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Sidney sold his company to Beatrice Foods (yes, really) for $100m in 1976 – he was serving in Jimmy Carter’s government at this point and was allowed no other business interests. By the end of the Carter administration, Beatrice Foods had undermined the Harman Kardon brand to the extent that Sidney was able to buy it back in 1980 for $55m.

Sidney Harman was 88 years old by the time he retired in 2007 – by then Harman International was sitting on a significant portfolio of electronics brands, including the likes of AKG, Lexicon, and Revel. The company had the sort of profile and credibility in the stereo world a brand like Samsung would quite possibly kill for – but instead the South Korean giant settled for a takeover. It acquired Harman International in early 2017 for a reported $8bn. 

Harman International probably fancied itself a company of heft and importance – but, of course, its activities are dwarfed by the scale of Samsung’s operation. Yet it seems to have been granted enough autonomy for the first fruits of its labour under new management to be precisely the sort of products one imagines Sidney Harman would be demanding were he still at the helm. And, of course, the range is called Citation.

The Citation Towers are the biggest and boldest statement in the current Citation range. A floorstanding pair of beefily powered speakers (with 200 watts of amplification in each tower), they’re comfortably over a metre tall and are that special three-dimensional, flared-ovoid, vaguely triangular shape for which the world of geometry has (as far as I can tell) no word. Cone? They’re cone-shaped, sort of. The impression of bulk is mitigated somewhat by the way the Towers seem to float a little above the plinths they’re mounted on. 

The good people of Kvadrat must be working triple shifts at the moment. The Danish textile manufacturer seems to have cornered the ‘hard-wearing fabric with good acoustic properties no matter the colour it’s dyed’ market – every wireless speaker brand and their uncle has beaten a path to the town of Ebeltoft. The Citation Towers are covered by blended-wool Kvadrat from top to bottom, in either black or grey. Black is, well, black – the grey is the sort of shade one can imagine Don Johnson favouring for the suit jacket he intends to roll the sleeves up on.

Each Tower deploys four drivers. From the top it runs ‘10cm doped paper mid/bass driver, 25mm silk dome tweeter, 10cm doped paper mid/bass driver’ with a 20cm doped paper woofer firing upwards from the bottom of the enclosure. Between the woofer and the three-driver array there’s a sculpted bass reflex port that vents at the rear of the cabinet, just above where the mains cable plugs in. That’s if cones can be said to have a ‘rear’. Frequency response is given as 28Hz to 22kHz, and sensitivity as a manageable 103dB.

Unsurprisingly, Class D amplification gets the nod – each woofer enjoys 100 watts of power, while each three-driver array splits the other 100 watts. Processing of digital audio is done by a 24bit/96kHz Texas Instruments DAC – which, for most people’s real-world purposes, is probably fine. But it’ll disappoint those who like a 24bit/192kHz download and/or are Tidal Masters subscribers.

Digital audio can, at least, be accessed from literally hundreds of sources thanks to built-in Google Chromecast. The speakers can also access any music stored on a local network, and they’re equipped with Bluetooth 4.2 (which, again, is just slightly a suboptimal number). 

Control is via Google Assistant, which means you are – through no fault of Harman Kardon’s – subject to the typical Google Assistant catalogue of unpredictable misunderstandings and general slow-wittedness. There’s also a touch-screen on the top of the right-hand ‘master’ Tower (it’s the Control Tower! Boom! Tish! etc.) – it is small, bright and, high-resolution. It’s also rather leisurely in its responses, which is much more Harman Kardon’s fault.      

Set-up is achieved using the Google Home app, and it’s here you can arrange your numerous Citation speakers into a multi-room system. It’s very straightforward to do – the real trick is getting Google Assistant to do as you ask once your multi-room set-up is established.

If you’re the patient type, it’s now you enter negotiations with Google Assistant about getting some music playing. If you’re more like me, you open the Tidal app on your phone, select a ‘Masters’ file of Karen O & Danger Mouse’s Lux Prima [BMG] and press ‘play’. Then try to hide your disappointment as the track quality indicator on the app switches down from ‘Master’ to ‘HiFi’ as casting begins.

