The S class. Even in a room 6x8m, Hagen's lower -3dB bandwidth is sufficient to satisfy. Coming from a single driver in a compact cab, that's an achievement Inès can be very proud of. Sneaking in a sub below where Hagen rolls off is certainly possible to add the lowest octave should one so desire. But still superior is a 4th-order mirror-imaged 100Hz handover. Not only does it reroute low, mid and some upper bass to dedicated bass weaponry which subtracts voice coil heat, related dynamic compression and excursion needs from the widebander. It also applies larger cone surface to the range of the kick drum and electric bass as two instruments that benefit from extra impact and air motion. The classiest way to enter the subwoofer S class is an active electronic high/low-pass filter executed with premium parts. Puritanical aghastheit at a filter preceding a virgin widebander merely needs a smart filter bypass function. Now it hears that executed actively and not with variable-state but discrete parts incurs no audible penalties whatsoever. It also hears that outsourcing the low end to a dedicated active subwoofer has benefits that go well beyond just extra bandwidth.

Obviously Voxativ's Alberich2 knows all about that last bit of extra reach. But more advanced and clever than just grafting on a sub is strategically dovetailing it at a frequency higher than the monitor's natural roll-off particularly when the sub's radiation is cardioid. Now a higher handover expands a super-dipole's cancellation effects to cover more resonant modes of a room. It cleans up their impact on the time-domain performance of the low end. But regardless of what type sub we pursue, Hagen's compact size is ideal for a stereo 2.1/2.2 array. Its happy sensitivity meanwhile calls 10 watts enough which opens doors to single-ended tube or transistor amps of the necessary high output impedance. It's a smarter more effective solution than pursuing large widebanders in deep quarter-wave aka TQWT boxes which still won't compete with a sub's reach nor its controlled bass textures. That being the case, keeping the widebander small and tidy becomes the ticket. On that score Siegfried-slaying bad boy Hagen is quite the golden boy. "Why didst you slay my husband?" Kriemhild demands. "I did so for the pain you caused my mistress Brunhild", explains Hagen. The aristocracy has it no better than the working class who knows all about pain. When it comes to true peak resolution, $6K/pr Hagen in his gleaming coat is all the fiscal pain we must shoulder to really live it up whilst looking posh. For the Voxativ brand, it's a kind of new low. S class sound for E class coin? In a smaller room like our upstairs, this whole subwoofer angle gets more oblique as long as our chosen amp doesn't stymie the innate reach of these lightweight cones. To reiterate, the 0.05Ω output impedance of SAEQ's Hyperion Ge was all wrong. Being 10 x higher, the 0.5Ω of Enleum's AMP-23R was a lot better. But undeniably best of all was the 4Ω of FirstWatt's SIT4¹. Knowing this is the master key to the Hagen puzzle. If I were Inès, I'd not take for granted that the average customer understands it. So explaining it on the Voxativ site could be a good idea?
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¹ In the solid-state realm, the 10wpc Riviera Audio Lab AIC10-Bal sports a 0.4Ω Z-out as an alternative to the Enleum.

Got milk? Lindemann's Move with its 5" Mark Audio Alpair widebander plus small AMT was a virtual stand-in with my upstairs MonAcoustics SuperMon Mini. That caused no outright lust, just seasoned acknowledgement that had I met it first, I'd likely have ended up with the German not Korean. Raidho's TD1.2 passed through the year before. That had caused chicken pimples; what a foreigner once called goose bumps. But the cold water of reality had flattened them out again. The amount of bandwidth I'd cut off with my downstairs 2.1 system spoke loudly against making such an investment for just above the belt line. My Qualio IQ gets likewise castrated but costs like Hagen2. That makes this surgery far less objectionable. And as importantly, in 'bypass' it's a full-range 3-way speaker with a 9.5" ported Sartori woofer reaching below 30Hz. That takes an amplifier's proper measure; a paramount review requirement. Milking lechery of Hagen haben—'haben' is German for 'having'—would be about tarting up my smaller system to the next level. It'd mean replacing my 250wpc Kinki EX-M7 amp with the below FirstWatt SIT1 monos whose 10-watt 4Ω spec mirrors the current SIT4. Yet those amps would be all wrong for standard speakers. This system would thus have to acquire a fluid Janus profile: one face the reviewer's pet, the other the alter ego for all occasions. Mentioning such personal so otherwise immaterial matters, again, is purely to underscore my genuine excitement over the latest iteration of Voxativ's smallest speaker called Hagen2. With that flag up and flapping, let's conclude with the obligatory recap.

As a brand, Voxativ's sonic blueprint in the widebander realm is most similar to Cube Audio. Actually, Voxativ was first on this scene so Cube mirrored themselves on Berlin. Zu pursue a very different sound, sound|kaos sit in-between. I've not heard any current AER or Lowther to know their spot on this map. For 'mainstream' speaker tech, full-range electrostats might just have the most in common with Voxativ's aural aesthetic. Hard Rock and Metal heads look elsewhere, chamber-music aficionados feel right at home. The lean 'n' clean purity of unamplified instruments doesn't rely on synthesized bass and the plumping up and density/darkness injection of PA systems. It's not about being unable to play back the opposite. Electronics don't know what style of music we feed them. In this type characterization, it's about finding a stylistic gestalt that has enough in common with the component under review that unfamiliar readers make the appropriate mental association.