Sometimes in hifi, you just know.
I knew the Gauder Akustik Capello 100 speakers I reviewed last year made music exciting and rewarding soon after I had them playing in Barn and I figured Gauder’s Elargo 200 would work that same kind of music-making magic, only bigger (because they are, bigger), and I knew soon after they arrived my hunch was correct.
I suppose you can fake hifi excitement, like Meg Ryan in a restaurant, but what would be the point? It’s only when we take that leap of faith and declare something to be “The Best” that potentially nefarious stuff can creep in. Whenever I hear anyone singing the praises of the good old days when ‘reviews moved boxes’ I thank my lucky stars I’m as young as I am. And I’m not young.
What could be more human, what could be more personal than listening to music. Everything about music is pure subjectivity right down to the tips of our goosebumps, the bottom of a tear, the edges of a smile or frown. Smiles are my favorite response to hifi performance, only laughter beats it, and I’ve seen both happen here with guests, at hifi shows, at other people’s places, and I’ve done a helluva lot of smiling in the Barn during the course of doing this job.
When I find myself smiling, typically in unison with head shaking in the affirmative while listening to music on the hifi, I just know. I just know that this hifi is hitting my humanness hard, deep down inside to the point where all of me becomes moved by the music in play. I bet you know exactly what I’m talking about, especially if you started listening to music on the hifi when you were young, before ‘knowing things’ crept in to throw a monkey wrench in the ability to just know based on what your mind and body are telling you loud and clear.
A key quality of the Gauder Akustik Elargo 200 is their ability to energize me. Not the air, not space although they do that too, but me. Music through the Elargo 200 excites for musical reasons. For the wonderful presence of sounds in space, for the textures and colors it reproduces with fluid ease, and perhaps most of all for their physicality that combines startling jump and exceptional impact from tippy top to bottom, from macro to micro with seamless life-like energy. If you want music that feels live all around you to the degree it gets inside and comes back out again in a smile or shimmy or a shout, the Elargo 200 delivered all those things every time I paid attention to them during their 2 month Barn stay. And they are very hard to ignore.
Here’s how I opened my review of the Gauder Akustik Capello 100 speakers (review):
I’ll let you in on a little secret—while I have Favorites, within those favorites I have favorites.
I call these favorites within favorites The Short List, a list I share with Patrons, and the Capello 100 are on it because they do what I want a loudspeaker to do which is offer up music in a way that grabs and shakes me with surprise and delight, something the Capello 100 did each and every time I listened through them over their 2 month Barn stay.
The 3-way/4 driver bass reflex Elargo 200, like every pair of the Gauder Akustik speakers, are made in the company’s Renningen, Germany factory. And let’s be clear–we’re not talking about ‘assembled in’ or ‘designed in’—we’re talking hand made in house using Gauder’s own aluminum-polymer XPulse drivers. The Elargo 200 house a pair of 9” XPulse bass drivers, a 7” XPulse midrage, and Beryllium tweeter. As you can(not) see, the driver’s means of attaching to the speaker’s front baffle are hidden, look ma no screws, one aspect of their design intended to appeal to people who care about how their speakers look in their home.
This care in the craft of the tear-drop shaped cabinet is also evident in the subtle mix of materials, where the black gloss finish of the tear-drop’s back—from top to bottom—seamlessly meets the Rosewood high gloss veneer in the review pair (Piano lacquer black is also available). The high gloss black finish is mirrored in the high gloss black base. It’s also worth noting that level adjustment is a breeze thanks to those beefy four geared adjustment knobs on the base. Nice.
The Elargo employ down-firing bass ports exiting out the speaker’s bottom—the tweeter and midrange are housed in their own sealed enclosures–as well as the Bass Management System, which is unique to Gauder in my experience. There are two means of adjusting the bass response for the Elargo 200—by moving the included jumpers (-3dB, Linear, +3dB) and by using one of the included color coded Bass Extension Modules.
No Jumper: 0 dB
Red Module: + 1 dB
Blue Module: + 2 dB
Green Module: + 3 dB
White Module: +3.5 dB
Jumper Plugged: + 4 dB
The company provides more information on Bass Extension in the manual:
All our loudspeakers are highpass-filtered. This means that there is always a capacitor in the signal lead. A highpass-filtered closed-box or bassreflex system is of higher order than the usual systems and therefore have a better performance: they have a lower f3-point (lower bass enhanced), have a higher efficiency and need a smaller cabinet volume. Such systems use the amplifier as source of energy which for digital amps, transistor amps or big tube amps is not a problem. If you do not use such an amp to drive the speaker you can pull out the “Bass Extension Jumper” and deactivate the system (plugged jumper is 4 dB amplification). The impedance then rises up to 10 Ohms and more in the low-bass region and requires much less power from the amp.
