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Product Description
Mathematics, Physics, Enthusiasm
The arrival of the Isophon Europa II seemed an ideal time to interview the speaker's designer, Roland Gauder, who visited me the day the loudspeakers were delivered. Gauder is tall, slim, and muscular, with a ready smile and clear, articulate English. He listened enthusiastically to the Europas in my listening room, and helped position the furniture to optimize the sound. He was bursting with eagerness to explain the Europa's unique design features: the acoustic bandpass filtering for the woofers, and the special configuration of the midrange drivers.
The Isophon Europa II is a tall, slim, floorstanding loudspeaker with beveled sides. It shares its aluminum veneer with a number of other high-end floorstanders, including the Krell LAT-1 and the Piega C-8 Limited. The Europa's tweeter and two of its three midrange drivers are set securely into a shiny chrome faceplate at the top of the column, with a 25.25" by 2" vertical slot running most of the front panel's length and covered by a grille. The third midrange driver is mounted in the side of the enclosure. The front midrange and HF drivers have no protective covers.
A bandpass woofer uses conventional drive-units, but instead of these radiating into the open air, they fire instead into an internal cavity, which is then vented to the outside world. Gauder decided to use this technology in the Europa because he was not satisfied with more conventional bass-reflex, or acoustic-suspension bass designs. Each of the two 9" woofers has a 2" long-throw voice-coil, a heavy paper cone, and its own separate sealed subcabinet to create acoustic (rather than electrical) bandpass loading. They fire into an internal chamber, with two ports opening into the long, large slot on the front baffle, to provide low air speed at high volumes. Foam placed in the vents provide additional filtering for frequencies above 80Hz.
Gauder developed a midrange-driver configuration that he calls the Acoustic Hologram Technology (AHT), to solve the problem of having a midrange driver that is both ultra-fast and has high dynamic range. The ideal midrange driver is light, with a small diameter and excursion. If a midrange is asked to output frequencies below 200Hz, it needs to develop relatively large excursions, which can produce audible distortions. Gauder uses three 4" drivers. Each midrange unit has a basket of diecast aluminum and a highly damped paper cone with low directivity, and is mounted in its own 3.7-liter subcabinet filled with sheep's wool. Two of the three midrange units—one mounted on the Europa's front, the other on the side of the enclosure—cover the 140-300Hz range. The third driver is mounted immediately beneath the tweeter, and covers the rest of midrange, crossing over at 3.4kHz.
The 1" soft-dome tweeter has a double magnet system and has been designed with a gradual rise in frequency response, from 12kHz to 20kHz, to account for the sound absorption of the air. The tweeter's response is delayed by a second-order passive network to achieve time alignment with the midrange drivers.
The Europa II is designed for triwiring, with three pairs of WBT jacks and separate crossovers for the woofers, midranges, and tweeters. The woofer crossover uses a large-gauge inductor and high-current capacitors. The speaker's quality of cabinet construction is very high: 1" MDF separated internally by wooden panels into six chambers to enhance stiffness and reduce internal resonances. The damped metal bottom plate has sockets for the supporting spikes.
Sound
Although each Europa II weighs 123 lbs, it was easy to maneuver them around the listening area in search of the optimal positions. I found they did best when placed 5' from the front wall and 5' from the sidewalls, about 7' away from my listening chair. This situated them near the short wall of my lightly damped, rectangular listening room (26' long by 13' wide by 12' high). The other end of the room opens into a 25' by 15' kitchen.
The Europas were oriented so that their side-firing midrange drivers faced each other, to lessen reflections from the sidewalls, as recommended by Isophon. The Europa is made in "handed" pairs that share a single serial number, followed by an R or an L to designate the channels served.
I began by checking the Europa II's low-frequency in-room response. I used the 20-200Hz sweep signal generated by the room-tuning setup program that comes with Velodyne's DD-18 subwoofer, and verified it with the 1/3-octave warble tones at -20dB on Stereophile's Test CD 3 (STPH006-2). I set my RadioShack sound-level meter to its C weighting, in slow ballistics mode, and took and averaged several readings in a window 4' wide by 3' high, and centered on my listening position and ear height to minimize the effect of room modes. When I set the volume so that the 1kHz output registered 0dB on the meter, the Europa II's bass response peaked at +6dB at 100Hz (a room-mode effect), but remained within ±3dB limits between 80Hz and 40Hz, and was down by 10dB at 30Hz. Pink noise varied smoothly and gradually during my "stand up, sit down, move around" test, and when I moved 16' back to sit on a couch at the other end of the room.
