Audiovector

R 6 Arreté

Floorstanding Loudspeakers

£24,999

Back in 1979, Audiovector founder Ole Klifoth set out on his journey to design and manufacture natural sounding loudspeakers. Today, it's Ole's son Mads Klifoth at the helm as company CEO – with continued input on the R&D side from Ole. The result is a genuinely interesting and innovative range of loudspeakers, of which the premium-priced R 6 Arreté is a shining example.

Not so long ago, Audiovector's sub-£9k R 3 Arreté beguiled us with its compact design, fine build and “impeccably authentic presentation”. The R 6 Arreté is the next equivalent step up, as the company does not offer an R 4 or R 5. Its £25,000 price tag is quite a leap, and makes it the third most expensive speaker in the R range, after the R 8 and R 11. Signposting its esoteric status, the R 6 Arreté employs a novel rear-firing midrange driver, an idea borrowed from the even more expensive R 8.

I'm a big fan of this Danish company's upgrade path, which lets you hop on board at R 6 Signature level, then – if you feel the need for something better – you can return your loudspeakers with some money for them to be upgraded to either Avantgarde spec or the fully-loaded Arreté, depending on your budget.

This R 6 Arreté uses the same HDF cabinet, and 165mm front-firing and isobaric-loaded down-firing woofers as the R 6 Signature and Avantgarde models. However, the Arreté, like the Avantgarde, replaces the Signature's soft dome tweeter with an AMT transducer. The Arreté AMT model benefits from neodymium magnets, lightweight precision coated Mylar membranes and is mounted and decoupled from the cabinet at three points. The Arreté also adds a rear-firing 100mm paper cone midrange driver along with the Freedom Grounding system. Additionally, the Arreté is kitted out with an internal shock absorption system, improved spikes, better damping, and a carbon rear panel.

The R 6 Arreté shares aspects with the previously reviewed R 3 Arreté while profiting from trickle-down tech from its R 8 and R 11 stablemates. Where driver improvements make sense to many, it's worth quickly touching on the manufacturer's Freedom Grounding tech once more. Here we have a cable that runs from the rear panel of the loudspeaker to an earthed power socket and is said to help lower the noise in the signal received from the amplifier.

Mads told me: “Simple grounding of the driver chassis can often result in an anaemic sound. Using a dedicated Freedom-only crossover between the drivers, you get more body to the performance with greater separation of instruments, lower noise floor and improved clarity. The current between the drivers' chassis is dealt with in a separate crossover that routes the signal via the Freedom Cable to the mains socket or grounded mains distributor.”

In addition to the R AMT Arreté tweeter and rear-firing, 3-inch paper cone midrange driver is a pair of 6.5-inch carbon mid/bass units featuring the company's Titanium Coil Technology, large ceramic ferrite magnets and rigid magnesium alloy, three-point suspended baskets. The low end is bolstered by an 8- and 6.5-inch woofer paired in an internal, downward-firing isobaric bass reflex system with two front-firing ports. Crossover points are listed as 100Hz, 350Hz and 3kHz.

This four-and-a-half way design stands 1,234mm tall and 278mm wide. My review pair came in a surprisingly attractive 'Piano District Green', with White or Black Piano, Italian Walnut or African Rosewood Piano as standard options. Needless to say, the finish is sublime – as you'd expect at this price.

Audiovector says the R 6 Arreté's frequency response is 23Hz to 52kHz (with no cut-off points mentioned) and quotes a healthy 91.5 dB/W/m sensitivity figure and 8 ohm nominal impedance. This means the speaker should be pretty easy to drive for most modern amplifiers, be they tube or transistor.

The rear-facing mid driver and isobaric bass system means that this speaker needs a decent amount of space between it and a boundary wall. Optimising this rear reflection was responsible for my most significant “wow” moment by far when dialling them in. It's also worth noting too that the R6 Arreté shines brighter when fed by quality amplification. Audiovector states a power handling ability of 450W, which proved ideal for my muscular Gryphon Essence pre/power pairing.

THE LISTENING

The Audiovector R 6 Arreté proves that spec sheets don't tell the whole story. Here we have a considerably bigger loudspeaker than the R 3 Arreté, but with an almost identical claimed frequency response. Yet its presentation is so much larger and more defined. Meanwhile, the refinement and detail that I enjoyed from the R 3 remained part of the R 6's personality.

Audiovector hasn't used the extra cabinet volume of this floorstander to give a lower bass cut-off. Instead, those clever Danes have focused on integrating the low end better while still having the R 6 deliver fast, responsive and fulsome bass. Trentemøller's Chameleon has hypnotically pulsating bass, which came over as clean, taut and deep – and musical too. Indeed, Stevie Wonder's Bird of Beauty showed how this speaker's smooth, effortless low end integrated so well with the rest of the frequency range.

Despite this speaker's sheer physical size, its bottom end timed surprisingly precisely. Radiohead's The National Anthem has multiple layers of instrumentation that this speaker imparted deftly while keeping the relentless rhythm of the bass guitar locked in. It proved more than up to the task, presenting what with lesser speakers can sound like a discordant hotchpotch of noise as an enjoyably challenging track of brilliance.

The R 6 Arreté isn't quite up to the likes of Node Audio's Hylixa in overall speed but is still more than competent. Indeed, at no point did this speaker remind me that it actually juggles half-a-dozen drivers in each wonderfully-shaped box. Instead, it serves up a highly cohesive recorded acoustic that makes almost everything it is fed sound good. It has an admirable intrinsic balance that doesn't flatter poor recordings, yet lets you get great enjoyment from good ones.

This speaker's treble is excellent, thanks in no small part to that AMT tweeter. It displays precision and bite without glare, brittleness or sheen, and this trickles down into the midband, which is truly special. The big Audiovector delivers visceral, reach-out-and-touch moments, the magic happening in the presence region where vocals count for so much. If you don't believe me, then try PJ Harvey's voice on the track On Battleship Hill – if her soprano stylings don't do it for you, then just wait for the lower male vocal to join in tingle-inducing harmony.

Above all, the R 6 Arreté excels in producing scale, dynamism and naturalness. Most fine affordable loudspeakers achieve only one of these skills, and in the high-end, it's more usually two – but all three is something special. Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, Act 3 - But Death, alas! performed by Dame Janet Baker, Thurston Dart, The St. Anthony Singers, and the English Chamber Orchestra under the baton of Anthony Lewis, has it all. Vocals were haunting, the harpsichord had great harmonic attack, and strings were vibrant. When the choral part came in, this speaker added another layer, rather than obscuring any of the other players. The auditorium-like sense of scale in height, width and depth from the Audiovectors afforded this musical cast the room to perform without constraint.

THE VERDICT

Audiovector's superb R 6 Arreté loudspeaker is large, but still friendly to most average-sized living rooms. Yet there's something quite exceptional about the way it delivers a sound out of all proportion to its modest dimensions. This speaker needs no special favours, just a good listening room and serious ancillaries, and even at low volume, you'll love its smooth, seamless, yet highly engaging sound. Although expensive, it's a world-class high-end loudspeaker at a fraction of the cost of many others it can put the frighteners on. So to anyone contemplating spending this sort of money on a pair of loudspeakers, I strongly suggest you hear this first.

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