Moreover, if you place the speakers close to a wall or in a corner then the low bass is also enhanced enormously. Reducing this low bass frequency range by pulling the Bass Extension jumper is also an appropriate way to reduce this problem easily.
As is the case with the speaker itself, these Bass Modules are nicely made and come in an attractive wooden box. As I pointed out in the Capello review, I encourage owners to try each module as doing so is not limited to more or less bass, rather changing modules subtly changes the character of the overall sound and they are literally plug and play. So I say plug and play away! My favored module changed with the amplifier, which kinda makes sense, and it’s a fun A/B. Listen and learn.
I also encourage you to visit the Gauder Akustik website to learn more about the technologies employed in the Elargo including the company’s Symmetrical, ultra-steep crossover design and Integrated TDC (Time Delay Control). Here’s a taste from their “Technology” pages:
When a music signal passes through a crossover, it is delayed in time by the coils used there. The larger the coils, the greater the time delay. As there is no coil (low-pass filter) in the signal path of the tweeter, the tweeter signal is not delayed and is emitted first, followed by the mid-range signal and finally the bass signal. Broadband impulses are thus reproduced with a time distortion and lose their dynamic temporal coherence. The music sounds weak and tired.
With TDC technology, we delay the signal from the tweeter to such an extent that it is emitted at the same time as the midrange signal, so that the music is put back together correctly. As our speakers all have very low crossover frequencies from the bass to the midrange (120 Hz – 166 Hz) and the ear is very insensitive in the bass range, there is no need for a time delay between the midrange and the bass. In addition, instruments in this frequency range naturally resonate much more slowly than the time difference generated by the coils.
While I cannot definitively attribute this TDC technology to the Elargo’s performance, I can say with absolute certainty they sound anything but “weak and tired”.
Overall, the 110lb. a piece Elargo 200 are made to a very high standard in every respect and I enjoyed watching the winter sun play over their high gloss Rosewood finish.
I paired the Elargo 200 with three integrated amplifiers—the Orpheus Lab Absolute Integrated (review), the Gryphon Diablo 333 (review), and near the end of the review period the enticing Enleum AMP-54R (more info). I’ll be definitive about these pairings—if I owned a pair of Elargo 200 and was looking for an integrated amplifier to go with ‘em, I’d buy the Gryphon hands down. And I say this based not only on these three contenders but also on a more general experience of listening to lots of systems over the years. The Elargo/Diablo synergy was in a word, magical.
To fill in the rest of the system, the Barn resident Grimm MU1 (review) fed the very impressive Imersiv D1-DAC that’s in for review (more info) with all cabling from AudioQuest (see complete Barn and system details). All told with the Diablo and Elargo in the mix, I was treated to some of the most seamlessly exciting and engaging sound I’ve experienced in Barn.
I wrote about it in the Gryphon review:
…this system brought some of the most exciting, dramatic, and impactful sound I’ve experienced to the Barn. Even after days and weeks of listening, there were moments in nearly every song played where I would be taken aback by the sheer quality of reproduction, a slap in the face obvious fact that music felt as if it had become materialized to such an extent I was left just shaking my head that had a great big smile slapped across its face. It’s times like this, special and kinda rare, where sound quality steps up and out with real swagger in the service of making reproduced music feel essential. Like sunshine.
The Tricky-produced eponymous 2022 album Lonely Guest gets plenty of air time here in the Barn because I love the music, the variety with a number of guest vocalists changing the character of their respective tracks, and it also happens to be very good sounding with lots of deep bass, deep grooves, and what I hear as real funk appeal. “Pre War Tension” features IDLES Joe Talbot and Tricky regular Marta on vocals and it’s the most raucous rockish songs on the record, as you might expect due to Talbot’s ever energetic angry presence. Played loud, or cranked as we used to say, presents as convincing proof of everything I’ve written about the Gauder/Gryphon system as the pulsing beats, staccato churning guitar, and pensive mood had the Barn feeling like it was breathing in and out to the beat, like some cartoon rubberized version with walls expanding and contracting in time with the music.
If you know Tricky’s music, perhaps from his work with Massive Attack or his breakthrough solo debut Maxinquaye from 1994, you know there’s always a veritable feast of delights for the ears from the tiniest tremors to big Earth moving rhythms and the Elargo 200 seem designed to fully explore and exploit every last nook and cranny while delivering the grandest movements with equal dexterity with everything feeling very much like a living presence meant to move you, the listener. Stunning, really, with a physicality that felt damn near dangerous as Joe Talbot spits out “There’s a Macy’s parade-sized pink elephant/In the room that renders me unintelligent.”