The smooth, even pink-noise tests accurately predicted the Europa's treble response, which was extended and open, sweet and nonfatiguing. Billy Drummond's Zildjian cymbals at the beginning of "The Mooche," on the Jerome Harris Quintet's Rendezvous (CD, Stereophile STPH013-2), had a transparent metallic shimmer instead of the hiss I hear through most speakers. Steve Nelson's vibes had the most natural, ringing quality I've heard in a while, and were placed holographically to the left and center. Similarly, the shimmering bronze of the cymbals in "Nardis," from Patricia Barber's Café Blue (CD, Premonition/Blue Note 21810 2), were brilliantly reproduced.
Overall, the Europa II's drivers blended well, the tweeter phasing smoothly over to the midrange drivers and allowing for wide soundstaging and fine ambience retrieval. The Turtle Creek Men's Chorus's layered-in-space voices and deep pipe-organ accompaniment on "Lord, Make Me an Instrument of Thy Peace," from John Rutter's Requiem (CD, Reference Recordings RR-57CD), gave me the sense of a huge performance hall. Voices in the choir were easily resolved without detectable colorations.
The Europa's reproduction of vocal music was unusually good, enabling me to understand sung words with ease. For the first time, I could follow and understand all the words in the selection from Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius, Part 1 (Test CD 2, Stereophile STPH004-2). When I heard Harry Connick, Jr. sing "Don't Get Around Much Anymore," from the When Harry Met Sally... soundtrack (CD, Columbia CK 45319), I was struck by the natural vocal timbre of his voice, which had no sign of honk through the Europa. The speaker's speed and dynamics were evident in the startling rimshot that ends that song.
The sopranos in the chorus singing behind José Carreras on the Kyrie of Ariel Ramirez's Misa Criolla (Philips 420 955-2) had the most open, extended sound, and it extended from wall to wall. Carreras's clear tenor had a liquidity and immediacy that was uncanny. I particularly enjoyed hearing Albert Jordan's lilting tenor separate out from the other singers on the title track of Deep River, the latest release from male choral group Cantus (CD, Cantus CTS 1203).
The Europa II also excelled at capturing the natural timbres of musical instruments. It conveyed the impact and speed of the Bösendorfer 209E reproducing piano in a small room when playing Beethoven's Sonata 24 in F-sharp, Op.78, from Robert Silverman's complete cycle of the sonatas (CD, OrpheumMasters KSP 830). While the Europa II reproduced the trombone's "brassy blattiness" from "The Mooche," on Jerome Harris' Rendezvous, I had difficulty hearing the crackle of air in the instrument's mouthpiece that engineer John Atkinson wrote about in his article about his Editor's Choice compilation CD (Stereophile, July 2003). Switching from my now-ancient Mark Levinson ML-2 monoblocks to the more recent No.334 brought the crackle back.
The Europa II's bandpass woofer system produced solid, tuneful, powerful bass from 35Hz up. The speaker is tailor-made for pipe-organ enthusiasts—it reproduced most of the growl, weight, mass, and impact of the king of instruments that you'd hear from a high-end system. Driven by the ML-2s, the Allegro from Widor's Symphony 6 for Organ, performed by Marcel Dupré on Recital (CD, Mercury Living Presence 434 311-2), shuddered the air in my listening room. Similarly, the deepest notes in Gnomus, from Jean Guillou's organ transcription of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition (CD, Dorian DOR-90117), rattled the cabinets in my listening room. But the Europa' bass system did so well with organ music because it played in a controlled fashion with a minimum of bass overkill. The organ accompaniment to John Rutter's A Gaelic Blessing, from Requiem, had just the right amount of volume and pitch definition, not the bloat I've heard from lesser speaker systems.
Via the Isophon speakers, Owen Reed's La Fiesta Mexicana, from Fiesta (CD, Reference RR-38CD), opened with weighty, solid, well-defined bass-drum beats mixed with shimmering, reverberating chimes. And all of the following were easily heard and felt: the dense, synthesized bass notes that depict supernatural footsteps in "No Sign of Ghosts," from the Casper soundtrack (CD, MCA 11240); the soft but ponderous bass-drum beat on "Cosmos Old Friend," from the Sneakers soundtrack (CD, Columbia CK 53146); the sodden heartbeats that crescendo at the beginning of "Speak to Me," from Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon (SACD, Capitol 58236 2); the raspy, edgy, throbbing didgeridoo that opens David Hudson's "Rainforest Wonder," from Didgeridoo Spirit (CD, Indigenous Australia IA2003D); and the subterranean synthesizer rumblings on "Assault on Ryan's House," from the Patriot Games soundtrack (RCA 66051-2).
