 7", the mid/woofer of the Kaiser plus its passives exceed a 12" woofer. That has obvious consequences on raw reach, air displacement, visceral kick in the upper bass, color saturation and more. Kaiser simply bring the biggest gun to the fight. That feeds back into perceived value. Here is how it all translated in the seat.
Z1 | Furioso Mini. One of my musical tour guides was this track from Mike Massy's Naseej for its lyrical and hammered Fazioli concert piano plus bowed cello, plucked upright bass, hand drum and higher male vocals. For the believable projection of a concert grand's facsimile relative to raw size and sonorous tonality, the Kaiser was far ahead. It backed up Ayad Khalifé's dynamic passages of heavy hands reaching into his lower registers with far more weight. Brother Sary's cello too was more woody and big. No surprise there. On the flip side, the Børresen shone rather more light on the piano's metallic overtones reflecting off its hard-lacquered cover, on the bow's varying pressure activating the cello strings. The Kaiser focused me on the reaction of resonant spruce and maple. Børresen made me see the action of about 200 hairs worth of friction causing strings to vibrate before any tone wood responded. The Furioso played it denser and earthier, the Z1 more light-filled and separated. That aspect of greater apartheid between simultaneous sound sources suggested higher resolution so more virtual seeing. The smaller speaker also set the soundstage farther back to create more distance, layers and depth of field. The denser thicker Kaiser which clearly agitated more air was closer up and not as teased out and specific. It spoke more to the gut.
We see how each speaker's core of qualities had a counterpoint in its opponent. How you weigh and rate their perspectives depends on bias. Say you loudly applaud Kaiser for their greater richness and substance. In the same breath you'd have to chide Børresen for being comparatively lean and thin.
But dislike Kaiser's take to find it thick and less precise instead and you'll congratulate Børresen for being more lucid and transparent. Likewise if you prioritize percussive exactitude and incisiveness. The lighter quicker Z1 will be the more energetic, crisp and locked to the leading edge where the Furioso follows through with more shove from the hip not shoulder.
Should you pursue tonal weight, image density and that certain darkness which only comes with more in-room bass, the heavier Kaiser must have your vote. Fanciers of cymbals, triangles, singing bowls and other long-fading champs who with their attention apply a virtual stop watch shall find the Danish ribbon more spectacular.
Likewise for the low-inductance mid/woofer's more deep-throated intimacy with close-mic'd vocals. The Furioso's compound 12-inch woofer per side behaved far closer to the subwoofer effect of the previous page. Unassisted, the Børresen was an animal of very different spots. Call it a cheetah not wildebeest.
The Z2's 8" woofers already sum to a single 11.3" woofer for a quasi mono sub. The Z3 runs one of those per channel. That adds to the Z1 virtual stereo subs just without active-drive benefits. So one expects that these Z floorstanders include some of our own sub's influence on tonality, scale and mass. Given the design concepts of Z1 and Furioso Mini, all of this was perfectly predictive. Still, covering it served an illustrative purpose. The Z1 with its small mid/woofer remains groomed for speed, articulation and resolution. Its choice of ribbon tweeter was naturally predicated upon a companion driver whose reflexes would match and easily make the handover frequency. For a 2-driver speaker, that meant the current drive unit, not the 8" which team Børresen don't run up high enough to meet their racy ribbon.
The Z5 even doubles up on the mid/woofers on either side of the tweeter. That ends up with a compound driver that'll be close to the bigger Furioso mid/woofer. In the Z range, those decisions simply spread out across consecutive models whilst Kaiser pack them all into a single model. That has advantages for some sonic qualities, relative disadvantages for others. Flipping this script, we could also say that the Kaiser is closest to the €23K Z3 but shrinks Børresen's floorstander down into a big monitor cab on a stand.
Casting our eyes ahead for copasetic Z1 amp mates, one must consider companion brand Aavik and their new I-platform built around 300wpc Pascal modules tweaked/tuned with the Danes' own noise-attenuating tech. Here Warsaw correspondent Dawid Grzyb's I-280 review concluded in a triangulation axis with S.P.E.C. of Japan and AGD Productions of California making up the outer polarities.
"S.P.E.C.'s RSA-M99 power output was that of a beefy transistor amp which sounded very much like a purist SET. On snap, resolution, overall maturity and freshness, AGD Productions' Vivace runs circles around almost anything I've heard to date. Aavik's I-280 now fit right between those two marvels." So classic single-ended valve sound on one side, ultra-resolution very fast sound on the other, Aavik somewhere in-between. Having reviewed Vivace and high-power Gran Vivace myself, either had been a virtual stand-in for our downstairs 200-watt class A/B direct-coupled 1MHz LinnenberG Liszt monos. Those are high-power cousins to our upstairs Bakoon AMP-13R. Thus our main amps match the Z1's own priority list of speed, transparency, airiness and top enunciation. If the Z1's downstairs performance became too lean, a better match might be Gryphon's 50wpc pure class A Essence inbound for its review? I expected that to be nearer Dawid's descriptions of the mid-tier Aavik integrated. And that's how audiophiles attempt to plan their mix 'n' match puzzles. How would mine come together?
