sound

William Schuchard

The Gracioso 1.0 speaker is a two-way stand mount speaker from Acoustic Preference based in Slovejina EU. That’s right – Slovenia! Acoustic Preference started in 2001 as a manufacturing company and has since created what they say is a top quality speaker that will satisfy the highest demands. According to General Manager Marjan Tancer, "The goal behind the company is, to create acoustic components that combine natural sound and offer great delight when listening to music on every occasion. Acoustic Preference wants to present their clients with durability and a feeling of prestige and excellence.

They started by attempting to create an acoustically inert enclosure through high end materials that are both highly functional and aesthetically pleasing. An enclosure that lacks coloration has consistently been a common theme among great sounding speakers. Merlin speakers use special brass braces, Aerial Acoustics uses heavy internal bracing, Green Mountain Audio uses cast marble, and Wilson Audio uses their X material just to name a few.

About 15 years ago, my fiancé came to visit me in my apartment. She opens the door to find me stirring cement in a 5 gallon bucket with a big stick in the middle of the living room carpet. After some hesitation in the doorway she quips, “What are you doing?”. I look up with the optimistic enthusiasm of a child; “I'm making Speakers!”. She turned and left only coming back after my task was somewhat finished. Even though one of the forms started to lose integrity and slant while curing, the speakers sounded excellent. I have since been a believer in acoustically inert cabinets. When moving to a house, the speakers were too heavy to move and were gutted for their parts even though the lesson lives on.

In order to achieve an acoustically inert cabinet, Acoustic Preference uses many thick pieces of Walnut cut in such a way that the grains criss-cross. They could have used some of the materials above but they wanted to achieve their goals with something natural and beautiful. The multiple walnut segments are preliminary measured, controlled, and assembled for optimal self cancellation of resonances. They are sanded extremely smooth and finished with wax. Additionally, they are able to shape the front with a very large roundover in order to reduce baffle diffraction and enhance imaging.

The cabinets are shaped for the best sonics. The large roundover on the front combined with the sides that taper to the rear look like a teardrop from above. The shape is meant to control internal standing waves and resonances. It also happens to look great. The wood blocks that comprise the sides are perfectly beveled giving them a bit of a nautical look. The materials and workmanship are heirloom quality with a natural sheen that shuns the super shiny speakers we see so often today. Pictures do not do the exquisite craftsmanship of these cabinets justice.

The Gracioso line from Acoustic Preference has optional matching stands that were also delivered for the review. They use the same quality materials and put the tweeter at about 38” high; just right for my listening position.

The stands come with three built in decoupling spikes for the speaker and three more for the base of the stand. The spikes are built such that nothing pointy touches the floor or the speaker; a lucky side effect as the spikes were said to have been chosen for their acoustic properties. Even without real carpet spikes, the stands stood firm and stable on my questionable and problematic listening room carpeting.

Given the high quality cabinet design, they chose to use very high end drivers from Morel. The 6” woofer and matched 28mm silk dome tweeter both come from Morel's Elite series. The large hexatech aluminum voice coils are said to both raise power handling as well as increase the attack of the drivers. Having heard speakers using these drivers and also built some of my own using them, I understand the benefits and characteristics of the drivers and why the cost is so high.

The smooth drivers and high power handling capabilities allowed the Gracioso line to use a simple 12db/octave Linqwitz Riley crossover. The crossovers are comprised of Mundorf air foil coils, and Mundorf high end audio MKP capacitors matched to a very close 0.5% tolerance. These qualities are hallmarks of a very high-end speaker since the parts are top rate and the critical, careful matching takes much time and effort.

The crossover board is treated to be non-resonant and is wired to bi-wire capable WBT connectors through solid teflon insulated silver wire from Homegrownaudio in the USA. How many speakers do you know that employ real silver wires!

Taking the quest for non-resonance further, the circuit boards use extra thick 2x 2,4mm/70 Cu/ Silver reinforced and extra rigid FR-4 board material, additionally dampened with proprietary 10mm thick layer of rubber on the copper side. The crossover components are carefully bolted and glued to the PCB which is then bolted to the enclosure making it virtually a part of the non-resonant enclosure.

The attractive grills are held on with tiny strong magnets but it was clear that listening should be done without the grills. With the grills on, a game of “pin the tail on the tweeter” was all too easy as the speakers no longer disappeared.

Setup

The speakers and stands arrived in larger, heftier boxes than expected. A few quick turns and the so called spikes were installed on the stands. The speakers were placed facing each other connected out of phase for initial breaking in. Further break in occurred in an auxiliary system that serves mostly for background music for another week. The speakers were finally placed in the listening room after about 100 hours of play time but continued to break in throughout the review period.

Getting new speakers to sound right when first placed in a room can sometimes be daunting. That wasn't the case with the Gracioso speakers. They were easy to place as long as I towed them in to avoid sound reflections off the side walls in my small listening room. Out of curiosity, I moved one around, then the other, etc, and each time a constant stable image was still there. The only tweak was getting the distance to the rear and side walls for the best bass and imaging but the best sound in my room was with them nearly four feet out from the back wall and nearly an equilateral triangle with the listening position. The speakers were slightly closer together than they were from the best listening spot. The rear port actually helped augment the bass as the best imaging was found where the best bass was found; just over three feet out from the rear wall.

During this process it was clear that rounding the front baffle to control diffraction of the sound off the face was helping. I could move my head around, bop it side to side, etc, and the sound and image was stable. This is good news as a speaker whose sound changes abruptly as I move my head is a pet peeve of mine. One of my criteria for a good speaker is being able to bob your head around without abrupt changes in the sound.

Most of the listening was using my Hephaestus monoblocks fed by the preamp of a Bryston B100, a Lite Audio DAC AM modified by Pacific Valve, and a Pioneer Elite DV47a CD transport.

So How Do They Sound?