Las Vegas 2010: A Drama in Three Acts
by Greg Weaver 
Room 4035 – Audience

Well, the gang at Audience has really put it together, showing an ALL Audience system that is an all-out assault on transparency and naturalness. Though there are more costly versions of the speaker they brought with them (a ClairAudient 8+8 and 16+16 exist), Audience demonstrated the diminutive, but not small sounding, ClairAudient 4+4 ($12,000) and the new ClairAudient 2+2 ($5000). They also had a prototypical subwoofer, whose price has not yet been determined.

These new ClairAudient speaker products employ the new Audience A3 driver, a breakthrough itself. It is a full range driver with a curvilinear anodized aluminum-magnesium alloy cone, a patented motor structure, with patent-pending suspension and basket, and is built like a high power subwoofer driver. It uses a low self-inductance, large neodymium motor structure with a big voice coil and employs unusually large suspension venting. With just 2.5 grams of total moving mass, it affords 12 mm of usable (and extremely) linear excursion, thanks in part to new spider and surround designs, and has less than 1dB of compression at levels up to 95dB SPL. Yeah, it's pretty special!

The exquisite looking and stunning sounding Audience ClairAudient 4+4 loudspeaker

As I mentioned, the entire system was comprised of components either created by, or in the case of their source, highly modified by, Audience. Their new The Wavemaster line stage is a switchless (tapped transformer) design that has 4 inputs, 2 outputs, a headphone output, uses their own aR-T power conditioning, and features a full remote control. (Projected retail is $12,000 - $13,000/ea).

The Wavepower amplifier is a Class D switching analog design rated to deliver 200 watts at 8 Ω. It features an Audience designed proprietary discrete component front end and also incorporates their now-renown aR-T power conditioning. The design goal of the Wavepower amplifier was to achieve the best characteristics of both solid state and tube designs. The left and right channels are uniquely mirror images of each other, and will be available in either silver or black finish (projected retail ~ $5000/ea).

The Audience ClairAudient 2+2 loudspeaker may be smaller, but it is by no means more demure

The source was a highly Audience modified Denon 3930. An adeptResponse 6-T ($4600) scrubbed power on the front end and an adeptResponse 12-T ($8000) was used at the front of the room on the Wavepower amps and sub. Both the adeptResponse 6-T and 12-T conditioners use the newly introduced "GP" technology, a new, all copper ground plane on the bottom of the chassis where all of the grounds are star weld connected. Current pricing of the adeptResponse line does not yet reflect the addition of this new feature. And of course, all cabling was from Audience, including the Au24-e interconnects, speaker cables and powerChords.

The Audience Wavemaster Line stage, subtle looking and virtually invisible sonically

My first listen to the 4+4 was sans subwoofer and was quite simply amazing. This speaker is without doubt the least colored, most natural sounding speaker I have EVER heard. The result is a naturalness, effortlessness, transparency, and coherence that simply has to be heard to be believed. Honestly, I'm not sure my words can do it justice at this point.

The Audience Wavepower Amplifier, beauty AND the beast in one

And guess what, I think that the more diminutive 2+2 was even better with respect to coherence and soundstaging. My only concern initially was the absence of the very deepest bass (under 50Hz or so) and the resultant forfeiture of the spatial information that the omission of such low frequency music programming affords. With it switched on, I'm not sure that I could point to any specific fault with this system in the short time show exposure permits. This system easily earned its place near the top of my list of the six best performing systems this year, period.

I was so taken with this system and its amazingly elevated level of performance that I had to share my impressions with a couple of colleagues, namely Jim Merod and Harry Pearson. Both concurred with my analysis of this system. Folks, this full Audience system is utterly amazing.