The arrival of the Isophon Europa II seemed an ideal time to interview the speaker's designer, Roland Gauder, who visited me the day the loudspeakers were delivered. Gauder is tall, slim, and muscular, with a ready smile and clear, articulate English. He listened enthusiastically to the Europas in my listening room, and helped position the furniture to optimize the sound. He was bursting with eagerness to explain the Europa's unique design features: the acoustic bandpass filtering for the woofers, and the special configuration of the midrange drivers.
The Isophon Europa II is a tall, slim, floorstanding loudspeaker with beveled sides. It shares its aluminum veneer with a number of other high-end floorstanders, including the Krell LAT-1 and the Piega C-8 Limited. The Europa's tweeter and two of its three midrange drivers are set securely into a shiny chrome faceplate at the top of the column, with a 25.25" by 2" vertical slot running most of the front panel's length and covered by a grille. The third midrange driver is mounted in the side of the enclosure. The front midrange and HF drivers have no protective covers.
A bandpass woofer uses conventional drive-units, but instead of these radiating into the open air, they fire instead into an internal cavity, which is then vented to the outside world. Gauder decided to use this technology in the Europa because he was not satisfied with more conventional bass-reflex, or acoustic-suspension bass designs. Each of the two 9" woofers has a 2" long-throw voice-coil, a heavy paper cone, and its own separate sealed subcabinet to create acoustic (rather than electrical) bandpass loading. They fire into an internal chamber, with two ports opening into the long, large slot on the front baffle, to provide low air speed at high volumes. Foam placed in the vents provide additional filtering for frequencies above 80Hz.
Gauder developed a midrange-driver configuration that he calls the Acoustic Hologram Technology (AHT), to solve the problem of having a midrange driver that is both ultra-fast and has high dynamic range. The ideal midrange driver is light, with a small diameter and excursion. If a midrange is asked to output frequencies below 200Hz, it needs to develop relatively large excursions, which can produce audible distortions. Gauder uses three 4" drivers. Each midrange unit has a basket of diecast aluminum and a highly damped paper cone with low directivity, and is mounted in its own 3.7-liter subcabinet filled with sheep's wool. Two of the three midrange units—one mounted on the Europa's front, the other on the side of the enclosure—cover the 140-300Hz range. The third driver is mounted immediately beneath the tweeter, and covers the rest of midrange, crossing over at 3.4kHz.
The 1" soft-dome tweeter has a double magnet system and has been designed with a gradual rise in frequency response, from 12kHz to 20kHz, to account for the sound absorption of the air. The tweeter's response is delayed by a second-order passive network to achieve time alignment with the midrange drivers.
The Europa II is designed for triwiring, with three pairs of WBT jacks and separate crossovers for the woofers, midranges, and tweeters. The woofer crossover uses a large-gauge inductor and high-current capacitors. The speaker's quality of cabinet construction is very high: 1" MDF separated internally by wooden panels into six chambers to enhance stiffness and reduce internal resonances. The damped metal bottom plate has sockets for the supporting spikes.
Sound
Although each Europa II weighs 123 lbs, it was easy to maneuver them around the listening area in search of the optimal positions. I found they did best when placed 5' from the front wall and 5' from the sidewalls, about 7' away from my listening chair. This situated them near the short wall of my lightly damped, rectangular listening room (26' long by 13' wide by 12' high). The other end of the room opens into a 25' by 15' kitchen.
The Europas were oriented so that their side-firing midrange drivers faced each other, to lessen reflections from the sidewalls, as recommended by Isophon. The Europa is made in "handed" pairs that share a single serial number, followed by an R or an L to designate the channels served.
I began by checking the Europa II's low-frequency in-room response. I used the 20-200Hz sweep signal generated by the room-tuning setup program that comes with Velodyne's DD-18 subwoofer, and verified it with the 1/3-octave warble tones at -20dB on Stereophile's Test CD 3 (STPH006-2). I set my RadioShack sound-level meter to its C weighting, in slow ballistics mode, and took and averaged several readings in a window 4' wide by 3' high, and centered on my listening position and ear height to minimize the effect of room modes. When I set the volume so that the 1kHz output registered 0dB on the meter, the Europa II's bass response peaked at +6dB at 100Hz (a room-mode effect), but remained within ±3dB limits between 80Hz and 40Hz, and was down by 10dB at 30Hz. Pink noise varied smoothly and gradually during my "stand up, sit down, move around" test, and when I moved 16' back to sit on a couch at the other end of the room.
