November 2007 Reviewed by Kevin East	Audes Credo Adagio / Credo Sentral / Universal U10 Home-Theater Speaker System

Description Model: Credo Adagio floorstanding speaker Price: $1999 USD per pair Dimensions: 40"H x 11.5"W x 13.5"D Weight: 57 pounds each Model: Credo Sentral center-channel speaker Price: $799 USD Dimensions: 17.9"W x 6.7"H x 11.8"D Weight: 15.4 pounds Model: Universal U10 wall-/stand-mounted surround speaker Price: $1200 USD per pair Dimensions: 11.6"H x 6.7"W x 10.2"D Weight: 10.1 pounds each System Price: $3998 USD (not including stands) Warranty: Five years against factory defects and workmanship

Features 6.5" SEAS woofers (Credo Adagio) 5" SEAS woofers (Credo Sentral, Universal U10) 1" soft-dome tweeters (all) Two-way bass-reflex design (Credo Adagio, Credo Sentral) Gold-plated binding posts Biwirable (Credo Adagio only) Optional stands (Credo Sentral, Universal U10) Finished in black paint with wood panels that can be stained in various hues

Back when you were based in a Soviet satellite state, you were in the business of making transformers and cables for a single customer: the Soviet Defense Ministry. But as economic and political conditions changed and your customer base eroded, you had perhaps one opportunity to ask the burning question that had kept you awake nights as you churned out parts to support the boot whose heel kept you and your country under control: If I could make anything, what would it be? Why not celebrate your emerging national musical conscience, led by émigré conductor Neeme Järvi and young composers Arvo Pärt and Erkki-Sven Tüür? Why not high-end audio?

Founded in 1959 to feed basic electronics components to the Soviet military, Audes started making high-grade loudspeakers in 1984 as the Estonian economy, anticipating official perestroika, if not glasnost, began to break the chains of Soviet bondage. Building on its electronics heritage, Audes has since grown into a multifaceted manufacturer that now offers, besides a full line of speakers, power amplifiers, speaker drivers, transformers, power supplies, and converters. Indeed, Estonia, known for exporting the likes of Järvi, Pärt, and Tüür, is now becoming known for exporting quality audio products as well.

Attributes

Audes markets a number of loudspeaker lines, led by the reference Orpheus and the cost-no-object Excellence series. The Adagio front channel ($1999 per pair) and Sentral center-channel ($799) are from Audes’s Credo line, which also includes the Grand Blues, Blues, Soul, and Jazz models. The U10 surround speakers ($1200/pair) hail from Audes’s Universal line, devoted to home-theater models. The system reviewed retails for $3998. The Credo Sentral and Adagio are timbre-matched, and all Credo models feature the highly regarded SEAS drivers, DH Lab internal wiring, and F&T polypropylene capacitors, all centered around a proprietary, hand-assembled crossover. The U10 surround speakers also use SEAS drivers.

The Credo Adagio offers a stunning visual treat. Its basic black box of MDF is graced on each side with elegant, curved, trapezoidal wood panels that extend about three quarters of the way up the side of the box from a similarly elegant plinth. The Sentral’s side panels match the Adagio’s. Although Audes’s literature asserts that the panels are stained veneers, they’re so perfectly matched that they look and feel like solid wood. Audes recommends spikes for the Adagios; the spikes are supplied, along with tiny cups for uncarpeted floors.

The Adagio’s drivers are mounted at the top of the front panel, with the tweeter offset above the woofer. Audes recommends mirror-image placement for the Adagios, with the tweeters toward the outer edges. The Sentral’s tweeter is sandwiched between the woofers in a D’Appolito-like configuration; however, the tweeter again is slightly offset above the woofers’ horizontal axis. The Sentral’s front baffle is raked gently back from bottom to top. The configuration requires that the Sentral be placed below the video monitor. If, like ours, your HT setup can’t accommodate this requirement -- our A/V cabinet has drawers below the video monitor, so the Sentral couldn’t go there -- Audes provides a stand on which to mount the speaker.

