The gronzing grobian? Merriam-Webster tells us that to gronze means to chew and crunch noisily just as a grobian—a slovenly, crude often cartoonish individual— might. How to spin that into my G-rated game? I must use these words in a different context. This SB Acoustics Satori tweeter has far more energy, brilliance, extension and airiness than cartoonish soft-dome lore would ever believe. That lore essentially says that fabric domes are the classic 300B of tweeters: rolled-off, mellow, slightly opaque and dull. Perhaps many really are. 300B amps which follow such a tuning do exist, too. But to paint all direct-heated triodes or silk domes with that brush would be boorish, crude and cartoonish. As to gronzing, when I envision its action with my ears, I hear a lot of dry percussive noises when those chewy crunchy bits break down amidst lip smacks and spittle sounds. Those are all very quick details which come and go rapidly. Such reflexes applied very much to the very brief life span of triangle strikes and how much oscillating metallic energies these tweeters managed to track before the decays faded to nothing. The same tracking applied to the upper harmonics of Vassilis Tsabropoulos' piano on the linked-to "Promenade" of ECM's elegiac Melos album with Anja Lechner on cello. The recording engineer's choice of microphones and their placement has really captured the piano's light-filled shiny aspects where Gro's tweeters had my ribbon-groomed ears lack for nada. Truth told, they exposed my own inner grobian and his crude notions on fabric domes. Even though there's just one letter of difference between Mozart and grozart—well, two really—one was a famous composer, the other very much still is a gooseberry. Not remotely the same thing. Ditto for generic fabric domes and Gro's in this implementation.
What in this rear view becomes the left speaker really shows off the steep baffle rake and "flipped wig".
Growling from the groin? Teachers of woodwind or brass players often admonish their pupils to play from the diaphragm. They want more body involvement. Sound generation shouldn't limit to lips or throat. Blow from the belly. Now groping for the groin is as low as the belly goes. Gro grounds itself accordingly. No head voice but proper grip of the shorthairs for a fleshy lower midrange. To growl not groan stands for that other low, the bass. HeadFi knows. Drivers no larger than big tweeters will do the job just fine when in ultra-close proximity. As greater distances involve ever larger air volumes to energize rooms, more and more cone surface and/or thrust must compensate. Looking at Gro's narrow-chested profile, it's instinctive to underrate its LF. If feeling generous, we might accord Gro proper reach as we already do for headphones. But we'll still warn of wilted welly. We see a pugilist whose rapid punches barely connect. They leave no dent. Our guy's a lightweight after all. Heck, for proper pounding even Gro's own creator gods have Fenja.
There 4 x 7" woofers combine into a 14-inch monster to add a ½-way below Frida's effective 7" 2-way. That jarring jump in cone cover, just for bass, concedes to the reality of pursuing lower and louder. It leads to the dragstrip mantra of no replacement for displacement. That crowd cramps up when we dare call dual 5ers competent, capable and classy. At their conniptions Gro throws a Curv® ball. Under domestic conditions—I don't live or test on the dragstrip—Gro challenges conceptions on how modern small drivers in an inert box can add up to being copasetic with normal room sizes, complete reach and needful SPL. Gro's bass can tickle tenderly when so recorded but also thuds with surprising smack when dynamic demands mean business. Even versus my dual 15" RiPol sub brought in at 100Hz/4th-order hi/lo for comparative reference, I had mature growl from the groin. My SPL occasionally top out at 90dB peaks but normally fluctuate in the 70s-80s. On raw reach I really was just a handful of cycles short. On room involvement my quasi cardioid sub had demonstrably less particularly relative to the room's short axis defined by its sidewalls. But that's a very different story. I did use my active Swiss bass traps since Gro's omni bass dispersion is pretty much the norm to need the usual in-room attention.
As Raidho and Børresen practice too, SV-Audio don't just parallel small cones. They do the same with narrow ports. Gro's rear-aiming triplets¹—Fenja has seven—might explain why its bass isn't stuffy but awake, not poncy but potent, not lazy but locked. In the best sense, this is small-woofer bass: well vented, happily aspirated. It prefers controlled agility to massive morass. It's about diction in daylight, not destruction in darkness. Darkness refers to how more air motion down low not only injects additional black into playback's colour palette but often swamps higher finer frequencies. That's very much like amplified live music which is nearly always bassier than unplugged acoustica. Gains in raw shove and darkness want disproportionate allocations of size, surface and price. For my tastes they also mandate big rooms. Otherwise they overplay their thickness card with redundant artillery. Knowing my taste and room, I'd never pursue Fenja. I leave bigger toys to bigger boys. As grotesque as monkey-coffin believers and worshippers of big woofers will find it, for this subwoofer regular, solo Gro without a sub fit ideally on raw bandwidth and bass power. So much for preconceptions.
For a spot of skull as mentioned earlier. Visually the speaker doesn't stop at the baffle's upper edge. That adds some visual depth.
¹ Three ports could tune identical; or deliberately offset to broaden the bandwidth across which their output lift sums. Offsetting their tuning could spread out the resonant frequencies for a broader, smoother and less peaky response though the interactions between ports and enclosure would get rather more complex. Using a coat hanger wire whose end I bent at a right angle, I determined that the upper two ports are of identical length whilst the lowest one is clearly longer. That indeed suggests spread tuning.
