Helium 510 presetting the scene for an Amphion flavour fest test.

Having kicked out my usual Boenicke W5se in this system at least for the duration, the Helium 510 set up three days prior to the One.18's arrival. This made for a perfect reacquaintance op. The house sound or rather behaviour of Amphion speakers is all about accuracy. It's about maintaining high separation to never lose the plot. Whether you call them tonally lean or honest will depend on your upstream gear. With Gato's warmish class D amp, I call these pretty much dead-on neutral. With a rhythmically prickly recording like Le Trio Joubran gone solo Adnan Joubran's Borders Behind, accuracy telegraphs as wonderful articulation. That's very much like how a master mime articulates expressivity through motion since he can't rely on speech. It's related also to top-class enunciation whereby, unlike with so many actors, one makes out every single word of dialogue between news-cast anchors. Here this very articulate enunciated quality applies to the time domain whereby interlocking multi-tasking percussive events—which needn't be actual percussion but can be plucked strings or staccato woodwinds—remain very crisp and intelligible. Everything stays in its proper place sharply focused. Nothings wanders, blooms in size or gets fuzzy of contour. Very literally, speech intelligibility on video programming is demonstrably high to make the difference between following the full dialogue or only portions of it without needing to tweak up the volume. Set up properly in the nearfield with strict path-length equality between both channels, it's very much like an out-of-the-head headphone presentation. Without any aggressivity, it's a very upfront clear-as-day unembellished sound just as one imagines should be vital for any recording studio. Except the Helium 510 targets consumers. Would the actual pro model be more accurate still? Here we play mindful of Anssi's view that this separation between pro and consumer is—should be?—purely arbitrary.

To avoid hifi absolutism which claims one solution superior to another or promotes it as the only proper one, let's invoke just two speaker brands which battle for supremacy in super speaker luxury branding: Wilson and Magico. Both have their followers and detractors. Yet one is ported, the other sealed. Regardless of white and really more grey papers, sales prove it. It's not the snazzier argument which wins. It's whatever folks like better. When enough folks prefer sufficiently different things, claims of better look a wee adolescent. That doesn't mean reviewers don't have preferences. It's simply best to not extrapolate anything more universal from it. With this bit of small print handled, did this reviewer have any clear-cut preference besides being able to lock to a definitive difference between passive radiators and ports? In fact, was there a demonstrable diff? It is after all the decisive design change between Amphion consumer and pro. It had to matter. Didn't it? I tend to prefer sealed over ported bass for its better timing and tautness and because ports always interact more with the room. In extreme cases, ports can sound like standing-wave riders which set off room modes. Except that if those effects vanish once you tightly plug the ports, the real message is clear. In my free-space desktop setup and given the size and tuning of Amphion's compact boxes, I wouldn't have those port issues at all. No effective wall for the ports to interfere with; no port tuning to 25Hz or some other boombastic figure. Hence my curiosity. How else would the ABR model express its mechanical difference?