The Universal U10 is a nifty little number. It’s constructed from two slim, vertical boxes, the larger finished in a stained-wood veneer, the smaller in the same painted MDF as the other speakers. The review samples were stained in a stunning, glossy mahogany. In a variation on in-wall speaker design, the U10’s drivers are mounted in a very slim cabinet, which in turn can be mounted on (though not in) a wall. Audes offers two different stands for the U10s: the St U1 for bookshelf placement, the St U4 for floor placement. The review pair came with St U1s.

Installation

Setting up the Adagios was straightforward. The only assembly required is screwing the plinth to the bottom of the MDF speaker cabinet using the predrilled alignment holes. The U10’s St U1 stands are two black wooden blocks that are screwed into the bottom of the MDF box: one extends the smaller box to a plinth in a clever arrangement that requires some assemblage dexterity. First, only the plinth and the extension block are predrilled, so I found it necessary to position the extension block squarely on the bottom of the speaker cabinet and drill shallow pilot holes. Second, because everything is painted in a soft satin finish, you have to use care in holding the extension block in place while you’re screwing it and the plinth into the speaker cabinet. I recommend holding it in place with 2" blue painter’s tape. It has enough adhesive to hold everything in place, and leaves little or no residue when removed.

The Adagios were installed about 6’ apart on either side of our A/V cabinet, and the U10s to either side of the sectional sofa on their 29" stands, allowing ample room for the speakers to clear the rear and sides of the sofa. The Sentral was installed on a stand in front of the A/V cabinet, which required that the Adagios be moved forward about a foot so that the three front baffles were in the same plane. After tuning the speakers with my Onkyo TSR-800 receiver’s onboard utility, I fiddled with the Adagios’ placement, aiming both of them straight into the room, and then angling them with various degrees of toe-in. I found that the Adagios presented the best overall sound when aimed straight ahead. I aimed the U10s straight at the prime listening position, as well as angling them so that their tweeter axes crossed in front of the listening seat, as I had with the Canton GLEs. The U10s sounded best aimed at the listening position.

Although Audes features two active subwoofers on its website, their representative told me that they’ve been pulled from development because their quality did not meet the company’s standards. For this review, then, I used a Mirage LF100 active subwoofer. Because I’m not a big fan of Stygian bass -- all those messy standing waves -- I prefer the LF100’s Bypass option, in which the sub’s output is controlled by the receiver’s bass-management algorithms and the demands of the particular DVD/CD.

Beethoven at The Proms

Every summer, BBC Magazine devotes a special issue to The Proms, Britain’s annual orgy of classical and choral music, folk music, and opera. This year it included a DVD with Proms performances of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.4 and Nielsen’s Symphony No.4, "The Inextinguishable." The Beethoven concerto, recorded in 2004, features pianist Andreas Haefliger and Martyn Brabbins conducting the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. The DVD is a delight. The Proms are a relaxed undertaking: The orchestra is dressed down -- only Haefliger is duded up in white tie -- and the Royal Albert Hall’s main floor seats are removed. The result is standing room only, which gives the audience a stage-apron view of the musicians. The BBC’s camera crew covers the players and their proximity to the audience with customary understatement. Unfortunately, the concert was mixed down to two channels, so our 5.1 capability was wasted.

The Piano Concerto No.4 was composed while Beethoven struggled with the massive opening of his Symphony No.5, and he peppered the concerto with the same shifts of tonality from dark to light that would come to characterize the symphony. This is nowhere more evident than in the opening measures of the second movement, in which the piano responds to slabs of string chords (chum! chum! chum!) with a few dazzling, crystalline notes -- what one critic called Beethoven’s musical demonstration of "the truth of the old Biblical statement that ‘a soft answer turneth away wrath’." All in all, the concerto is finely played. Haefliger’s Swiss cool breaks a sweat in the Rondo: vivace third movement -- with that billowing shock of hair, he even looks like a concert pianist.

The Audes system faithfully captured Brabbins’ fine sense of pacing and Haefliger’s keyboard dexterity. Although I ordinarily prefer two-channel recordings without the "enhancements" offered by Dolby Pro Logic II, the latter listening mode spread the orchestra’s sound far beyond the Adagios’ boundaries while keeping the piano firmly at center stage. This is one instance in which Pro Logic II, no doubt assisted by the timbral matching of the Adagios and Sentral, added depth to the sound without throwing the soundstage out of kilter.

