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To say it right off, Elac’s active AM150 box is a speaker between two worlds. Equally comfy with digital and analog, it’s at home in the recording studio as it is on the desk top or in the living room. What Elac manages in connectivity and employment scenarios for €518/pr is at least in theory very sound.
Cosmetically it’s pragmatic studio wear except for the rounded corners. Haute design it’s not but the stock black version is available in matte white lacquer too which ups the ante. The workmanship of the enclosure is very good meanwhile but with speakers it’s really the innards which count. Here the Elac weighs in with a big fist.
This is an active 2-way bass reflex affair with 130mm glass-fiber reinforced paper cone and 25mm silk dome with elliptical wave guide for matched dispersion at the crossover frequency. The port is on the back and since the electronics have to be somewhere not round but a horizontal slot. Each cabinet contains two class A/B amps. 50 watts go to the mid/woofer, 25 watts to the tweeter. As plain as the front may look, the rear panel offers more than the usual binding posts - none of those in fact. |
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Time for tunes. Because the weather just then had turned to gray gruel with me in the doldrums of wint’ry melancholy, I reached for some proven TLC by way of Nada Surf’s Let Go to cue up the ballad "Blond on blond" for softly plucked guitar at left, mallet-tickled cymbals, standing tom with deep reverb, then Matthew Caw’s longing vocals augmented by chorus and minimalist percussion. First impressions had my thumb erect. Elac’s AM150 cast an overall very clean soundstage. Deep bass aside which such small speakers can’t do, everything else was sufficiently accounted for. The toms had mass, the guitar was tonally clean, the vocals neither muddled nor nasal, the cymbals gloomily growling or feathery sparkling depending on what they were struck with. Tonally I was very impressed particularly considering the price where certain things are expected to fall by the wayside.
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| Time for those thumbscrews then and an album with the arguably ugliest cover treatment of any in recent music history. That would be Helmut Brandt’s Mainstream Orchestra Chez Pep. I’m allowed to say that. I was the sound engineer during its mix down. Whilst in this context that's liable to sound self important, such involvements are a true boon for any equipment review. Here I’ve been over every track at least 200 times to know each inside out. That's useful.
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I regard Helmut Brandt (1931 – 2001) as one of Germany’s most unusual Jazz musicians. In the end as arranger, he was a member of the RIAS Big Bang for 40 long years. Nearly unto death he made at least one weekly appearance at Wilmersdorf’s smoke-doused Aue digs. His complex arrangements were filled with sly references and literal quotes. His infamous baritone sax clattered like an ancient jalopy, his bullfrog cheeks coaxed out the sweetest of sounds and solos could debauch into heavy Rock. From a mastering perspective this particular album is quite the hammer as its often six-manned wind section demands a certain degree of resolution to separate out the individual instruments.
The "Otti Olsen" 6/8 Jazz ballad features constant solo changes from its four-part chorus with Brandt on clarinet, Eddie Hayes on flügelhorn, then Brandt again on baritone sax. How did the Elac keep up? First impressions stuck. Tonally the small speaker acted very mature. Each woodwind on its own seemed properly voiced and natural without apparent gaps or seams across its range - the blackwood meltingly gentle, the slightly echo-y flugelhorn outright fluffy and the baritone sax hoarse as the chuckle of an aged but very charming diva. Only the high end as represented by the cymbals could have stood a tad more gleam for my tastes.
Perhaps that was bias. In 1995 we mixed this recording without treble-boosting aural exciters or other devil-worshipping kit. Possibly the Elac was innocent. On tonal balance my thumb remained stiffly upward. The little boxes really sailed through this material with true maturity which ideally should be expected from any perfected match between amps and drivers in an active speaker design. On micro resolution the AM150 got a bit sloppier. Granted, cleanly separating four instruments which frolic simultaneously in mostly the same frequency bands isn’t exactly chopped liver.
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Despite realistic clean coverage of each soloist and the harmonic ‘en bloc’ choral passages, it was clear that surgical separation into tonally and spatially discrete performers didn’t always come off. For a reality check in the same price class I reached for the Trends Audio TA10.2 SE integrated and Nubert’s nuBox 101, solo sans sub of course. First bass shed a few grams. The Elac was clearly the more endowed. Simultaneously the stage seemed to broaden, in general and also relative to space between performers. The Trends + Nubert combo had less low-down displacement but countered with more precise and dimensionally less compacted staging. Reverting to the Elac reintroduced more bass and greater weightiness in the lower mids.