Despite the theoretical step down in quality, there’s much to like – even to admire – about the way the Citation Towers serve up ‘Turn the Light’. Standing out in some free space and toed in just a fraction towards the listening position, the Harman Kardon pair generate a fairly broad, fairly deep, and fairly convincing soundstage. There’s nice three-dimensionality to the way the speakers place the acoustic guitar towards the rear of the stage as it plays the root chord changes, and the close-mic’d vocal enjoys a pocket of space up front and centre. Danger Mouse (Brian to his Mum) has got the whole low-temperature disco insouciance thing down pat, and the Towers allow the tempo to simmer elegantly.

Tonally, the Citation Towers sit just on the cool side of neutral. There’s plenty of heat in Henry Mancini’s The Music from Peter Gunn [RCA], but the speakers take just a touch of the sting from the blaring brass. The result is an undoubtedly easy listen, but not the most forceful or assertive you’ve ever heard. This kind of approach suits Karen O and Danger Mouse just fine, but where Henry’s concerned a little more attack wouldn’t go amiss.

That’s not to suggest the Towers are an entirely passive proposition. They have sufficient vim to tackle Fela Kuti’s Colonial Mentality [Arista] head-on, and manage to keep control over a stage that’s crowded with quite forceful performers. This recording is a fine showcase of the speaker’s ability with timing and integration, too – keeping the gimpy rhythm rolling while it’s punctuated from all directions is a test many a speaker has crumbled in the face of.

Avoid Bluetooth if at all possible (here it drains much of the animation and excitement from music) and stick to casting from your preferred sources, and the Towers are an adaptable, generally engaging listen. 

They’re certainly impressive at the bottom of the frequency range – kick drums, bass guitars, and so on have real depth and texture. These instruments display great discipline with the attack and decay of bass sounds too, which helps reinforce their timing credentials.

There are a couple of unusual blind spots in the frequency range, though. For all the good work the Harman Kardons do when digging deep, a little higher up – towards the area the woofer hands over to the brace of mid/bass drivers, at around 120Hz – they become a little boneless and tentative. And it’s a similar story at the opposite end: the tweeter strikes a nice balance between bite and grind, but towards the bottom of the upper frequencies (at 2.8kHz, where the handover down to the mid/bass drivers happens) there’s vagueness rather than positivity.

Which makes it sound like the mid/bass drivers are somehow culpable, but that’s not the case. They do really admirable work with the unbearably vulnerable voice in Lotte Kestner’s Secret Longitude [Saint Marie], describing all the details of her vocal technique but maintaining a human, rather than analytical, quality to the sound. The problem is not with the drivers, which on an individual basis are doing everything they ought, but with the way the active crossovers are managed.

How fair it is to deal in absolutes when considering a product so squarely designed to offer as much convenience as much as performance is debatable. Consider the Citation Towers purely by the standards of £2k per pair floorstanders and you can do better in terms of frequency integration and dynamism. Consider them as a self-contained system, though, one that’s capable of functioning as an element of a multi-room or surround-sound set-up without any undue aggravation, and they become quite a bit more valid. And… Google Assistant’s low IQ is not Harman Kardon’s responsibility.

Like virtually everything in hi-fi that doesn’t carry a lottery-winner’s price tag, the Citation Towers are a compromise. A trade-off. But they do nothing to blacken the proud heritage of the Citation name, and they really ought to encourage Samsung that at least some of its money was well-spent.

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

Type: Three-way, four-driver floorstander with ported bass reflex enclosure

Driver complement: 1 × 25mm tweeter, 2 × 102mm mid/bass driver, 1 × 203mm woofer

Frequency response: 28Hz–22kHz

Crossover frequencies: 120Hz, 2.8kHz

Impedance (ohms): 6

Sensitivity (dB/w/m): 103 

Dimensions (hwd, cm): 116 × 34.7 × 34.7

Weight (kg): 19

Finishes: Grey, black

Price: £2,199 per pair

Manufacturer: Harman Kardon

URL: harman.com

Distributor: Harman Kardon

Tel: +44(0)161 222 3325

URL: harmankardon.co.uk

Looks can be deceptive. Apart from that familial resemblance, there is almost no point of contact between what went before and the Sasha DAW. Well, not entirely, but aside from the upper module that’s more than 13% larger than its predecessor, a new lower module that’s over 10% larger than its predecessor, a revisit of the materials that go into the cabinet, the way the group delay mechanism works, resistor access panel, and even the binding posts… it’s the same loudspeaker!  

