ESTELON AURA LOUDSPEAKERS REVIEW
Estelon Aura Loudspeakers are made in Tallinn in Estonia and cost £19,500. They represent the brand’s entry-level floorstanding loudspeaker and in this review for HiFi PiG, Janine Elliot admires both their physical beauty, and their sonic attributes. Read on to find out more of what she thought.
I don’t often have the privilege of a work of art displayed in my house, but having the beautiful gloss black Estelon Aura grace my living room was indeed an honour. Estelon speakers are all jaw droppers with their curved lines that would have certainly pleased Gaudí if he had been fortunate enough to stock his La Pedrera in central Barcelona with HiFi, Gaudí himself being adverse to using straight lines in anything he designed. All Estelon speakers, coming from Estonia (I guess you could have worked that one out), are truly beautiful to look at, but all that artwork does cost money. Indeed, all works from founder and chief designer Alfred Vassilkov are designed from the inside out, each cabinet the result of many years of dedicated research and development. Their shape is not just there for art’s sake; using proprietary marble-based and thermoformed mineral composites, the cabinets offer exceptional rigidity and minimise unwanted vibrations. Their curves eliminate parallel walls and standing waves, while also reducing diffraction. Inside, natural and synthetic damping materials absorb any excess energy, plus suppress cabinet resonance. Interestingly, the name “Estelon” sounds similar to “Love Poem” in Chinese, which fits in well with the theme of beauty and art from their elegant looks.
For the last 15 years Estelon, based in Tallinn, have been designing some of the very best-looking loudspeakers out there, if you really don’t just want to see wooden rectangular boxes in your living room. To me, that shape is not just for looks, but provides an umbilical cord between art and nature. Those shapes just flow like they should always have been there. So many unconventional shapes I see at HiFi shows look like they’re there to just make a statement, and often even look like they were drawn by an Art student in their first year. Gaudi would, I’m sure, have been impressed by the Aura, Forza, Extreme, or any other model from Alfred and his team. Like a growing number of manufacturers, he began his life in the Soviet era taking apart radios and tweaking components to make them sound better. He later went to the University of St. Petersburg where he studied electro-acoustics. One Sunday morning at breakfast in 2010 he had an epiphany and decided to turn his interests into a full-time occupation. With the support of his two daughters, Alissa and Kristiina, who have both become his co-founders, they are helping to shape his vision into curvaceous beauties that always raise eyes (and ears) at HiFi shows. Alissa is the CEO.
BUILD AND DESIGN FEATURES OF THE ESTELON AURA LOUDSPEAKERS
With the Extreme and Forza at the top of the range, the 2023 Aura is the entry-level speaker, but will still set you back £19,500 for the basic White offering, and then another £3000 for the Black Gloss or Iron Grey, £4500 for the Starlight or Horizon blue, and a colourful £5000 for the Amber Elegance. It takes a lot of talent and time to finish these speakers in your chosen colour, hence the cost. I know from trying to re-spray the curves on my MG-F! The composite structure of the unit is very hard and heavy, far removed from the usual MDF, and unlike BBC thin-wall designs, doesn’t “ring”, or do anything at all, when you tap it. This is solid, especially the baffle area, the whole looking like the neck of a designer wine-glass. As Ilias Koutromanos, Estelon Chief Commercial Officer, informed me, it has “Continuously varying thickness for rigidity”. Despite it being such a tall speaker, it felt smaller than my LS5/9 on metal stands sat in my living room, and with its curvy design, there wasn’t even the possibility of my cat sitting on top to peruse his kingdom. Inside the gloss exterior is a Scan-Speak 1” textile-dome tweeter flanked by two 5” Egyptian Papyrus fibre Satori mid-woofers from SB Acoustics (laid out like in my aged Meridian M2 speakers). Papyrus fibre is very lightweight, well-damped and fairly stiff. I am a fan of both textile-dome and Scan-Speak drivers, as they also appear in my Wilson Benesch Arcs. They produce a very lifelike sound without the 20kHz+ “tizzy” peaks that can be associated with some diamond or metal-coated drivers. Interestingly, he also uses both diamond tweeters and aluminium sandwich woofers in his various models, showing his hunt to find the best drivers for each individual creation. As Ilias explained to me;
“In our higher models, we use Accuton ceramic and diamond tweeters for ultimate bandwidth and micro-detail in rooms and systems that can reveal that last few percent. Each choice is about the target experience of the specific model.”
