Amphion Argon 2 Bookshelf Speaker Pair birch

Description

Amphion is based in Finland, and when I first saw their speakers at the High End show in Germany, I was intrigued by the flaring front baffle -- it was an indicator that there was more to the argon2 than met my eye. I sat down for a listen, and my initial impressions were positive. I then talked to the Amphion staff about the company's design methodology, and this really perked me up.

The argon2 is the successor to the company’s original argon speaker and uses a 1" aluminum-dome tweeter and a 6.5" aluminum woofer in a gorgeous-looking cabinet. Amphion crosses the tweeter over to the woofer at 1200Hz. This is the lowest I’ve encountered in a loudspeaker I’ve reviewed. It also raised my eyebrows a bit because usually when you try to bring the tweeter down too low, distortion and power-handling problems can arise. However, Amphion says they’ve overcome these. Still, it begs the question: Why are they doing it?

According to Amphion, one of their goals is to get the crossover out of what they consider a critical range of human hearing: 2kHz to 5kHz. This, they feel, is where the ear is most sensitive to anomalies that crossovers can cause. Keeping crossover elements out of critical frequency regions isn’t new; other companies try to do it too. But instead of riding the tweeter down low like Amphion is doing, most will make use of the woofer driver (or midrange driver in a three-way design) and push that higher in frequency.

Amphion also touts something they call Uniformly Directive Diffusion. What this pertains to is the off-axis response of the speaker. Essentially, the company is trying to optimize the response heard at the listening position by concerning itself not only with the on-axis response (the direct sound from the speaker), but the off-axis response too (the sound that reflects off walls, floor, ceiling, etc.). It’s the sum of the direct and reflected sounds that creates what you hear in your listening chair. The guys at Amphion joke that some loudspeakers’ off-axis response curves "look like the Swiss Alps." Amphion’s own goal is to have output decrease as frequency increases and continue to do so the further you get off axis.

The tweeter’s crossover frequency is important for this goal too because the driver has inherently wide dispersion. Woofers have good dispersion too, provided that they’re not forced too high in frequency, where they’ll start to beam. That’s the problem some companies have when they push their woofers up too high. Bringing the tweeter down as low as Amphion does -- providing you don’t have distortion and power-handling problems -- gives you wide and even dispersion that integrates ideally with the woofer’s own dispersion pattern up to that frequency.

The argon2 is average in size for a bookshelf loudspeaker, measuring 15" high by 7 1/2" wide by 12" deep. You can get it with or without real-wood veneers. On my review sample, all sides except for the front are veneer over MDF. On the front, Amphion uses layers of wood that are glued together to run deeper around the tweeter area. Doing this allows the company to carve out that flare and recess the tweeter. I suspect that this flaring front baffle, which horn-loads the tweeter to a degree, is instrumental in allowing Amphion to cross over the tweeter so low. Overall, the speaker is splendid to look at, and all aspects are finished to such a high level that I would have suspected that the speaker costs more than it does.