The smooth, even pink-noise tests accurately predicted the Europa's treble response, which was extended and open, sweet and nonfatiguing. Billy Drummond's Zildjian cymbals at the beginning of "The Mooche," on the Jerome Harris Quintet's Rendezvous (CD, Stereophile STPH013-2), had a transparent metallic shimmer instead of the hiss I hear through most speakers. Steve Nelson's vibes had the most natural, ringing quality I've heard in a while, and were placed holographically to the left and center. Similarly, the shimmering bronze of the cymbals in "Nardis," from Patricia Barber's Café Blue (CD, Premonition/Blue Note 21810 2), were brilliantly reproduced.
Overall, the Europa II's drivers blended well, the tweeter phasing smoothly over to the midrange drivers and allowing for wide soundstaging and fine ambience retrieval. The Turtle Creek Men's Chorus's layered-in-space voices and deep pipe-organ accompaniment on "Lord, Make Me an Instrument of Thy Peace," from John Rutter's Requiem (CD, Reference Recordings RR-57CD), gave me the sense of a huge performance hall. Voices in the choir were easily resolved without detectable colorations.
The Europa's reproduction of vocal music was unusually good, enabling me to understand sung words with ease. For the first time, I could follow and understand all the words in the selection from Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius, Part 1 (Test CD 2, Stereophile STPH004-2). When I heard Harry Connick, Jr. sing "Don't Get Around Much Anymore," from the When Harry Met Sally... soundtrack (CD, Columbia CK 45319), I was struck by the natural vocal timbre of his voice, which had no sign of honk through the Europa. The speaker's speed and dynamics were evident in the startling rimshot that ends that song.
The sopranos in the chorus singing behind José Carreras on the Kyrie of Ariel Ramirez's Misa Criolla (Philips 420 955-2) had the most open, extended sound, and it extended from wall to wall. Carreras's clear tenor had a liquidity and immediacy that was uncanny. I particularly enjoyed hearing Albert Jordan's lilting tenor separate out from the other singers on the title track of Deep River, the latest release from male choral group Cantus (CD, Cantus CTS 1203).
The Europa II also excelled at capturing the natural timbres of musical instruments. It conveyed the impact and speed of the Bösendorfer 209E reproducing piano in a small room when playing Beethoven's Sonata 24 in F-sharp, Op.78, from Robert Silverman's complete cycle of the sonatas (CD, OrpheumMasters KSP 830). While the Europa II reproduced the trombone's "brassy blattiness" from "The Mooche," on Jerome Harris' Rendezvous, I had difficulty hearing the crackle of air in the instrument's mouthpiece that engineer John Atkinson wrote about in his article about his Editor's Choice compilation CD (Stereophile, July 2003). Switching from my now-ancient Mark Levinson ML-2 monoblocks to the more recent No.334 brought the crackle back.
The Europa II's bandpass woofer system produced solid, tuneful, powerful bass from 35Hz up. The speaker is tailor-made for pipe-organ enthusiasts—it reproduced most of the growl, weight, mass, and impact of the king of instruments that you'd hear from a high-end system. Driven by the ML-2s, the Allegro from Widor's Symphony 6 for Organ, performed by Marcel Dupré on Recital (CD, Mercury Living Presence 434 311-2), shuddered the air in my listening room. Similarly, the deepest notes in Gnomus, from Jean Guillou's organ transcription of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition (CD, Dorian DOR-90117), rattled the cabinets in my listening room. But the Europa' bass system did so well with organ music because it played in a controlled fashion with a minimum of bass overkill. The organ accompaniment to John Rutter's A Gaelic Blessing, from Requiem, had just the right amount of volume and pitch definition, not the bloat I've heard from lesser speaker systems.
Via the Isophon speakers, Owen Reed's La Fiesta Mexicana, from Fiesta (CD, Reference RR-38CD), opened with weighty, solid, well-defined bass-drum beats mixed with shimmering, reverberating chimes. And all of the following were easily heard and felt: the dense, synthesized bass notes that depict supernatural footsteps in "No Sign of Ghosts," from the Casper soundtrack (CD, MCA 11240); the soft but ponderous bass-drum beat on "Cosmos Old Friend," from the Sneakers soundtrack (CD, Columbia CK 53146); the sodden heartbeats that crescendo at the beginning of "Speak to Me," from Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon (SACD, Capitol 58236 2); the raspy, edgy, throbbing didgeridoo that opens David Hudson's "Rainforest Wonder," from Didgeridoo Spirit (CD, Indigenous Australia IA2003D); and the subterranean synthesizer rumblings on "Assault on Ryan's House," from the Patriot Games soundtrack (RCA 66051-2).