Given the significance of the Sasha in the Wilson line, this is as close as it gets to a clean-sheet design; it retains the basic parameters that explain why a loudspeaker system can remain at the top of the tree for 35 years, but it looks at every aspect of the design to re-evaluate the concept from first principles. In the process, the loudspeaker needs to appeal both to potential newcomers who hear Wilson Audio for the first time, and to those who have been there from the get-go. It needs to fit into the Wilson Audio ecosystem (both in terms of physical placement and equipment compatibility – more on that later – and in hierarchy of product line). And most importantly, it needs to sound damn good.

The drive unit roll-out is always the Cliff Notes version of loudspeaker description, but here that almost says the least about the loudspeaker. Wilson has used a 25mm soft dome tweeter and a 178mm mid-woofer in the top box, and a pair of 200mm bass units in the cabinet for the longest time in this design. In fairness, these have been subject to a range of changes (a quick look at the original WATT shows an inverted metal dome where the fabric dome sits). And while we are staying on the ‘in fairness’ part of the review, those drive units saw some extremely profound revisions in the last iteration, so this isn’t the first place to go looking for changes.

The crossover, too, remains the subject of evolution rather than revolution, although the resistor changes used to help the speaker match the unique bass characteristics of different rooms are now accessed through an easier to open panel. This is not some form of tailoring or DSP, but instead a very slight change in loading to suit different sized rooms. This helps a lot; someone buying a pair of Sasha DAWs in a ranch in America has a very different room load to someone doing the same in an apartment in Hong Kong.

Each successive iteration of the Sasha improves on the group delay system, which is tuned in situ, both in terms of slight changes to the crossover network, but more importantly changes to the pitch of the front baffle of the top-box. This has gone from a relatively simple adjustment to a very precise micrometer, allowing the most precise set-up in room it’s possible to get at the price. This really is a trickle-down from higher-end models; what began at the MAXX level and beyond appeared in the last generation of Alexia, and now makes it to Sasha. It can’t go any lower than Sasha of course, because the Sasha is the first in the range that includes that kind of top-box adjustment.

There’s a misplaced feeling of voodoo about this tuning, in so far as saying it presupposes a fixed head position for the listener. Nod your head forward and the time-alignment is out of alignment. While this has some very raw credibility, it misses the point of all that careful installation made with electrostatic loudspeakers that also uses alignment that notionally presupposes pin-point head position. In fact, the time-alignment works for an optimal space for the listener relative to the room, and time-alignment takes that into account. Yes, it still focuses the best part of the sound into a very precise sweet-spot and those not sitting in that sweet spot don’t get anything like the same benefit, but it’s not the kind of sweet-spot that requires a head-clamp. Rather it is more like ‘a zone of sweetness’ that is focused on the listening position. Move a small amount and you’ll still be in that zone. A deft installer with time enough to fine tune could extend that zone out wide enough to accommodate two listeners sitting close to one another, a deeper zone in front and behind the best position, or focus that sweet spot in so tight that you might want to think about a neck brace.

One of the strangest parts to this review is writing up the sound quality, in that the words just sprinted onto the page. This is usually a sign of a very good or very bad speaker indeed. In this case it is a positive sign. There’s an aspect of good audio that is often forgotten in the path toward getting ‘better’ sound; it’s also got to be enjoyable. There are a number of loudspeakers that you listen to and find yourself full of respect for the sound, but musically unmoved. They aren’t ‘sterile’ or ‘harsh’ sounding… just ‘not for you’. And often you hear consensus among those who heard that speaker; great speaker, does everything right, but don’t like the sound. The absolute opposite applies to the Wilson Sasha DAW

There’s a bit of a buzz going around the audio world about the Sasha DAWs. It’s one of those ‘have you heard them?’ moments, not dissimilar to the buzz about the mighty WAMM Chronosonics, but with wider accessibility. It’s between those who haven’t heard them and wonder what all the hype is about, while those who have heard them are weighing up which formerly vital organ they have to sell to get a pair. Even people far farther up the loudspeaker food chain have been known to re-evaluate their position, wondering how they can get that performance from their typically larger and more expensive existing loudspeakers, and often concluding that the Sasha DAW is a feasible upgrade to more expensive loudspeakers. This isn’t just the usual hyperbole and self-aggrandisement from reviewers (we can be guilty of being a touch ‘carney barker’ about high-end at times), but the genuine ‘why I got into this business’ moments of interest that don’t come round too often. And that is precisely what the Sasha DAW offers.

