I still recall the first time I bumped upon Estelon speakers. Among the most outlandish cabinets in the market. They have nothing in common with a typical cabinet, neither as a form nor as materials. The looks are absolutely stunning, the material of that sculpture the cabinet is made from reads “marble based composite”. Not your run of the mill wooden box with a few drivers attached, eh?
There are some new traits on this design, the most important of which is that the cabinet is sealed. No ports, no bass reflex, the Estelon Forza are a true acoustic suspension design. Acoustic suspension is my favorite theoretical design and while speaking with Alfred Vassilkov I came to realize that he is very fond of it too. There is something inherently more natural in the lower frequency extension and decay of these designs along with a few shortcomings that it’s up to the engineer to get solved, Alfred is one of the very few guys I can think of that knows how to properly implement Accuton ceramic drivers and a fancy cabinet into a homogeneous musical experience.
The most obvious trait of all Estelon speakers and of these, the Forza, playing in Munich with a Kronos Pro turntable with ZYX cartridge and a complete stack of CH Precision electronics, is imaging. To get a pinpoint imaging experience one must make sure to time align the drivers, again few speaker designers grasp this concept, and to properly cross each driver for the given cabinet. Trust me on this one, it doesn’t get any better than this when it comes to imaging, even under show conditions you can tell where the flauto traverso and the oboe are sitting in a 100 men strong orchestra. These works of art have almost no flaws, I could point out that they are not the deepest sounding speakers for the money but they do reach deep enough thanks to the two 10″ woofers. The design is a four-way five driver with a tweeter, mid-range and mid-woofer sitting on the top of the cabinet. Price might be a bit of an issue, it shouldn’t actually as this kind of engineering and sound don’t come cheap. The Forza retail for 110.000 euros and they are worth every penny.
I agree that not too many designers manage it implement Accuton drivers well.
Theoretically , a single driver in spherical horn will be the most coherent loud speaker. The Ferguson Hill uses one Lowther DX3 driver and transparent horn that it 5’ tall and 4’ deep .This mechanical amplification of a 114 dB efficient driver , with no crossover effectively makes the driver the size of the horn’s opening This results in a driver that is many times lighter than the air that it’s is driving. This dampening factor 50 times greater than traditional drivers . The lack of phase shift inherent in every crossover network between drivers results in air and harmonics and imaging unrivaled by traditional speakers.
All speakers should come in this color from now on. I was mesmerized by the hue while I listened. And they sounded fantastic too!