Has Serinus been demoted? You might well ask. This month, instead of reviewing a $58,000 stereo amplifier, I’m tackling a $599 powered loudspeaker system.
Truth be told, I’m always on the lookout for products that deliver outstanding sound at bargain prices. And since I maintain in my living room a modestly priced system built around powered speakers—this in addition to the far costlier system in my dedicated listening room—it’s an easy fit for me to evaluate low-priced products in a real-world context. Besides, I’ve been impressed by Vanatoo’s achievements ever since my first encounter with the company’s original Transparent One speaker system, at the 2012 Rocky Mountain Audio Fest. A bonus, Vanatoo is located relatively close to my home in Port Townsend, Washington: another easy fit!
Genesis of the Transparent One Encore
Vanatoo was founded in 2007 by mechanical engineer and amateur speaker builder Gary Gesellchen and electrical engineer Rick Kernen. Aware that a sea change was happening in audio, both men decided to quit what Gary described as “well paid jobs” to start working on Vanatoo. As Gesellchen explained when he traveled from the company’s Seattle-area headquarters to set up my review samples, “I thought I knew enough about speaker design to build a small, affordable system that could pole-vault over the standard of ‘doesn’t suck.’ In fact, we decided that it wouldn’t suck by a long shot.
“A lot of things were changing in technology that we thought would disrupt how people were going to get and listen to their music. The iPhone had just come out when we began, people were ditching dial-up modems, and it seemed pretty clear that things were going to change. We expected speakers to go wireless, and the sound of class-D amps to continue to improve. We wanted to come up with an affordable system that would leverage the best of the new technology that was out there.”
In 2012, after several years of groundwork-laying, the company’s initial product, the now-discontinued Transparent One ($499/pair), premiered. The T1’s smaller sibling, the Transparent Zero ($359/pair), arrived in 2017, and the Transparent One Encore (aka T1E) replaced the T1 a year later. Among the T1E’s improved features are redesigned drive units, remote control, built-in Bluetooth, bi-amping, a DSP crossover, and a number of user-configurable parameters.
The Transparent One Encore is an active speaker system in which all electronics are housed in one of its two MDF speaker enclosures. Each speaker has a 1″ aluminum-dome tweeter, a 5.25″ aluminum-cone woofer—custom-made for Vanatoo using a split-gap “XBL” motor licensed by that design’s inventor, Dan Wiggins—and a rear-firing 5.25″ passive radiator. That last driver is tuned to a lower frequency than would be ideal for a reflex port in a speaker of similar size, while the speaker-output curve is equalized, via digital-signal processing (DSP), to compensate—a design approach Vanatoo calls ClearBass. A proprietary four-conductor, 6m–long cable connects the two units (also available are 2m and 10m lengths). “Most of our users are not audiophiles,” Gesellchen declared during our chat. “They can’t handle color-coded binding posts and speaker wire, so a simple, dedicated, four-pin connector cable that can only go on one way works best for them.”
A four-channel class-D amplifier, manufactured by D2Audio, provides 100W each for the woofers and 20W each for the tweeters, and works entirely in the digital domain, the D2Audio chipset directly driving the transistors into Pulse-Width Modulation output. That chipset, which has a 24-bit maximum resolution and a sample rate of 48kHz, performs all DSP, including crossover functions, and is addressed by three digital inputs: one S/PDIF coax (RCA), one S/PDIF optical (Toslink), and one USB (type B), all of which accept signals of up to 24 bits/96kHz. Signals appearing on the T1E’s analog input (3.5mm), intended for use with a smartphone, phono preamplifier, or other line-level-out device, are converted to digital by a Wolfson A/D converter. The system’s wireless input is compatible with Bluetooth SBC and aptX codecs.
Other features include volume, bass, and treble controls; automatic switching to whatever source is playing; AutoSense line-level output for an active subwoofer; remote control; a low-power sleep mode; magnetically attached grilles; and a switch on the speaker containing the electronics to determine whether it is to function as the left- or right-channel speaker in a stereo pair.
Perhaps the only disheartening change from the original T1 to its successor is that the T1’s IEC connector, which enabled use of a detachable aftermarket power cable, has been replaced by a hard-wired standard gauge power cord. Because that cord has a nonpolarized two-prong plug, the user can listen, rotate the plug 180°, listen again, and note which orientation produces better sound.
Installation and setup
There are nine different settings that can be customized on the Transparent One Encore, including the system’s DSP setting. The T1E’s default response curve incorporates a 4–5dB attenuation at 60–125Hz, to compensate for having the speakers less than 2′ from walls or room corners—this owing to Vanatoo’s perception that most T1E owners don’t use speaker stands or otherwise position their speakers with the same care exhibited by audiophiles. But for installations where the speakers won’t be so close to room boundaries, the user can switch the DSP equalization from that default (Shelved) to Flat. Also among the customizable settings is the option to disable the system’s default Limiter (ie, compressor), without which the user can crank the speakers louder for dancing, distortion be damned.
When Gesellchen installed the T1E system in my irregularly shaped, 14′ by 16′ living room, he switched its DSP bass setting from Shelved to Flat so I could hear the difference. (Because I keep living-room speakers nearer than 2′ from the front wall, he thought that Flat might deliver too much bass.) While I liked Flat on most classical music, bass intensity became a bit overbearing on some pop recordings. Consequently, I went back and forth, depending on material. (The change took 90 seconds.)
In order to compare the sound of the Transparent One Encore system to my reference living-room system, the 10-times-pricier Dynaudio 200 XD class-D powered speakers ($6000/pair)—which process digital signals in a manner similar to the T1E system—I positioned the Vanatoos on the same fixed-height speaker stands. The short distance I maintain between the Dynaudio speakers is mandated mostly by the 2m Nordost digital cable that connects the two enclosures—that and the fact that the right speaker sits perilously close to a propane-fueled fireplace that my husband has been known to turn on full blast without concern for frying the speaker—yet the T1E system’s far longer connector cable enabled me to space them almost 6′ apart.
I connected my MacBook Pro to the active speaker with the same Nordost Valhalla 2 USB cable I use with the Dynaudios: at $3499.99/m, a disproportionately expensive choice for use with a $599 powered speaker system, but a necessary one for the sake of consistency and a fair comparison. To play Red Book and higher resolution files, and to wirelessly stream Tidal and Qobuz, I used Roon, the best-sounding computer-based playback software I’ve encountered. Other Roon advantages are its ability to convert DSD to PCM on the fly and to downsample higher resolutions to the 24/96 required by the T1E system. It can also perform the first unfold of Master Quality Authenticated (MQA) files, enabling them to play at 24/96 resolution.