This isn’t jaw-dropping, unless the music calls for a spot of jaw-dropping. If you want jaw-dropping, put on von Karajan’s 1969 recording of ‘Wellington’s Victory’ [DG]. It’s like the 1812’s louder brother with more cannons. Be prepared to sit back a bit or turn the music down. The Sasha DAW will do jaw-dropping like you are guzzling down radium milkshakes.

Like all good Wilsons, the Sasha DAWs go crazy loud and crazy clean too. I played Ernest Ranglin’s ‘Surfin’’ from his 1996 album Below the Bassline [Island], played at close to club levels. You need a powerful amplifier to keep up (Constellation helps), but your ears surrender long before these speakers begin to hit problems. In fact, in normal rooms, your eyes give in from the pressure before the drivers!

But, where it’s simple to dismiss loudspeakers that go after impressiveness, this is only the first stage in understanding what the Sasha DAW does. Move over to some more textured and subtle music – such as Jackie McLean’s ‘Bluesnik’ (from the album of the same name, Blue Note, XRCD) – and the level of texture and layering is excellent, but even this hardly scratches the surface. Yes, as you go deeper you get the outstanding levels of detail, articulation, and solidity of instruments in a rich and large soundstage. But these are just world class aspects of a world class performance… there’s much more.

There is a level of musical communication here that comes along so rarely it stops you in your tracks. The big WAMM Master Chronosonic has it, and so does the Sasha DAW, albeit writ smaller. It’s the uncanny ability to listen to the intent of a musician as well as their performance, that marks the Sasha DAW out as outside the audio norms.

It didn’t matter what genre of music you played, or no matter how tortured the sound in an attempt to slip up the Sasha DAW; it was so musically assured, so sure-footed in its performance, it was an exercise in futility. ‘Me and the Devil’ from the Cowboy Junkies 1986 Whites Off Earth Now album [Latent] was telling. Well recorded but ‘earthy’ in performance, this can easily fall one of three or four ways: too flat sounding, too exaggerated, too loud, or undynamic. All of which depends on how good your speakers are at dynamic shading, staging, and sheer headroom. Compromise is the only way for most speakers, and compromise ruins the album. With the Sasha DAW here was no need for compromise, just music; raw and fun and enjoyable.

In fact, the Sasha DAW’s only real weakness is possibly also its greatest strength. This is not a loudspeaker that ever sounds bad (its greatest strength), but it also has the potential to sound truly soul-shakingly good. There will be some pairs of Sasha DAWs where that potential remains untapped. This is a loudspeaker where going to the extra place is not simply an exercise in navel-gazing but returns the kind of performance that can stop you in your tracks. Here’s a perfect test of the Sasha DAW’s true power; play something evocative like Jacqueline du Pré’s remarkable rendition of the Elgar Cello Concerto [Barbirolli, LSO, EMI]. Unless the system has been set-up with a pick-axe, you will get goose-bumps. When the system is fully on song and at its very best, you find yourself in tears. It’s an uncontrollable, almost atavistic, reaction to the music that happens when the system pulls the music into focus. You can find this in very well set-up systems, but usually in very well set-up systems that cost so much they could depth-charge the economy of a small island nation.

There is a tendency to view any suffix after the name of a product as simply a new version of that product. There was a Sasha W/P and a Sasha Series 2 before this, so one might be forgiven for thinking the Sasha DAW to be a ‘Mk 3’ model. Except that, once you actually hear the Sasha DAW, thinking that way is unforgivable. The Sasha DAW is no Sasha Mk 3… it’s Sasha reborn, pure and simple. It’s also perhaps the best way to honour Dave Wilson in a way he would have loved… with one of the best loudspeakers you can own right now!

