Extreme nearfield bliss. Take a page from ex Audio Physic boss Joachim Gerhard and his famous setup. It simulates a nearfield protocol inside a bigger space. Its widely spaced sharply toed-in very close-up speaker positioning creates a type of sound bubble that's far more immersive/enveloping i.e. quasi surround than the 3-meter straight-out convention in a typical living room. To come off only requires close 2-way driver spacing, ideally a KEF-style dual-concentric which could be augmented by an adjacent three-way woofer, and proper setup geometry. That means having the tweeters at ear height. This is especially important on the desktop. Parking rectangular boxes flat on their haunches here usually fires their tweeters straight at your sternum. That's useless unless you're Susan Sarandon's Mayan lizard from Bull Durham. Obviously the extreme nearfield isn't a usage mode exclusive to the Amphion One18. Far from it. Its mastering monitor concept simply has it bred for it. The Amp100's lucid mode shares far more with earlier NuForce amps than the far darker warmer Pascal implementation of Gato Audio's original DIA-250 which complemented their soft-dome/paper driver speaker ideal. The ICEpower voicing of Wyred4Sound's EJ Sarmento and April Music's Simon Lee is a bit less cozy than Gato's. That's followed by AURALiC's take on Hypex, then Roksan's. If nCore sat next to that, Amphion's Anaview would jump over them all to occupy the wiriest most lit-up polarity. Coupled to Amphion's trademark wave-guided Titanium tweeter, this magnified its presence-region-and-up visibility to a good degree. A is true for many class D amps, the Amphion also responded noticeably to power cords. Upgrading a generic cord to a Crystal Cable for example countered the wiry striated crisp aspects with patently greater smoother fullness. Obviously the Amp100's price doesn't warrant some designer-priced power cable. Simply make sure to get something better than an Electric Avenue molded freebie.

Leaving the nearfield bubble (cue up dishwashing detergent ad) acts like another softening agent. Hence setting your path lengths is a most effective tuning option. If your desk isn't deep enough, move the chair back or put the boxes on stands behind the table. If you listen to lossy MP3 like Spotify+'s 320mbps, getting really close and/or loud will betray their steely grainy HF elements. Upgrading to full-resolution streaming à la Qobuz, WiMP or Tidal remedies that unless a recording is an overcooked spitty Pop affair to begin with. On this aspect of perceived treble purity, the Amp100 proved more critical than the class A/B Goldmund/Job it replaced. Its treble teeth were sharper. Again, on quality productions this enhanced the sense of audiophile vision. That refers to our ability to very specifically map out virtual space. It's not a relaxed casual mode. It's a head-on confrontation with dense detail that's been most cleanly separated out by banishing all shadows. You hear a great simultaneity of layered/overlaid sounds cleanly individuated. Does that rather suggest an ideal mastering engineer's tool? For the pleasure-seeking home listener, its virtues become particularly attractive when one must/wants to listen quietly.

With Job 225.

After all, pretty much anything sounds 'good' loud. What separates the real deliverers from the pretenders are moderate to subdued levels. That's when the pretenders shut down. They get opaque, pale, flat and cloudy. Boring. Uninvolving. Far away. Not the Amphion threesome. Whilst recording engineers are known to use high volumes, our kind needn't. Often it's outright asocial rudeness on one's cohabitants to blast it. Or, they might still or already be asleep. If that's your type scenario, the One18 driven in the nearfield by the Amp100 is your sort of savior even beyond the Job 225. Obviously nearfield needn't mean desktop. A small bedroom vacated by a college-going kid can accomplish the same. Add chair and a pair of compact speakers on stands close up to take room acoustics out of the equation and act full-range without heavy and costly driver artillery. On bass weight and roundness by the way, the also physically far heavier Job 225 had it over its class D competitor.

Hear it as the pros did. Pretty much any company which crosses from pro into consumer audio exploits a variation on this advertising theme. DAC companies invoke the number of studios which use their converters during recording sessions. Active studio monitor companies like Genelec and PMC might list some famous recordings which were mastered on their boxes. With Amphion's One18 still being relatively new to market, one doesn't expect a long list. Yet. Still, those six words apply already. And Anssi Hyvönen makes a very valid point when he asks why audiophiles should listen to anything else. Having reviewed a number of their ported home models, I'll say categorically that this ABR pro model digs even deeper into the same groove. It's a more honed more finely calibrated instrument on the very same mission. The only thing presently excepted is low bass reach. Here the bigger floorstanding homies have the obvious cubic-inch advantage. But as Amphion demonstrated at CES 2015, for bigger spaces that insist on 25Hz, that's easily addressed with a quality sealed active subwoofer. True, the promies only come in flat black whilst the homies offer colours and veneers. But on sound and Amphion's ongoing concern over time-domain behaviour, these plain black boxes have it over their rainbow brethren.

Ought Anssi to redo their entire consumer range accordingly? I think not. Variety is the spice of life. For listeners who favour a slightly softer, gentler more forgiving sound, the home range remains distinctive as is. For those who notice port behaviour well above its tuning frequency to compromise transient fidelity, the new pro range would seem to have the better options. This serves two different tastes instead of diminish focus on purely cosmetic options. For €2'250/pr before VAT to us Europeans ($3'000 to Americans), the Finnish One18 is a sterling example of the vivid sound school. It's the antithesis of the Meerschaum pipe and silk slippers aesthetic. This is about bare-knuckle full contact sport with the music, not some faraway remote connection over yonder. "Hear everything" is a hollow phrase because of how often it's used. How close to that fine ideal we are is recognized only in the negative. Something must show up that reveals more before we recognize that we made do with less. Even so, we still won't know just how much more remains unheard before we arrive at 'everything'. We never know. That's how this racket works. It's why audiophiles keep turning the hamster wheel. Here I'll simply predict that the arch-conservatively styled Finnish box will offer more to many even advanced listeners. That's because it works a bit like an über headphone. If you know how a first-rate headfi rig embarrasses most speaker systems on raw detail retrieval and linearity, the One18 becomes a very good stand-in. That's particularly so if you run it in a studio-type nearfield setup off the stable-mate Amp100.


What you should really take away from this review isn't so much specific to Amphion. It's about the more general 'trick' of nearfield listening. It abolishes the most common room-induced ills without effort. It reduces demands on the square footage that's appropriate to the task (forget about the unrealistic dream of the palatial dedicated sound room and convert an existing study, studio or bedroom now). It reduces demands on the speaker to behave de facto full-range. It reduces loudness demands to be less intrusive. It reduces amplifier demands. Really, it's about downsizing a number of audiophile beliefs to minimize expenses and enjoy rather better results with and for less. If you were to start thinking along those lines, then my meandering 8-page tale would have hit its intended target. If you also remembered that the Amphion One18 was a prime candidate for exactly such applications ... so much the better. That's because this is really impressive stuff disguised behind zero bling and only apparent normalcy. There clearly is an award contender amongst this pro range. To know which model offers the highest bang for the buck—the most ecstasy for the euro—simply requires that one first work through them all. This having been my first exposure, I'd have four more to go before I could make that assessment. That's not gonna happen. Your best bet to sorting it out might be to canvas Anssi's Gearslutz thread of professional users and search for consensus. I'll bow out by reiterating the essence. Pro speakers for consumers? If it's these, absolutely!

Amphion website