A year or so before Covid when I started to get back into audio and I was looking and reading at everything I could find I rant across Voxativ. Holger Adle, a Mercedes ICE engineer back before starting the loudspeaker company, now Ines Adler has a factory in Berlin and makes every single piece of her loudspeaker driver in house. The cabinets are made my a German piano manufacturer so the cabinets are just pure craftsmanship. The upgraded cones are made of laminated compressed wood and she states that they’re 100 time stiffer than paper at the same mass.
I fell in love with the idea of a full range high efficiency crossoverless motor as being the purest form of getting a signal from an amp to your ears. Every loudspeaker design comes with advantages but since in physics you don’t get something for nothing, there are also disadvantages. A full range drive is being asked to do a lot, go down low, extend up high and it’s not easy to get that done with one cone. There are engineering solutions that help, the low mass, very stiff cone, super high efficiency (100 dB @ 1W @ 1 meter) help with the bass speed and and a large 8" driver move more air but still, you’ve got to throw a lot of technology at a driver to make up for the difficulty of a full range design and that’s why you see most of the loudspeakers in the world not going in that direction.
After moving into my apartment I had the opportunity to completely rethink what I wanted in my 2 CH system and I had a long term vision of a low power high efficiency amp and speaker combination as the end goal. Single full range drivers image well. I kind of discovered that with my Zu speakers, well Zu isn’t really full range single driver but mostly it is. The Omega speakers I had after the Zu took everything a step further in that single driver design but leveraging the high efficiency, “the first watt is the most important” is what they say. It’s where the Nelson Pass amps get their name.
So cutting to the chase, I couldn’t plunk down the money for a pair of Voxativs as I was purchasing all my other source gear and to be honest, Voxitiv stuff doesn’t come up for sale in the used market all that much. This weekend the planets aligned and a pair of Voxativ Zeth showed up for sale. It was the same pair that had gone up for sale about a month or two ago in Florida… they were sold and that was the end of that. This time around however they were in NYC so much closer. A guy that tried them in his system, poor synergy and decided to move them quick. His trial and error, my gain. He paid to get them to NYC from Daytona Beach FLA and I got a bit of a discount on the original sale price, so I’m a happy camper. They’re not flawless, (I’m the fourth owner) but a little bit of elbow grease will get them back up to a 9 from the 8 I’d rate them at now. One nice thing is that these have the upgraded PiFe version of the 1.8 drivers in the Zeth, the PiFe drivers have the laminated wood cone instead of the paper cone and the wood phase plug. Basically bringing the efficiency up to 100 dB instead of the standard driver’s 94 dB rating and the wooden phase plug is supposed to take away any potential harshness up top.
I got them home, unboxed, they’re sitting quietly as… I don’t have a cable to use on them! They need bare wire or banana, and I can’t use the spade terminated cables I’ve got home. The only cable I had with bananas I gave to a neighbor a few months ago. lol
Very beautiful, and until I figure out a cable situation, I can’t play them so it’s a good thing they’re so beautiful. I’ve got a vibration isolation solution in the works but I’m not in a rush to get these things complete. I want to enjoy the experience of setting them up to my liking as they may be the last high end piece of audio gear I buy for a looooong time. Thank you for listening to me ramble on, it’s exciting.
@M0N any recommendation for an all copper speaker cable solution? Ines says they like good copper no fancy alloys so clean slate. I would have tried them with my Kimber Ascent but I’d have to get them reterminated and I’m not going to bother with that and they probably deserve something better anyway.