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

Type: Two chassis floorstanding three-way loudspeaker

Drivers:

            Woofers:Two – 8 inch (20.32 cm)

            Midrange:One – 7 inch (17.78 cm)

            Tweeter:One – 1 inch, Dome (2.54 cm)

Enclosure Type Upper Module:Rear Vented Midrange, X&S-Material

Enclosure Type Woofer Module:Rear Ported Woofer, X-Material

Sensitivity:91 dB (one watt at one meter at 1kHz)

Nominal Impedance:4 ohms / minimum 2.48 ohms @ 85 Hz

Minimum Amplifier Power:25 watts per channel

Frequency Response:20 Hz –30 kHz +/- 3 dB room average response [RAR]

Dimensions (HxWxD):113.67x 36.83x 58.26 cm  

Weight: 107.05kg per channel

Price: £39,998 per pair

Manufacturer: Wilson Audio

URL: www.wilsonaudio.com

Distributed by: Absolute Sounds

URL: www.absolutesounds.com

Tel: +44(0)208 971 3909 

Meanwhile, the lower, ported, section of the Ekstra houses two more of those 134mm bass drive units. One unit is located on the bottom panel, facing the floor, while the second is located internally, directly above the first, in a sealed isobaric arrangement, handling only low frequencies and acting as an integral subwoofer system. The low-Q port is specially tuned to enable close to wall placement of the speaker in most rooms.

The chambered design is relatively simple – at least compared to labyrinths used by companies like PMC – but very effective, as it essentially means the loudspeaker is a two-way stand-mount sitting on a subwoofer with minimal interaction between the two. 

This system also helps make the Ekstra a relatively benign load. An eight-ohm load with minimum impedance dipping to around five ohms and a realistic sensitivity of 88dB/w adds up to make a loudspeaker that could be run by the humblest of electronics. However, with a loudspeaker of the Ekstra’s calibre, it’s more about quality than quantity, and a good amplifier like the Hegel H390 and the Primare I25 both worked perfectly with the Ekstra.

Installation is easy, as the speaker is relatively unfussy about placement. Precise positioning nets the best sound, but ‘sub-milimetre precise’ isn’t necessary. More important, however, is the nature of the floor beneath the speaker. As there is a down-firing bass unit, which is the outer driver of an isobaric chamber, surrounding it in thick shag-pile carpet from the 1970s is unwise. OK, so that’s ‘unwise’ in terms of undermining sound quality (and taste… who has these kinds of things today?) rather than a potential fire hazard. But if your living room looks like it was used in some low grade porno movies from the mid-1970s, you might be advised to look elsewhere. 

Usually, the way of reviews typically goes good points, bad points. Occasionally it’s a sandwich of good-bad-good or bad-good-bad. This time, in honour of Neat’s convention-breaking design protocol, we’ll break with convention and get the bad out of the way first. There seem to be two results from listening to a Neat loudspeaker; either an almost immediate bonding to the way it sounds, or a tepid ‘hmm’. Occasionally, those who weren’t initially impressed warm to the sound of the Neat as they shake off years of listening to what ultimately was the wrong product for them. Many will never make that flip and come to consider Neat loudspeakers as little more than a brand to cross off the short-list. In the UK, such things are given the term ‘Marmite’ after the dark yeast spread that is either a salty-umami jar of heavenly deliciousness, or some form of food-grade rust protection you might use on the underside of a car. You can’t know your feelings about Marmite until you try it, and very few people are so-so about the stuff; it’s either ‘love it’ or ‘make it stop!’ Neat is a ‘Marmite’ loudspeaker and the Ekstra is perhaps the most Marmite-y of the lot.

OK, so in the pantheon of ‘different’ sounding loudspeakers, Neat is relatively mild next to things like the late ‘lamented’ Rehdeko designs or really quacky early Klipshorns (both of which have their followers, even today). However, in a world of increasing convergence of sound (due in part to everyone using the same group of measurements, often on the same suite of measuring instruments), the Neat does stand somewhat apart. That will mean some will listen and say ‘thanks, but no thanks’, usually recognising the good points of the design, but realising those good points do not apply to them. Others will be able to do that without even going within 10 miles of a pair of loudspeakers, because they define their musical options at one remove and rely on measurement to define one of the least measurement-defined parts of audio design.