As you would expect, the Elargo 200 produce a lot of in-room energy, easily delivering the deepest bass throbs of Lonely Guest at Barn rattling levels, literally, which is when those Bass Extension Modules come in handy because they allowed me to dial in bass response to fit this space. Nice.
Raime’s 2018 EP We Can’t Be That Far From the Beginning, the first release on their own RR label, is another study in sounds in the service of music. Childhood friends Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead know how to build tension from a deep toolbox mixing manipulated found YouTube dialog, grime, dub, and industrial influences into a rich menacing sound with deep bass foundation. These tracks unfold in space like some kind of partially deciphered message from a troubled place, an SOS of sorts delivered with stunning sonics and the Elargo 200 made all that manifest in Barn as a physical force to be reckoned with. The Elargo’s full range reach feels about as cohesive from top to bottom as I’ve heard, with no undue emphasis sticking out from the mix.
Perhaps the best way to describe the experience of listening to this record at pay attention levels is simply to say the experience was completely convincing. No effort needed, no mind manipulation necessary to rearrange some speaker-induced diversion from what came across as pure music energy delivered with as much jolt as I’ve had the great pleasure to receive.
Let’s quiet things down with Adrienne Lenker’s delicate beauty of a record Songs from 2020. Largely made up of vocals and acoustic guitar, Adrienne Lenker—who is also part of Big Thief—knows how to spin a tune twisting words and guitar like a spider web blowing in the breeze so delicate, seemingly simple, yet complex and nearly impossibly intricate. And I chose to highlight this lovely solo Lenker outing to highlight the fact that the Elargo 200 reproduce this music as convincingly as the big and bold (and brutish). With just a few elements in play, the voice of each carry the weight of the song so things like tone, texture, and timing down to the pluck of a string become all-important. I’d venture to guess that we’ve all heard a voice and guitar up close and personal so we all know what they sound like and how, in expert hands, they can move us far away from the here and now which is where my thoughts went when breathing in this lovely music with the Elargo’s deft touch in control.
When a loudspeaker becomes see-through, so to speak, no matter the music it’s asked to play leaving us in the company of sounds that feel as real as the real thing—and I was exceedingly greedy with my limited time living with the Elargo 200 so they played loads of music—music-making magic seems like an understatement.
In terms of other speaker options around the Elargo 200’s price, a sensible and interesting speaker to consider is the recently reviewed Wilson Benesch A.C.T. 3Zero Loudspeakers (review), which start at $54,999/pair. While The A.C.T. 3Zero were not here for a direct comparison, I feel confident in making some sonic comparisons. But first, I’ll point out that the Wilson Benesch are also made in-house to a very high level of fit, finish, and performance. A very high level and they have a more high-tech look as compared to the Elargo 200. The A.C.T. 3Zero employ a bottom-ported Isobaric bass that has a rather unique sound in its sense of elasticity and bounce.
The A.C.T. 3Zero also sound highly refined with “stunning clarity” as I shared in that review whereas the Elargo 200 tilt the overall sound toward a richer, more full bodied and more impactful sound while retaining a convincing sense of resolution and refinement. To put it more plainly, the Wilson Benesch are highly refined while the Gauder Akustik add a more robust, earthy appeal. I am exaggerating these qualities a bit for emphasis as these are both highly refined, very well made, and to my mind excellent sounding speakers. The only way to know which you’ll enjoy most is to experience them for yourself. Anyone who says different is more than likely more interested in moving boxes or bolstering their ego than making you smile.
I saw the Elargo 200 coming from a mile away and my kinda obvious hunch—that they would work the same kind of music-making magic as their smaller sibling the Capello 100 only bigger—rang out with affirming clarity in Barn soon after they arrived. If you’re anything like me and being mesmerized by music, being fully taken in and away by its sounds, movements, and moods is something you crave as part of your day-to-day, the Gauder Akustik Elargo 200 come with my highest recommendation as one of the most convincing conveyers of music’s life-affirming magic I’ve had the great pleasure of spending time with.
Gauder Akustik Elargo 200 Loudspeakers
Price: $49,975/pair
Company Website: Gauder Akustik
US Distributor: Axiss Audio
Specifications
3-way bass reflex speaker floorstanding speaker
Impedance [Ohm]: 4
Power handling [W]: 480
Height [cm] :126
Width [cm]: 30
Depth [cm]: 43
Weight [kg]: 50