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From Jazz we advance to a mix of chamber music and electronica compliments of Austrian pianist and elfin vocalist Anja Plaschg better known as Soap & Skin. Her Lovetune For Vacuum album is a mostly gloomy theatrical work with plenty of pain in the lyrics and sound but also moments of iridescent beauty. "Extinguish Me" begins with piano arpeggios and Anja’s vocal tremolo. Slowly strings enter and the voice deepens with choral doubling. Smack in the midst of the song a bright refrain kicks in that rides on great vocal vehemence. The Elac reconfirmed earlier impressions. The piano was gratifyingly grand and even the singing seemed very natural where many speakers in this class betray a tendency for the nasal, hollow or other colorations. The Elac clearly fought for greater evenness.
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Dynamically both on the micro and macro scale I had to subtract points however. I knew this sudden refrain to be dynamically edgier, sharper and meaner. The Elac rendered it more good-natured and civilized. Again, this wasn’t tonally. Even with the +3dB treble contour this effect remained. While the top end did glisten more, being blown away by the lead vocal as hoped for didn’t occur.
On "The Sun" still from the same album there’s additional electronica by way of sequencers, rhythmic noises, drones and hum. The Elac applied the same maturity. It rendered all the effects hashery very effectively and believable, albeit without infrasonic foundation. Dimensionally the speaker behaved typical for a near-field monitor. Horizontal separation was admirably precise unless things got too complex. Tremendous depth of field or oft-invoked holography meanwhile weren’t part of the curriculum. |
Last but not least I cued up a bit of Soul/Electric Jazz with Idris Muhammad’s Loran’s Dance. It sports a 10-minute long very cool mid-tempo number based on a simple Fender Rhodes groove. It presents drummer Idris Muhammad with all the space to shine without succumbing to any one-upmanship pressures. Wow, this really had the Elac at hello! The Rhodes was at once silken and bell-like, the trombone taking over the theme was flufficacious at its very best and the drums kicked hard despite the overall chilled vibe. This somewhat paradoxical total impact took getting used to. Though seemingly primed for small pro or home recording studios, these small boxes seemed to hit their stride with relaxed groovy fare.
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While the properly crisp brass solos of this 70s production were mastered defensively—and likely bedeviled by good ol’ albeit not deliberate tape compression—the AM150 handled them with aplomb for true enthusiasm without qualification. So far I’d only gone in analog though. How ‘bout digital? |
This begged for an A/B because I could leash up another coax to the digital out of my Marantz SA7001 SACD deck and simply switch between analog and digital on the Elacs’ backs. The difference wasn’t dramatic but audible. The digital input seemed more pressurized, edgier and more dynamic. This was apparent on the Helmut Brandt CD as well as the effects-imbued Soap & Skin – nothing earth-shaking but definitely beyond mere nuances. On balance however I’d personally favor the Marantz over its analog outputs. The overall character was harmonically softer and thus more becoming over the long term – though that’s also a question of music. Whoever fronts the Elac AM150 with a CD player ought to permanently connect both scenarios to be able to flip at whim.
Conclusion: How’s it all add up? A happy encounter with a lot of value for the money. Developing a speaker with such universality of application and such a friendly budget makes it impossible to be all things to all people. One has to define a niche, focus down on specific talents and fix up a particular profile. That’s been successful. Today’s tester has clear character. For the money it’s prematurely mature – neutral and sufficiently loud and bass stable without cheap tricks. I put Elac’s AM150 through its paces over two months and enjoyed my time. Obviously you can get more if you spend more. What distinguished this box from my bigger rig were concept-typical subtractions in the low bass, lesser scale and precision of the soundstage and stepped back microdynamics. Bigger budgets will thus track the finest breathers on Soap & Skin better. Ditto for the dying embers of electronic decays and damped piano strings. Costlier kit won’t strut wobbly switches and instead seduce us with classier cosmetics. But - those of leaner wallets who want a good near-field monitor for Jazz, Pop or Rock mastering or an uncomplicated unusually mature-for-the-money living room speaker that merely requires a source ought to be more than satisfied.
The Elac AM150 was characterized by:
- Astonishingly clean sonics for the sticker. From the upper bass through to the treble this speaker seemed very even-handed.
- In the neutral EQ setting, the treble veered towards the soft rather than crisp.
- Low-bass compromises are intrinsic to the concept but bass output and extension were surprising given the size.
- Being dynamically lively, macro and micro limits were still just typical for this breed rather than special virtues.
- Realistic soundstage size with decent ambient recovery. As long as the music avoided undue complexity, localization remained strong and nicely separated.
- Various filters allow adaptation to room and listener.
- For quiet levels (or music with broad dynamic range) self noise was somewhat high in the near field.
Facts:
Concept: Compact active 2-way with rear-firing slot-loaded port
Dimensions and weight: 290 x 195 x 250mm HxWxD, 7.6kg
Other: Digital inputs, selectable filters |
