Style and Substance

GERMAN SPEAKER company Elac has had quite a run over the past few years, with designer Andrew Jones turning out new models on an annual basis after setting the audio world on its ears in 2016 with the Elac Debut. Following the Debut's launch, the company came out with the pricier Uni-Fi. A three-way bookshelf design, the Uni-Fi incorporated a coincident midrange-woofer that positions the tweeter at the apex of the midrange cone where the dust cap usually sits.

- Thomas J. Norton

Coincident drivers offer significant advantages, including less destructive interference at some listening angles where the responses of the woofer and tweeter overlap (comb filtering). They have downsides as well, including design complexity and cost. But Jones worked with British speaker-maker KEF in the 1980s when that company launched its now-iconic UniQ coincident drivers, and he had extensive experience with this type of design. (He also used coincident drivers in speakers he designed for TAD and Pioneer.)

Jones recently left Elac. But the new Uni-Fi Reference series, an upgrade of the original Uni-Fi and now with additional models, could be considered his going-away gift to fans of the designs he created for the brand. (The company's new acoustical engineering manager is Oleg Bogdanov, who previously was the acoustical engineering manager for Canadian speaker manufacturer Paradigm.)

The new Elac collection consists of three models. The Uni-Fi Reference UBR62 bookshelf ($1,200/pair) is a significant refinement of the original Uni-Fi, and the UFR-52 ($1,200 each) is a tower design with three 5.25-inch woofers plus the same 4-inch Uni-Fi coincident midrange-tweeter used in the UBR62. The UCR-52 center ($700) employs the same mid-tweeter plus two 5.25-inch woofers. With all three speakers, the crossover in the coincident driver is at 1,800 Hz. The woofer crossover is 220Hz for the floor-stander, 260 Hz for the bookshelf, and 240Hz for the center. All midranges and woofers are black anodized aluminum, while the tweeters are 1-inch soft domes.