Blast from my past – In August 2013 I reviewed then bought Albedo's Aptica as the first Accuton speaker I ever wanted to own. It's shown here in our Villeneuve/Switzerland digs. Using 1st-order filters and a transmission line with internal resonators to cancel the cab's primary organ-pipe modes, this very handsome Italian 2-way tower with its rakish lean and exclamation-mark profile remains on hand even today. It's my resident example of a 'modern sound' speaker that's not lost its bloom in over a decade. If I listened to it long-term again, I'd simply change my present electronics to add the Vinnie Rossi L2 linestage. That's it, a small concession which adapts system tuning to a new member in the band. Hard drivers sound hard. Really? In this implementation, they don't. Neither did any of the Raidho models I reviewed. It's good to second guess popular sentiments. Just because they can be true most of the time, there's nearly invariably an exception which makes a mess of tidy rules. In fact, I've since met another ceramic champ I'd love to own for my upstairs system: ModalAkustik's MusikBoxx monitor. That combines a current-gen bigger Accuton mid/woofer with my favourite tweeter, Mundorf's dipole AMT in a time-aligned monitor with acrylic cabs and external xovers. There's indeed many different ways to get to Rome. The only reason I've not revisited the Albedo brand is that except for one model below Aptica already covered, everything else has gotten ever bigger, heavier and costlier to meet distributor demands from the Far East. My room and wallet simply don't keep up with those trends nor does my spare bathroom turned storage handle large crates. Aptica thus remains my sweet spot for a compact ceramic floorstander 12 years on.