Estonia Rocks!

No sooner had the Audes speakers arrived than it seemed appropriate to audition them with a post-USSR Estonian celebration -- in this case, Erkki-Sven Tüür’s Crystallisatio, with the Tallinn Chamber Orchestra and Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir conducted by Toñu Kaljuste [CD, ECM 1590]. Crystallisatio is a series of five orchestral and choral sections -- Architectonic V, Passion, Illusion, Crystallisatio, Requiem -- loosely related to each other as well as to Tüür’s earlier works, especially his Architectonic series, Masses, and Requiems. Because Tüür’s orchestrations can include live electronics playing along with the orchestra, his works present special challenges in the midrange and highs. Passion is emblematic of this, commencing with a long passage for cello and bass that resolves, in a lovely shift from minor to major, into keening violins and complementary electronica. With lesser speakers, the later passages can be shrill as nails on a blackboard, but the Credo Adagios in stereo configuration rendered them flawlessly. The opening bass-and-cello passages were appropriately deep, free of messy irresolution or dropouts.

I double-checked the midrange with Enya’s lovely "Evening Falls…," from Watermark [CD, Reprise 9 26774-2], a tour de force of vocal clarity and Ella-ish diction, which the Adagios captured with breathtaking precision. Even after the Adagios’ rendering of Tüür’s Passion, I wasn’t sure they could handle deep bass. After all, even if Audes claims for them a frequency response down to 47Hz, it doesn’t necessarily mean you can actually hear anything more than a wheezy chuff from a two-way system at that frequency. But the Adagios hit the impossibly difficult low note in the bridge of "Orinoco Flow" (Watermark again) without a subwoofer. Now it wasn’t completely resolved, but instead of flattening out in a cosmic fart, it rolled off ever so gently. Once the sub was back in, the difference in resolution was apparent. However, I give high marks to a well-engineered two-way system that can (1) reach the note at all and (2) render it with a measure of musicality.

I listened to all audio material in stereo, with and without a subwoofer, and with and without Dolby Pro Logic II. I have a healthy distrust of DSP, especially when it tinkers with sound engineered for two-channel playback. What I found with the Audes system was that, frequently, the Dolby Pro Logic playback was too enveloping, too artificial, especially with recordings I know intimately in their stereo versions. I preferred plain ol’ stereo for the vast majority of recordings, simply because the Adagios were up to the task. If you have a good pair of speakers, like the Adagios, that get the midrange right, can dig deep enough to satisfy most appetites, and have an innate musicality -- well, who needs electronic gimmickry?

Featured presentations

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers provides ample opportunity for any home-theater array to strut its stuff, and the Audes complement did not disappoint. The attack of Isengard’s wolf-beasts, the Wargs (chapter 26), envelops the soundstage with furious intensity. The retreat to the inner walls during the raging battle for Helm’s Deep (chapter 39) -- in my opinion the finest battle sequence in cinema -- is washed across the soundstage; although the visual depiction of the battle is restricted to the screen, the sound puts you there, a hair’s breadth from Aragorn’s singing sword or an Uruk-hai battle axe. In the same sequence, a cutaway to the caves places the sound of the battle entirely -- and, in the case of the Audeses, convincingly -- in a muted, reverberant rear. During the Nazgul’s attack on Frodo in Osgiliath (chapter 50), the beast’s wings beat across the stage’s breadth. What the Audes system displayed was a coherence among the many speakers that provided a virtually seamless sonic integration.

The Audes system tackled The Incredibles with remarkable ease. From the subtle, such as Dash’s zip around the dinner table in chapter 5, to the decidedly unsubtle, such as Dash’s mad dash through Nomanisan Island’s topography (chapter 20), the Audes array captured unified statements of sound and picture. Similarly, the attack of the Mangaloids on the Mondoshawan (wherever do they get these names?) in chapter 5 of The Fifth Element was splashed across a huge soundstage as the Mangaloid fighters swoop relentlessly on their vicious errand. Ruby Rhod’s initial broadcast from Phloston Paradise (chapter 20) was virtually holographic. I got the feeling -- very much intended -- that what I was hearing was what the vacationers on the cruise were hearing: a radio broadcast that put me in the ship’s corridors. It’s a great sound-engineering team that can create a cinematic virtual experience, but it takes speakers as excellent as the Audes system to translate that experience into one that is just as convincing in the home.