The Scan-Speak Illuminator Aura surround has an elliptical waveguide for smooth dispersion, helping deliver that important high-frequency detail to my settee. Deep bass is handled by a downward-firing hard-pressed 10” paper cone from FaitalPro. Estelon always have the bass as close to the floor as possible so that they couple more effectively with the room. Other manufacturers, such as Magico, have the same idea, with that company also only producing infinite-baffle designs, as in the Aura. Having no port, it is not quite so intolerant of being placed near to walls, though, of course, sealed boxes add their own problems in design. I was able to place it much more easily than ported and transmission-line designs. Each driver is also installed in its own complex, sealed and dampened chamber. The crossovers act at 75Hz and 2.3kHz, both using second-order (12dB/octave) slopes. Being under the important 3kHz is a good thing, in my opinion, as so much happens in music around that frequency. The crossover itself is point-to-point wired using air-core and iron-core coils, Auricap and Jantzen caps and Mundorf bifilar resistors. All great vital statistics, and every component checked for perfect matching. As for internal cabling, that comes from Kubala-Sosna. With a power handling of 150W, it worked very well with my Krell SS workhorse, and even better with the KT88 Class A/B valve amplifier. With 88dB/W sensitivity, they should be easy to drive with any reasonably powered amplifier. The speakers come with lovely shaped magnetically attached, black-cloth grilles, should you want to use them, and these mimic the geometry of the curved front. Connecting up the Aura isn’t quite straightforward. It has an unusual cable-connecting system; whilst spade connecting is fairly easy (see photo), the bananas need to be inserted through tiny holes (one was too small initially) and then for both options you need to tighten up the bottom like a vice, without, hopefully, squeezing your bananas so they look like runner beans. I prefer connections where the bananas connect with the socket all the way round, rather than just pushed to touch metal at the top.
SOUND QUALITY
Once I had put the Aura into its best position – and that is a task on its own, as each speaker weighs 34kg – I started listening to music. I found the best audio with a slight toe-in, and could position the boxes nearer to the walls than I expected (even for an infinite baffle). With paper drivers, I expected a smoother and slower performance than I got. Indeed, I found the imaging and clarity to be very accurate and fast, and even with a massive 10” woofer (it’s not a sub-woofer), the low-frequency sound wasn’t overpowering. That bass was certainly all there, but I found a very cohesive performance from all the drivers; even with such a big distance between the downward-firing bass and the other drivers, the speakers still acted like a single point-source.
One of my favourite test-CDs is the Naim “True Stereo” CD, created using just a pair of AKG 414EB condenser mics in ORTF (Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française) stereo array, recorded directly onto a Nagra IV-S reel-to-reel. In cardioid mode and angled outward at 110 degrees, it really does give a chance for the room’s own atmosphere to be part of the recording. There is nothing impure in these performances, and the quite brilliant soundstage from the Aura, especially front-to-back, was quite startling. The clarity and bass extension from “Saudades on 8th Avenue” (Stew Cutler) was engrossing. With guitar left, bass middle, and drums to the right, the spatial positioning was very precise. The musicians were as firmly positioned in my living room as I have ever heard them. My only qualm was that it gave just a very slightly congested sound mid-frequency, even though there were just 3 performers. Interestingly, I also found that in the upper mid-band of Ian Anderson’s “Mrs Tibbets” (from Jethro Tull’s ‘The Zealot Gene’).
With the slight concerns I had on the mid-band, I listened to Delius “On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring” (LPO, Vernon Handley). This is the British composer at his best with slushy strings and excellent imagery. I was surprised by just how good those mid-frequencies were able to separate all those musical lines. I must admit I was now listening dead centre in that sweet-spot, so I think it was more my positioning when writing whilst I listened that caused that mid-congestion. Thank you, Delius. The tweeter sits in an elliptical waveguide that Estelon tune to match its directivity to the mid-woofers for a wide, even listening window. As Illias told me, the narrow baffle around the tweeter was for low diffraction and precise imaging. These speakers do sound great wherever you are sitting, but those mid frequencies seem just a little more controlled when you are in the right place! Indeed, imaging, clarity, and bass performance were quite astonishing even for £20K.
