Nine years ago I reviewed and acquired the €9'380/pr Albedo Aptica. Back then the brand under Massimo Costa now at Alare was the first purveyor of Accuton speakers which I truly admired. Naturally much water passed under that bridge. The good Accuton ship and its driver tech is a few generations farther along as must be competitors. My pair isn't representative of their status quo, just a personally trusted member of the metallic tribe. As a pure two-way, it made for a useful comparator to this latter-gen Raidho to chase down hard-membrane differences.

That heavy/rigid Track Audio stand behind the TD1.2 is not the type stand you want for it. Been there, done that and burnt the T-shirt!

I started with Mark Eliyahu's spiked fiddle on "Drops". It gave me a solo string instrument played with dirty flageolet to trigger higher harmonics. Do androids dream of sheep? Do speakers dole out THD?  Over Aptica, the overall climate cooled a little. When Mark ascends higher registers, his timbre evinced a slight onset of the 'shrill'. Over the TD1.2, the soundscape bathed in more golden light, lower harmonics grew more burnished, upper harmonics sweeter. If I had to guess, my older Accutons injected more upper odd-order harmonics. Or perhaps the inverted dome tweeter suffered intermodulation from a lower first breakup mode? As a classically trained musician, I never learnt to love e-guitars in overdrive. I find their high deliberate distortion ugly noise. That's a good pointer for the Albedo/Raidho difference. The Italian injected just a minuscule potion of that flavor into the kemanche's on-string action. It occasionally felt like oil sizzling faintly behind/between the sounds; the aforementioned 'rust'.

For multiple violins, Tania Saleh's "Nameless Relationship" includes the perfect tell. The descending tremolo motif previewed right at the beginning then repeated more elaborately later contained fierier 'screech' when Accuton held the reins. Whilst subtle in the grand scheme, this difference in seasoning was readily demonstrable. It played along the lines of 3rd vs. 2nd-harmonic dominant amplifiers; with a vital offset. 3rd-harmonic circuits are cooler, separate harder, crisper and sharper. 2nd-harmonic variants do it sweeter, warmer and denser. Relative dosage modulates the effect. In that scheme, the Albedo was a 3rd, Raidho a 2nd – just with none of the thickening, softening or subjective breaking which to me register as resolution losses of high THD-caused octave doubling like lesser no-feedback SET exhibit. I might simplify the TD1.2 take as some of the sugar, categorically none of the stickiness.

A very subtle side effect was that Raidho's reading felt more stately or relaxed. This vocal track from the 10 A.D. album casts a well-populated stage with many little percussive sounds popping up far and wide. The TD1.2 made all of them exceptionally acute/astute in texture and location. Call it very high detail presented in most nonchalant fashion. Zero show-off nerviness, no apparent effort. Easy hi-rez perhaps? For a deeper dig into the aspect of perceived resolution, I now set up the sound|kaos monitors as comparators. That meant classic cellulose widebander with AlNiCo motor and bronze basket running up into the lower treble; upfiring Raal ribbon above; horizontally opposed woven-carbon woofers below.

Raidho's front-firing quasi ribbon was clearly airier and more energetic than the omni-reflecting true ribbon working across narrower bandwidth. The TD1.2 also had the edge on making complete sense of Hélène Grimaud's grand piano plus Ashwin Srinivasan's bansuri enveloped by electronic ambiance from Nitin Sawhney. It feels like a combination of listening through diaphanous veils rippling in the wind; having water in the ears; or watching wet watercolors run into each other. Heavily reverb laden and recorded with a deliberate far-field perspective, it's a moody dream-like production. Here the 'diamond' driver resolved farther down than its cellulose brother in arms. It seemed to contribute less micro blur of its own to leave me with just the recorded echoes and their frayed edges to sort through. This had nothing to do with overdamping. The effect was more akin to looking through a high-magnification lens that didn't move at all versus one that trembles ever so slightly.

This confirmed with an ultra-spacey number from Joël Garé's Des pas sous la neige. Both electrifying initial strikes of mallet on bells then lingering sound clouds which overhang previous fading trails tracked still more fully with the metal drivers.

Another literal edge of the Raidho driver factored on this complex all-strings number from Renaud Garcia-Fons' latest album. It's a melée of percussive transients generated by virtuoso string players. The Raidho simply felt quicker on their uptake. It prickled harder in time. This wasn't tonal hardness but rhythmic exactitude; like nails not fleshy finger tips drumming out beat tattoos. The Swiss monitor was tonally fruitier, denser, darker and overall softer. Those struck me as precisely the reasons why so many buyers and designers keep faith with vintage paper-based transducers. They seem to be inherently less critical as though keeping a safe distance from hitting a nerve. The Raidho managed to move closer to it without causing any flinching. As a civilized adrenaline chaser, for me that was its special attraction: dancing more on the nerve without causing any buttock clenching.

I also found it to be more dynamically charged. We notice this when on a track, our hearing enters a comfy zone of dynamic cruise control. Suddenly the music steps on the gas and RPM aka SPL unexpectedly jump past the rev limiter. Given today's tech intro, this probably had to do with very delayed dynamic compression due to excellent thermal driver management; and the motor's potent flux. Those aspects added themselves to the TD1.2's 'street-legal racer' image. It revved harder dynamically. To repackage this page, I did think that my metallic vs organic juxtapositions showed how sufficiently hard metal drivers enjoy an inherent resolution advantage over paper-based variants. I also heard how Raidho's most advanced driver tech sounds sweeter, purer and richer than early ceramics, gives up none of their precise enunciation from leading-edge articulation yet manages an altogether sunnier disposition with fuller tonality. Finally, xover tuning must factor decisively since the Benno-revoiced TD.1.2 struck me as quite different from Børresen Acoustics speakers which otherwise pursue very similar driver tech.