The most money I’ve ever spent on a pair of loudspeakers was back in the early 1990s, when I bought a pair of used TAD TH-4001 wooden horns and their associated TD-4001 compression drivers. The TAD horn’s smooth, micro-resolved response was a refinement upgrade from my multicell Altec horns; plus, the TADs’ French-polished wood looked radically less industrial than the soldered-tin, tar-filled 1005/288C horns they replaced. None of my horn-fanatic friends had anything sonically or aesthetically comparable, and all of them were envious. I didn’t keep the TADs long, because the friend who admired them most made me a very “friendly” offer.
That was my first experience with Japanese loudspeaker design, and it exposed me to a level of engineering precision and fine craftmanship I had not yet encountered in American-made speakers.
Thirty years later, I find myself listening to a pair of brand-new TAD speakers, and once again, none of my friends have anything sonically or aesthetically comparable. This time, though, it’s a living room–friendly, three-way, dynamic-driver standmount/bookshelf called Compact Evolution One – Bookshelf Speaker System. The model number is TAD-CE1TX-WN. It is exposing me to a level of fit’n’finish and sonic insightfulness that is rare among contemporary speakers, even at the highest prices.
In the beginning
The company everybody knows as Pioneer was founded by Nozomu Matsumoto in 1938 as a radio store and speaker repair shop in Tokyo. Over the ensuing decades, Pioneer grew into a revered brand with a global reach. In 1978, Pioneer decided to break into the professional speaker market with a line of all-out recording studio monitors manufactured under the name Technical Audio Devices Laboratories. TAD’s first product was the TD-4001 compression driver mentioned above.
According to the TAD website, that driver and its associated TH-4001 horn “found its way into famed recording studios around the world, including those designed by Tom Hidley, who was a top-rated acoustic designer of the time, as well as AIR Studios, Capitol Records studios, and Record Plant.
“TAD speaker units were also used as part of a sound reinforcement system during the concert tour the Eagles made around Japan in 1979, during which the performance of the TAD speakers dazzled audiences. Impressed with the reputation of TAD speakers, big-name musicians such as Jimmy Page and Prince installed TAD speakers in their private recording studios.”
In 2000, TAD introduced its first speaker designed specifically for home audio use, the floorstanding M1, which featured the first incarnation of TAD’s now-famous coaxial Coherent Source Transducer. The M1 evolved into today’s flagship Reference One Floor Standing Speaker (TAD-R1TX-EB/TAD-R1TX-BR), the big brother of the Compact Evolution One I’m reviewing here.
Description
What separates Technical Audio Devices Compact Evolution One from its audiophile-speaker competitors is its highly evolved 5.5″ coaxial “Coherent Source Transducer” (CST) driver, which is manufactured in-house in Japan and features a “newly developed” magnesium midrange cone with a concentrically mounted beryllium dome tweeter that, according to TAD, is manufactured with their “proprietary vapor deposition technique.” Impressively, TAD’s CST is specified to operate between 250Hz and 100kHz.
The CE1TX is a three-way design. The bottom three octaves are reproduced by TAD’s 7″ “aramid composite” (footnote 1) bass driver, which is made of “five layers of woven and non-woven fabric” that TAD says “optimizes the vibration characteristics of the shell-shaped diaphragm that integrates the center and the cone into a single piece.”
Another feature, which surely contributes to the CE1TX’s sound character, is its “Bidirectional ADS Port”; ADS is short for “AeroDynamic Slot.” These bidirectional slots are slit-shaped ducts with flared openings behind the speakers’ 17″ × 13″ sculpted-aluminum side panels, which appear to float about 4mm beyond the cabinet’s sides. According to TAD’s website, these slots allow internal air to flow out smoothly, without turbulence: “The symmetrically placed port openings … reduce port noise and keep internal standing waves from escaping from the ports.”
These made-in-Japan speakers are heavy (63.9lb) and on the large side for standmounts, measuring 11.3″ wide × 20″ high × 17.6″ deep. Their sensitivity is listed as 85dB/W/m, and their nominal impedance is specified as 4 ohms. The CE1TX is priced at $32,500/pair; a pair of optional stands adds $2500.