“Blue in Green” with American Jazz pianist Laurence Hobgood, Bassist Brian Torff and percussionist Paul Wertico (Pat Metheny Group drummer), coloured my living room with sparkle and excellent control of the music. The sense of space and freedom made this music sound just so easy. Indeed, I felt in all my listening that the Aura just made music sound so real and unfettered. Sometimes speakers can complicate the music, and even make the listener rather edgy, but the Aura just gave an aura of peace and control. That didn’t mean it was slow and lethargic; on the contrary, songs like “Keep It To Yourself” (Bonnie Koloc) had excellent speed and timing from the amplified acoustic guitar, and the tenor saxophone, acoustic bass, and piano all had their own part to play in this great live performance. With the small recital hall used for this recording not adding much of its own reverberation, all performed with considerable alacrity.
With the load impedance going down to around 2-ohms at 58Hz, I wondered how well the Synthesis valve amp would cope with the electric bass guitars with Pink Floyd and Yes, but it was very well controlled and very smooth. I knew my Krell SS amplifier wouldn’t be flustered at all. The deep bass guitar synthesizer effect drone at the start of Sting’s “A Thousand Years” and the pedal organ bass lines in Bach’s Toccata and Fugue BWV 565 played on the grand organ of the St.Laurens Church, Alkmaar, both showed me that the low end can be tamed on most amplifiers, so as long as the amplifier has a good stable current delivery then you should be fine, but perhaps you should check your amp will cope down to 2Ω first. The latter organ work came across with a powerful but well-controlled performance, filling my room with complete mastery as if I was hearing it in Gaudí’s – still incomplete – Sagrada Família cathedral. Going down to 37Hz is very reasonable.
QUIBBLES
My only qualm with this loudspeaker was the highly unusual, vice-like loudspeaker connecting terminals, especially as you have to crawl on the floor to attach everything.
CONCLUSION
I was a little worried when I took on the review that the Aura wouldn’t be able to shine in my music room. How wrong I was. The speaker brilliantly coped with all I threw at it and was able to be placed perfectly to give me that satisfaction. £20k isn’t cheap, but bearing in mind their top-end Extreme Mk ii limited edition is £250,000, then the Aura is almost a give-away price. There are other speakers at this price point, but few look this good and even fewer sound as good. The soundstage is perfection, and despite the upper-mids not quite being as perfect, the music from the lowest bass to the very top is a textbook example of a designer who really knows his stuff.
AT A GLANCE
Build Quality:
Immaculate and a work of art
Sound Quality:
One of the very best soundstages and highly musical at all frequencies.
Value For Money:
£20,000+ gets you a considerable amount of music per pound.
We Loved:
Imaging and clarity; the soundstage is excellent, particularly front-to-back.
Impactful bass performance.
Clear top-end detail.
Excellent in all types of music.
Beautiful looks.
We didn’t Love So Much:
Just that unusual loudspeaker plug connection
Elevator Pitch Review: Estelon loudspeakers will grab your attention before you even listen to them. Looking like an hour-glass figure, they are not just here for good-looks; the speakers bring together art and function in the most beautiful way. With their almost erotic-looking top-end speaker at a quarter of a million pounds, the Aura, for review here, comes in at around £20,000. It might not sound or look as good as their Extreme, but the Aura is quite an astonishing speaker, and I really didn’t want to give this one back.
Price:
£19,500 in White offering,
£22,500 for the Black Gloss or Iron Grey,
£24,000 for the Starlight or Horizon blue,
£24,500 for the Amber Elegance
Janine Elliot
System Used:
Pre-Audio GL-1102N/Ortofon Kontrapunkt b (phono-stage); Krell KPS20i (CD player); Music First Audio Baby Reference pre-amp/Synthesis Roma 98DC and Krell KAV250a (amplification); Tellurium Q and Townshend cables, Coppice Audio stand and Townshend rack.
SUPPLIED SPECIFICATION
3-way passive loudspeaker, sealed box
Frequency response: 37 – 40,000 Hz
Power rating: 150 W
Nominal impedance: 4 Ω (min 2 Ω at 58 Hz)
Sensitivity: 88 dB/2.83 V
Minimum amplifier power: 30 W
Internal cabling: Kubala-Sosna
Cabinet material: Thermoformed mineral-filled composite
Drivers:
Woofer: 250 mm hard-pressed paper (FaitalPro)
Mid-woofers: 2 x 132 mm Egyptian Papyrus fibre (SB Acoustics Satori)
Tweeter: 25 mm textile dome (Scan-Speak Illuminator)
Dimensions
Height: 1366 mm
Width: 384 mm
Depth: 367 mm
Net weight: 34 kg per piece
Recommended room size
16 – 60 m² (For review it was 23.4m²)
Finishes: White, Black Gloss, Horizon Blue, Starlight, Amber Elegance, Iron Grey
