Since this could involve salt, I'm reminded of a silly saying. How to catch a rabbit? Put salt on its tail. As a child, I couldn't figure it out. If you're close enough to salting its tail, haven't you already caught your rabbit? To catch our 98 rabbit no salt entailed, here are Jacob's answers to our still open questions. The mid/woofers are 12.5cm/5" Satori units with papyrus paper cones. That's a small diameter relative to expected bass but doubling up resets those boundaries to a claimed -3dB@30Hz without any DSP compensation. And of course that small diameter enables a just 18cm wide profile to begin with. The upper bandwidth is 25kHz.

About multiple sonic profiles, there originally were none since Noble & Noble wanted to start simple so only wrote one control code to DSP.  But the USB input already anticipated future upgrades and by the time my loaners delivered, two more profiles had been added. "Our proprietary mechanical loading combines a bass reflex, transmission line and Helmholz resonator for almost flat impedance¹ which in the passive version varied between just 4-7Ω. Our mid/woofers don't use a dust cap but the frontal unit an aluminium phase plug with the added benefit of cooling down its voice coil. The connecting rod mounts to the center of the pole piece of each driver. Because they wire up out of phase, they really aren't isobaric though they might look like it. Our DSP filter uses a 4th-order Linkwitz-Riley slope at 2kHz between tweeter and first mid/woofer whilst the second one comes in at 200Hz on the same slope. Physical time alignment comes from the wave guide plus a 43µs digital delay between tweeter and first mid/woofer which compensates for a slight phase shift from two minor boost/cut filters around the crossover frequencies. We don't view DSP as a global panacea. A design has to get all the basics right without it." Based on this information, we now know to call this 3-driver design a 2½-way.

¹ Why is nearly flat impedance cause for hurray? In many ported systems, the twin peaks of their saddle response will hit 50Ω+ against a 'nominal' value of 8Ω. With most transistor amps, that causes a ~1:10 output reduction into such peaks. Hello highly nonlinear power transfer. It's often responsible for apparent room boom. Linearized impedance optimizes the power transfer between amplifier and load.

Out of the box you'll want to turn the 7th side's safety bolt with a hex key by two turns. For shipping, that's deliberately tightened. For listening, it should be loosened to create properly decoupled 'float' for the inset outer baffle. That baffle gets later grounded with a central spike once final speaker positioning is locked in.

Leaving PG13, the left speaker is default master, the right its slave. Since S/PDIF is a serial signal protocol of both l/r music plus clock data, just one digital cable comes off your source. Then use either an AES/EBU or coaxial cable from the corresponding through-put into the other speaker. Add mains cords. Hit 'play' on your source, set volume with Hypex remote. Done.

If it's now that you decide to canvas the tangled Interwebs on what active alternatives you might have considered at the same price, you'd eventually come across the Lyravox Karlina XT. That wide but shallow nCore competitor from Hamburg bundles an Accuton 30mm ceramic tweeter with matching 7" midrange, upfiring AMT super tweeter and 10" rear-firing long-stroke ScanSpeak woofer slot-ported through the plinth. It also gives you a custom RF remote to upgrade the plastic Hypex egg. Purely on paper, the German plays to the 'more makes merrier' mentality of more drivers, more cone surface, more visual presence. A Nobilis Sonum 98 shopper will thus prioritize a smaller visual footprint and find bliss in a lower transducer count with less moving mass. So it's fair to say that the 98's target audience fêtes minimalism. The motto is see less but hear more. To keep honest, we'll add than expected. That properly qualifies us hearing more than our eyes anticipated. We're back to where we started – direct drive, active DSP filters, premium drivers, sophisticated assembly for a silent enclosure to suppress typical box talk.

The best translation of that colloquial term? Reminders of artifice. It's when our sophisticated ear/brain gloms onto obvious evidence that the sound isn't made by people but machines. Obviously the latter is true. A hifi is a collection of inanimate apparatus. But the most sophisticated playback shrinks or ideally eliminates such aural evidence for the hoped-for illusion that our own private band serenades us.

When sound squeezes from boxes like dry toothpaste or instead pumps in obvious mechanical ways, we're far from there yet. Box talk interferes. We're still not there when subtle fuzz, blur, hollowness, opacity or vaguety suggest that our sound filters as though through heavy curtains. As our virtual curtains get thinner, it gets easier to overlook them even miss their presence outright. It's only when a component swap removes yet another layer or two that we finally spot our earlier curtains by contrast from subtraction.

Ideally our hifi suspends sound before us in one big three-dimensional panorama that spreads from wall to wall. It doesn't seem to originate from anywhere in particular. Eyes closed, we shouldn't be able to point at the speakers as the obvious origins of the sound. Ideally that feels as direct and unfiltered as front-row center before a live ensemble. How would the Nobilis Sonum 98 fare on that advanced score? It's not synonymous with raw bandwidth or ultimate SPL but lives on a different page. Parsing the firm's online presentation and claims, it's that very directness and clarity which I saw at/as the heart of their first compact active speaker. It's that which my review would then focus on in particular.

Related to our sought-after Houdini stunt—of being left with just the music and only minimal visual reminders of its origins—is the stumpy narrow profile. This box is just shy of a meter tall. It's really a down-to-the-floor mini monitor that replaces a cosmetically discontinuous metal stand with full cabinetry whose added cubic volume makes more bass well before the invisible driver. Unlike the white Lyravox, the Dutchie contains no streaming module. Given the rapid changes in that sector which render whatever one may build in obsolete or outdated in a few years if not sooner, the Germans smarted up, too. They removed the streamer from their bigger costlier Karlotta model.

The only prospective discord I could spot on Noble & Noble's menu prior to delivery was its Hypex remote. For €20K, some clients could view it like plastic cutlery in a white-linen eatery; a bit declassé and incongruous. "We're currently working on our own and once perfected, will supply it free of charge to our early clients." Voilà, fine silver to go with the white linen. Time to cue up some tunes?