Setup
Early in my TAD auditions, I realized that the CE1TX presents unusually consistent dispersion in both the vertical and horizontal planes, and that those dual side ports make them easy to place. The first couple of days, I moved them about in an obligatory manner; no matter where I set them down, they just looked at me and shrugged as if to say, “Put us anywhere you want. We don’t care.” I didn’t put them in the refrigerator, or under the bed, but as I was moving them, I remembered that professional studio monitors are not typically designed to sit far from the front wall as many audiophile speakers are. Monitor speakers are, by necessity, friendly with room boundaries. I didn’t try it, but I feel pretty certain the CE1TX would even work on a big desktop or a wide shelf, as long as the tweeters were roughly level with the listener’s eyes and toed in to cross behind the listener’s head.
My review samples ended up on 24″ Sound Anchor Reference stands, about 6′ apart and maybe 30″ from their front face to the wall behind them. In that position, the 50Hz-to-200Hz region was flatter and cleaner than with any speaker I’ve reviewed in this room. All listening was done with the included woofer grilles off.
Listening
The distributor told me that my pair of CE1TXs had more than 100 hours on them on arrival. Nevertheless, for the first week, I let them play 24/7 in the background at low volume while I worked in my studio. Yet, over and over, I’d have to stop what I was doing and check my iPad to see: what is this fabulous new music Roon Radio has discovered for me? Every time I looked, it was some new conductor or brand of large-scale classical music I don’t usually enjoy because the orchestra is too big, the music’s bombastic, and the recording sounds clogged and fatiguing to listen to. This happened so frequently that the first thing I wrote in my notes was “These speakers force me to like music I don’t like.”
Powered by Parasound’s Halo A 21+ amplifier, the CE1TX loudspeakers sorted and presented the densest, most complicated and overproduced music in ways that made it more intelligible and agreeable—and oftentimes more beautiful than it is with my Falcons powered by the same Parasound amp. During these early auditions, the CE1TXs made every recording sound right and uniquely “like itself ” and, most likely, the way its producers hoped it would sound.
With this combination, on the mind-pulling 33-minute Forbidden Love by Pulitzer Prize– winning composer Julia Wolfe (24/96 FLAC, Nonesuch/Qobuz), the So Percussion Ensemble generated startling, percussive struck-string transients that I could feel in my gut. The So Ensemble did this while painting the most delicate details into a deep, galaxy-like space behind them. If you enjoy the sound of sounds like I do, this demonstration-quality recording will thrill you and your visitors.
As I listened to the Julia Wolfe, I kept thinking, it sounds like I am hearing everything on the recording, yet the sound is never too rough, sharp, dry, wet, muddled, muted, short, or cold, or anything! Nothing is lost, and nothing is exaggerated. The CE1TXs sounded more supple, textured, and relaxed than the Genelec G Threes or my memory of the Harbeth 30.2 monitor speakers—which is the one speaker this TAD reminds me of most. Their sonics and tone balance are similar, but the CE1TX is smoother, finer grained, and focuses the lens another half-turn.
What surprised me was how these TAD speakers made the Parasound A 21+ sound more colorful, three-dimensional, and energetic than usual. I like it when a new speaker makes a familiar amp sound better. And vice-versa.
Shake Sugaree
I am embarrassed to say I’d never heard of singer–songwriter–guitar player extraordinaire Elizabeth Cotten (1893–1987). A song she wrote when she was 11 years old, “Freight Train,” was covered by Peter, Paul and Mary and became a staple of the 1960s folk revival (footnote 2). Her signature tune, “Shake Sugaree,” was covered by both Dylan and the Grateful Dead. I discovered Cotten’s music because Roon Radio steered me to her after I listened to gospel by Old Regular Baptists. The sound of her voice and her sophisticated, left-handed, upside-down guitar picking caused her to jump right out of the music stream. Cotten’s talent was discovered while she was working as a maid for Pete Seeger’s family in the early 1950s. Through the CE1TXs, her vocal tone was exceedingly natural, disarmingly clear and sincere—and adorably unpretentious (16/44.1 FLAC, Smithsonian Folkways/Tidal).
Footnote 1: Kevlar is an example of an aramid fiber.
Footnote 2: See youtu.be/R2DCWfBkMSI.
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COMPANY INFO
Technical Audio Devices Laboratories, Inc.
Bunkyo Green Ct. 2-28-8, Honkomagome
Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0021
Japan
(781) 982-2600
padhifi.com
ARTICLE CONTENTS
Page 1
Page 2
Specifications
Associated Equipment
Measurements
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