To get an idea of what Neat is all about, let’s put a scenario together. You go to a small music venue, a folk singer turns up and plugs into a small, well-tuned PA system and sings a small set. He’s no Bob Dylan, but he’s very good, and backed by a small semi-acoustic band. If that is your idea of Hell (because it’s not bangin’ Techno played at eye-popping levels, or it isn’t a piece of classical music played without amplification in a natural acoustic), then the chances of you finding the charms of the Ekstra reaching you are remote at best. On the other hand, if the only thing missing from this scenario to make it perfect is ‘a pint and few mates’, this might well be your next loudspeaker. That may sound flippant, but the more you listen to the Ekstras, the more you realise that’s exactly what it does so well.

This means that what you get is a bass performance that defies all logic of loudspeakers of this size. It’s not overblown at all; if anything, the bass is taut to the point of dryness, but there’s a lot of bass energy in reserve. This makes for a very tidy and tuneful presentation and is particularly good at reproducing the sound of a bass guitar. As ever in such cases, Jaco is called for, and Pastorius’s fretless bass voice sings clear here, to the point where Jaco Pastorius [Epic] got played in its entirety and led to Joni Mitchell’s Hejira [Asylum]. That too spun on for the whole album, and led (through slightly less obvious steps) to listening to all of the eponymous Silly Sisters album [Chrysalis], then to Richard and Linda Thompson’s I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight [Island], then to Richard Thompson’s solo career, then to other guitarists, and on, and on.

A pattern emerged here. You put on an album and you listen to the album, not a few tracks. However, that ‘on to other guitarists’ showed it’s not just a folk-lover’s loudspeaker, and not just a walk down memory lane (to the pub serving foaming pints of Scrummock’s Aulde Fetlock). Out came Vök and Little Simz and Stormzy (‘cos I is street) and it all worked. I didn’t find pen hitting paper too often though, because my attention was focused on the music rather than the sound it makes. A good thing for a listener, not so good for someone with pages to fill!

Strangely though, this lack of description of the sound a speaker makes is what the Neat is all about. You listen to music, then listen to more music, and never once give a damn about the performance of the loudspeaker. To discuss it in audiophile terms seems to be like dragging the conversation back to the prosaic, or worse, back to an entirely different conversation in which you have become thoroughly uninterested.

Nevertheless, a job is a job. The Ekstra is a very fast sounding loudspeaker with outstanding bass in terms of both depth and speed. It is exceptionally good at the presentation of musical coherence, and when listening to a piece of music (such as ‘Love in Vain’ by The Rolling Stones from the Stripped CD [Polydor]) the sense of interplay between musicians in this live cut from the rehearsal room really puts you in there with the Glimmer Twins.

Detail is good but only slightly above average in its class. That being said, upper register detail is very good, and free from aggression or brashness. Staying with the Stripped album, the live arena tracks are some of the least listenable tracks I own, even down to an occasional sense of the band ‘phoning it in’. Any hint of top end emphasis on tracks like ‘Street Fighting Man’ make the album descend into thin, nasty brightness, and the Ekstra managed to keep that top end in check while opening out the top end sound.

Ekstra is also a relatively forgiving loudspeaker, twice over. It needs a good, but not brute-force, amplifier, but more importantly it’s very forgiving on less than wonderful pieces of music that are swathed in compression. Muse’s ‘Invincible’ from Black Holes and Revelations [Helium-3] is an anthemic piece almost ruined by compression. While the Ekstra cannot undo the damage made by such compression, it can – and does – make it seem less bothersome.

You’ll notice that most of my recording callouts here have not gone too far down the classical rabbit hole. I noticed this several hours into the listening session. It’s an odd sensation; it’s not that the loudspeakers were bad on classical music – in fact, they played classical music pretty well on balance – but I found myself playing other music each time I thought about playing classical pieces. In later introspection, I can’t quite tell whether that was down to the loudspeaker gently moving me away from music it cannot do to the same degree of justice, or it exposes my own musical predilections to be less catholic than I would like them to be. In other words, it might have been ‘me’ rather than ‘it’ opting for the non-classical music. To date, I’m still not sure on this and where I run with it. Playing them to a true classical-loving friend (who also ‘got’ the speaker) they played a lot of Bach through them and were surprised by that (“I didn’t realise how much I like Bach” was the reply). I’ve come to the conclusion that the Ekstra isn’t a musical filter, but it engages with your own musical filters with a high degree of accuracy.

