The passive version of the speaker presented here, the FS 407, was already thoroughly tested by i-fidelity.net just over a year ago. Hence I will refrain from a new description of the basics of this speaker and refer you, dear gentle readers, to the former report. After all, a mere recap of facts would mean taking coals to Newcastle, and so I’m going to deal only with the active module and the possibilities of driving and operating the AIR-X version and then, of course, report about the sonic merits of this package.

Actually I’ve never really held Elac in the focus of my hifi horizon as a maker of loudspeakers, but rather as an analogue specialist. Which is why I had fitted my first real turntable – a Thorens I had made myself a present back then for my A-levels – with a formerly totally hip MM system from Elac. During my study fund-raising activities in a hifi studio at that time I got in touch with an Elac loudspeaker, a 250 4PI. This speaker, as bulky as a premium grade cooler-fridge combo and equipped with a put-on omnidirectional mushroom ribbon tweeter, was not unappealing soundwise, but didn’t stay in my memory because of its look. Until today, I had therefore rather seen Elac as a family member of the German pickup maker league.

A big mistake, for Elac gave up making pickups already in the last millenium and has developed and produced only loudspeakers ever since. A highly committed design team e.g. kept on refining the JET tweeter – a derivate of the high-frequency driver developed by Oskar Heil – to its current 5th generation and brought the crystal diaphragm, a compound of a paper cone and an interestingly embossed alu foil, to the hifi world. Thus it may be rightly stated that Elac speakers are not off the shelf. In view of this background I’m eager to learn what Wolfgang John’s boys can do today in the field of active electronics and transmission technology.

A DSP chip with 56-bit resolution forms the heart of the active electronics of the AIR-X 407. That way the team around head designer Rolf Janke was able to programme various filter characteristics and interleave them in the most diverse combinations. In a simple manner this allows to define the spatial filters and at the same time provide a pretty smart loudness function. Based on the sensitivity curves of Fletcher-Munson and the theory of a physiologically correct loudness adaptation, Elac has developed a regulation which uses the input voltage to adjust the volume at the listening spot in a frequency-dependent manner. This has nothing to do any more with the loudness of yesterday’s amplifiers which rather produced a bathtub type of frequency response instead of adapting the volume to the listening sensitivity of the human hearing. I’ve checked out this feature and must admit that it works great with soft listening during the evening and night-time hours.

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