Arte Noir

This review will publish on HifiKnights.com. By request of the manufacturer and permission of the author, it will then be syndicated here to reach a broader audience. – Ed.

Reviewer: TBA
Review component retail: €21'525/pr

The heraldic emblem is of the city of Krakow where Fram are based.

Polski Noir¹. Unlike a Nordic Noir crime film from Scandinavia, today's Arte Noir styled like a classic theatre spotlight is a passive Polish loudspeaker which "won the final Good Design award, our country's most important industrial/utility design competition". In its 1st incarnation shown in miniature above, it still was a 2-way. The present 2nd Coming is a 3-way with rear-firing passive radiator² and a full array of SB Acoustics Satori drivers on the front. Those are a 29mm soft-dome ring radiator, a 60mm soft-dome midrange with neodymium motor and a 240mm woofer with neo engine in-between. This speaker is intended for rooms up to 100m². To ease setup, it has ±2dB compensation switches for both woofer and tweeter. Sensitivity is 91dB, nominal impedance 4Ω. Dress code is either full-on black or with gold trim around the central woofer and gold for the wing nuts. Included are tripod stands in metal or natural oiled oak. "Because these are really heavy, we will arrange a review with HifiKnights after the upcoming Warsaw show." That was Jarek Waszczyszyn, Fram's chief designer who recently featured in these pages with a syndicated review of his Silver Grand Mono II amplifiers for his other brand, Ancient Audio. The considerable weight he refers to stems from Arte Noir's ribbed aluminium construction. That lays up its cab in vertical slices³ of machined metal whilst loading the woofer into three cylindrical chambers. If this were Nordic Noir, we'd expect a bullet in said chambers. Here they funnel air pressure to trigger the passive radiator. The stand bracket enables easy tilt and swivel for best aim. Get ready to be shot at by cinematic sound? If he survives, our Polish correspondent will fill us in when the time comes.

¹ Apparently Polish Noir is a recognized movie genre. A Czech film festival points at titles like Knife in the Water, Pigs and The Criminal Who Stole a Crime for examples of Polish Noir cinema.

² We're living in an era where the ubiquitous ported speaker sees a minor comeuppance from its ABR-assisted cousin for auxiliary bass radiator. Be it Mårten Design or Tidal at the very high end, Fram or Virtual Hifi in the Polish scene, Buchardt or GoldenEar, there are more sightings now than 10 years ago. A passive radiator is a cone without voice coil or magnet. It's a tuned mass/spring system. The cone is the moving mass, the air trapped in the enclosure the spring. When the active driver moves out, internal air pressure drops. The higher atmospheric outside pressure pushes the radiator in. When the active driver retracts, internal air pressure rises to push the radiator out. It seems that the passive moves out of phase yet at the system's resonant frequency, pressure fluctuations from the active driver combined with the inertia of the radiator's mass cause the passive to move in phase. At or below the resonant frequency, the active driver still moves but output drops off. Now the passive moves with much larger excursion to take over a significant portion of the sound. It acts like a tuned port but instead of letting air escape, its mass and size resonate with the enclosure volume. The radiator converts internal air pressure changes into LF output. It's about synchronized motion at specific frequencies to reinforce bass.

³ Another speaker which adopts the vertical not horizontal sliver stack is my upstairs MusikBoxx from Germany's ModalAkustik. Its far lower weight comes from acrylic slices which alternate clear with black or white. Most layered speakers stack horizontally like Gauder Akustik's Berlina range.

For now we might add that Fram the brand leverages advanced metal fabrication skills with roots in the Polish aerospace industry. Whilst Jarek handles the electro-acoustical design work of driver selection and filter tuning, his friends involved in the enclosure production are domestic professionals working well outside audio. "Ziemia Obiecana is a Polish movie by Andrzej Wajda whose title translates to The Promised Land. There's a scene in it where three friends say to each other, 'I have nothing, you have nothing, he has nothing. That's enough to build our factory.' That movie is about our 19th century textile production city Lódz. Our Fram story has similarities. Three of us had brave talks near our current textile industry city of Zyrardow. We too wanted to move forward no matter what even though conditions were sparse.

"Five different designers were necessary to engineer the complete speaker set. One of them is a real aerospace engineer who had the necessary knowledge to build in aluminium both from a design and specialty materials perspective. Our metal parts are actually produced by an aircraft company to get the tolerances and quality we need." That quote is from my October 2019 review of Fram's Midi 150, a rectilinear active compact. With the original Arte below and now Arte Noir, the target client shops a different league and owns all the required electronics already. Hence this speaker is passive and equipped with driver artillery appropriate for the larger rooms one expects shoppers after €20K/pr stand-mounts to have.

Here we just saw the Warsaw 2025 show demo with the smaller active Fram 2-way with dual passive radiators on its oaken tripod whilst the Arte Noir loomed behind it on metal stands. Sources were an Ancient Audio CD player with variable outputs into an Ancient Audio solid-state amplifier, Jarek's solo brand which just celebrated its 30th Anniversary.

… to be continued…