What I also found myself not putting down on page too often was imaging. This time, it was more a function of the loudspeaker than me. Imaging here is good, but very much not a priority. So that holographic soundstaging and the kind of presentation that makes a loudspeaker really attractive to some people is a little bit less obvious. It’s more a bolus of sound between the loudspeakers than a three-dimensional presentation of sounds around the room. In fairness to Neat, most concerts I’ve been to have a similar ‘soundstage’ to the Neats and no one has ever walked away from a concert saying ‘what great imaging!’ Nevertheless, if you define your musical presentation by a walk-in soundstage, the Neat may struggle to meet those demands as well as some other designs.

A lot of the rest of the performance is marked out by a very high degree of effortlessness in all things. Take its dynamic range, for example. This is not the kind of loudspeaker that presents a powerful dynamic range up front, but the more you listen to it, the more you realise it’s incredibly dynamic… it just hides that dynamic range in a kind of British sense of understatement. The same applies to its ability to portray the light and shade of microdynamics; there is no immediate sense of a microdynamic superstar, but all those subtle shades and textures are there in full effect.

Finally in the assessment phase, comes the pace, and it’s here that the Ekstra ekcells. It’s a beat-hound; put on a piece of music with even the merest sense of a beat and the Ekstra will sniff it out and play it for you. Not push it upfront or force you into a beat when listening to talk radio, but when you find yourself listening to the meter of the speaker instead of thinking about hand grenades when listening to one of the more pompous orators on Radio 4, you know there’s something special in the beat-reproduction of the Ekstra. It makes news sound like poetry, it makes a click track sound like Buddy Rich, and so it goes on. It’s an exceptionally good rhythmic performer, one of the best I’ve heard in a long time. Perhaps more so because its rhythmic properties fall under that whole ‘effortless’ part of the performance. Not only was it great at keeping a beat – even those crazy beats like Pink Floyd’s ‘Money’ or Dave Brubeck’s ‘Blue Rondo a la Turk’ – but because it does it without any kind of effort or difficulty.

In truth, I struggled with not struggling with the Neat Acoustics Ekstra. I felt the review process shouldn’t be this easy, and in truth I laboured over the writing more than normal, trying to find what it did so well. Then the speakers went away and then it hit me. I’d imprinted on them like a duckling to its mother. There was something so musically adept and enjoyable about the Ekstra that it made the playing of music a vital thing. That is the most obvious thing when you hear them and the sappiest thing you can write.

Attributed to everyone from Elvis Costello to Frank Zappa, the quote “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture” holds a lot of truth here. The loudspeaker is not one that opens itself to critical inspection, even though it passes muster in almost all aspects for many. It’s a loudspeaker that you either ‘get’ or ‘don’t’ and if you get it all those details about imaging, dynamics, rhythm, timing, and so on are all academic. It’s just a bloody good loudspeaker and all the other considerations melt away. It’s little wonder that I got the downsides out of the way first; if you really let the Ekstra get under your skin, it’s like insulting a family member.

The interesting thing with this is the last time a loudspeaker and I bonded in the same way, that was a Neat loudspeaker too. That time it was one of the most expensive ones in the group. This time it’s way more affordable. There’s clearly a lot of commonalities shared here between the Ekstra and the Ultimatum, and the difference in price and performance might be marked, but they have more in common than you might expect for the price.

Neat Acoustics Ekstra’s tagline is ‘Thinking Inside The Box’ and while that is absolutely correct, it’s so much more than that. Ekstra is a loudspeaker that does manage to squeeze a quart into a pint pot and does it perfectly. You need to be fairly well in lockstep with the sound of Neat (put another way, the sound Bob from Neat likes), but if that is the case, the Ekstra will melt your heart, extra fast. 

TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS

System: 2.5-way isobaric bass reflex, incorporating integral isobaric subwoofer

Drive units: 1× 134mm LF/Midrange unit; 1× Ribbon HF unit; 2× 134mm LF units

Impedance: 8 Ohms (minimum 5 Ohms)

Sensitivity: 88dB/1 watt

Finish: American walnut, black oak, satin white

Size (H×W×D): 110 × 17 × 25cm

Weight: 18Kg each

Price: £2,999 per pair

Manufactured by: Neat Acoustics

Tel: +44(0)1833 631021

URK: neatacoustics.com