On Friday morning, I drove over to the little town of Novato, California for two reasons. The first was to return the Quad Electrostatics and the Quad tube amps to Ken Askew. I admit, I hated to see the Quads go. The second, and a much more exciting reason, was to hear Ken’s newest speakers, the Spatial Audio Lumina open baffle speakers. The cost $20,000 to $25,000 per pair, including Servo bass amps. Ken’s are a magnificently finished Makassar rosewood. They are 4 feet tall, 16 inches wide, three inches deep and weigh a staggering 150 pounds. I have been very critical about the looks of the Holograms, but the Luminas are simply sleek and very beautiful.
Spatial’s new X32 coaxial drivers use the world’s first pure beryllium compression diaphragm. It uses a 35 pound magnet and is 96dB efficient. Then there are twin servo controlled bass drivers that are driven by provided 375 watt servo mono block amps. In Ken’s room they were flat down to 15Hz. This is both a good and bad thing in my opinion.
There is no doubt these are world-class speakers, I don’t know of any traditional deadened box speaker that can hold a candle to what I heard at Ken’s house. Ken was driving them with a Pass Labs XA 30.5 and yes they use a passive not digital crossover. I would have loved to have heard them with Pass’ newest XA 30.8 amp.
They played piano recordings better than any multi-driver speaker I have ever heard. The sound of vocals was equally involving. There is no doubt in my mind that this speaker handles really deep bass better than any speaker I have heard. By really deep I mean bass below 30Hz. The problem I have with bass that deep is it often excites the room or things in the room. Yes this can be handled by acoustic treatment, but I personally don’t want to listen to music in a room that looks like a recording studio. I am perfectly satisfied with a speaker that can play bass between 30Hz and 40Hz as long as it can do this in a very dynamic, powerfully and big way. Still I know a lot of people who don’t feel that way and this speaker truly plays bass I have seldom is ever heard on recordings.
There is no way I can compare this to my system. Too many variables, different room, different amp, digital source verses vinyl source. Still, I really, and I mean really, liked these speakers, and am glad I got to spend Friday listening to them visiting with Ken.