Country of Origin
This review published in February 2026 on HifiKnights.com. By request of the manufacturer and permission of the author, it is hereby syndicated to reach a broader audience. – Ed.
Reviewer: Marek Dyba
Digital transport: custom passive Win10 server with Roon, Fidelizer Pro 7.10, JCAT NET XE and USB XE cards, ferrum Hypsos Signature PSU, Keces 8 mono supply for server, JCAT USB Isolator, Innuos Statement, fidata HFAS1-S10U
DAC: LampizatOr Poseidon with Ideon Audio 3R Master Time USB regenerator
Network: Silent Angel Bonn N8 + Silent Angel Forester F1 + optical LAN isolator
Vinyl: J.Sikora Standard Max turntable, J.Sikora KV12 & KV12 Max tonearms; AirTight PC-3, Audio Technica PTG33 Prestige & Le Son LS10 MKII cartridges; Grandinote Celio MkIV & ESE Lab Nibiru V 5 phono stages
Preamplifier: Circle Labs P300
Amplifier: GrandiNote Shinai, Circle Labs M200, Art Audio Symphony II (modified)
Speakers: GrandiNote Mach4, Ubiq Audio Model ONE Duelund Edition
Interconnects:Bastanis Imperial x2, Soyaton Benchmark, Hijiri Million Kiwami, Hijiri HCI-20, TelluriumQ Ultra Black, KBL Sound Himalaya 2 XLR, David Laboga Expression Emerald USB, David Laboga Digital Sound Wave Sapphire Ethernet
Speaker cables: Soyaton Benchmark Mk2, WK Audio The RAY Exclusive
Power cords: L Custom Audio 3D-S-AC Connect, LessLoss DFPC Signature, Gigawatt LC-3
Speaker signal conditioning: LessLoss Firewall for Loudspeakers, Boenicke ComDev
Anti-vibration conditioning: 12x Carbide Audio Carbide Base under DAC, preamp and speakers
Power delivery: Gigawatt PF-2 Mk2 and PC-3 SE Evo+; custom power line with Gigawatt LC-Y in-wall cable; Gigawatt G-044 Schuko and Furutech FT-SWS-D (R)
Equipment rack: Base VI, Rogoz Audio 3RP3/BBS
Resonance control: Rogoz MO40 and CPPB16 platforms with BW40MkII feet, OMEX Symphony 3S, Franc Accessories Ceramic Disc Slim Feet and Wood Block Platform, Graphite Audio CIS-35 and IC-35 Premium
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?
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.
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 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. Now our narrative hands over to Marek Dyba for actual hands/ears-on impressions. – Ed