The advent of surround sound has allowed engineers to manipulate the placement of the musical soundtrack so that it doesn’t fight for room in and among the dialogue and sound effects. Both The Two Towers and The Fifth Element frequently push the soundtrack to the surround speakers so that the music is literally in the background. For instance, Howard Shore’s score for The Two Towers, curiously not nominated for an Academy Award, unlike those for The Fellowship of the Ring and The Return of the King, is a work of awe-inspiring majesty whose strains inhabit the surround channels more often than not. A singular strength of the Audes U10s was their ability to shoulder the load of full orchestration on demand -- a compelling reason one might use a wide-range speaker for surround duties.

A brief comparison

Because the Adagios can be biwired, I took them upstairs into the music room and put them into the big rig: Legacy Classic loudspeakers, an original Sunfire amplifier, Van Alstine Omega Star III EC preamplifier, Parasound C/DP 1000 CD player, all wired through an Adcom ACE-515 power conditioner. I connected the Sunfire’s voltage outputs to the woofer and its current outputs to the tweeter, as with the Legacy Classics. At 2.5 times the driver complement (and nearly double the price), the biwired Classics throw a huge soundstage, portraying a silky, almost liquid midrange, smooth, deep bass, and clean, sibilant-free highs. I ran the Adagios through some familiar CDs: Steely Dan’s Aja [MCA MCAD 37214], Sarah Harmer’s All of Our Names [Zoe 01142 1032 2], and The Wailin’ Jennys’ 40 Days [Red House RHR CD 177]. (For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, the wealth of outstanding pop music coming out of Canada these days -- acts such as Harmer, the Jennys, Feist, Neko Case, Sam Roberts, Be Good Tanyas, and the New Pornographers, to name only a few -- deserves more than passing notice.)

While the Adagios displayed some reticence with deep bass, the midbass and midrange were as robust as in the A/V system, and the highs as crisp. No, the soundstage wasn’t as high or as deep, nor was there the depth of resolution that the Classics afford. However, the Adagios were unequivocally musical. Lovely vocals, such as Harmer’s "Almost" and the Jennys’ brooding epic, "Arlington," came off with enviable "thereness." Steve Gadd’s hallmark drumming on "Aja" was captured without glare or congestion, from the quiet time-marking of the cymbals to the frenetic coda. The Adagios have obviously been engineered to take full advantage of biwiring. If your budget for stereo speakers is in the $2000 neighborhood, you’d be well advised put the Adagios on your short list.

Summary

The Audes system I tested is a bit pricey at $3998, especially when you consider that it doesn’t include a subwoofer. However, its musical gifts, especially the Credo Adagios in stereo configuration, are considerable. Add to that the system’s ability to render a seamless cinematic sound image, surely enabled in part by the timbral matching of the Credo Adagios and Credo Sentral, and this system should satisfy all but the most demanding home-theater installations. Our A/V room is 20’ x 16’ x 10’ -- probably larger than the average home-theater venue. The Audes system filled it with cinematic or quality musical sound at will, and miles better than the PSB Image 2Bs we’ve been using. After having the Adagios around, I’ve gotten spoiled: We’ve gotta find a new home for the 2Bs. Then again, at four times the 2Bs’ price, the Adagios should be spoilers.

If you’re looking to move your home-theater sound up to match that honkin’ 1080p plasma video display you’ve just chunked down wads for, and you’re looking for an attractive package that will serve as a primary listening system as well, you owe it to yourself to give the Audes Credo Adagio, Credo Sentral, and Universal U10 a listen. They’ll cost ya, but they’re worth it.

Manufacturer contact information:

Audes USA, Inc.
58 Winding Brook Drive
Matawan, NJ 07747
Phone: (866) 24-AUDES
Fax: (866) 807-8967

E-mail: sales@audesusa.com
Website: www.audes.ee

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