Specs & Pricing

Equipment
Report
Eben X-3
Loudspeaker
It’s fast and dynamically explosive, yet svelte and a snap to set up
Jim Hannon
A
couple of reasons why most
loudspeakers don’t sound like live
music are that they are dynamically
compressed and that they fail to accurately
replicate hard transients. Ultimately, they
just don’t have enough dynamic headroom
or speed. If you’ve ever sat up close at a big
band jazz concert or a piano recital, you know
that unamplified music can not only get very
loud, it also has tremendous dynamic swings.
In order to accurately reproduce the sound of
big chords on the piano, cymbal crashes, a full
brass section playing accented notes, or mallets
striking a tympani with intensity, a loudspeaker
must be able to explode dynamically without
acoustic breakup. It must also be able to
start and stop instantaneously to replicate
the leading edge of transients without
overhang. Think of the “ping” you hear at a
live performance when a trumpet player hits
a note or the hammers strikes the strings of
a piano. Large multi-driver horn speakers can
come close to the dynamic realism one hears
at a live concert, but this often comes at the
expense of coherency, natural timbre, and/or
cost.
The good news is that dynamic realism is
not limited solely to physically imposing and
costly horn-loaded speakers. The remarkable
MBL 101 E certainly has it, as do some large
multi-driver arrays and high-ticket speakers,
but at one-third of the cost of the MBL and
with an even smaller footprint, the Eben
X-3 from Danish manufacturer Raidho
captures the dynamic swings one hears at a
live performance. The X-3 combines five
mid-sized, but extremely fast cone drivers
with an exotic planar-magnetic tweeter. Like
the MBL, it has a rare ability to replicate
hard transients with blazing quickness but
without acoustic breakup or overhang. These
capabilities alone would be enough to qualify
the Eben as worthy of an audition, but this
Danish design also disappears like a great
mini-monitor, offering precise image focus
and fine inner detail. While it has dramatically
better natural timbre than most large multidriver
horn systems, the Eben falls a bit short
of the MBL’s overall excellence. Although
room placement and setup are relatively easy,
this Nordic powerhouse requires careful
system-matching because of its chameleonlike
ability to change sonic character based on
what precedes it in the audio chain. Yet with
the right components, the X-3’s performance
is of reference quality in many respects.
A problem with reviewing speakers this
revealing is that the sonic flaws one hears are
likely to reside in upstream components, not in
the Eben X-3s. For example, the PrimaLuna
Prologue Six monoblock amps I reviewed last
issue were outstanding with my Quads, yet I
heard a hint of midrange glare when these
tube amplifiers were matched with the Eben.
I was ready to ascribe this coloration to the
This Danish design
also disappears like
a great minimonitor,
has precise
image focus, and
fine inner detail
X-3, but then I remembered that this slight
forwardness wasn’t present when I heard the
smaller Eben X-Centric, which uses some of
the same drivers as the X-3, matched with
Chapter electronics at CES. Chapter’s U.S.
distributor, Jason Scott Distributing, kindly
sent some demo Chapter gear for me to try
with the larger Ebens. When mated with the
Chapter Couplet amplifier, the X-3’s slight
glare in the upper midrange vanished, the bass
was more extended and powerful, and overall
transparency was breathtaking. It’s no wonder
Raidho demonstrates the Ebens with Chapter
components.
The Eben X-3’s sonic prowess came
together on two of my favorite torture tests
for loudspeakers: piano and voice. The Eben’s
portrayal of the sound and scale of the piano
was incredibly realistic and compelling. Yes,
the perspective is typically first row rather than
82 December 2006 The Absolute Sound