It’s always a treat to go up to the local hi-fi shop (Soundstage in Waterloo Ontario) and listen to exotic hi-fi.  On my latest visit however exotic fare wasn’t so exotic, I got to sample the sweet sounds of speakers made right here in Waterloo Ontario.  Reference 3A was originally a Swiss company started by a legendary French speaker designer named Daniel Dehay.  Reference 3A was later bought by a Canadian company and now they’re hand made in the small city of Waterloo Ontario.

The Reference 3A line of high end bookshelf speakers is simple.  The Dulcet is their budget model you can find for around $1500 US.  Then it’s on to the critically acclaimed MM Decapo I, lastly weighing in at around $5000 US per pair is the Royal Virtuoso, the speakers I had the pleasure of sampling one afternoon.

The first thing that strikes you is the look of the Royal Virtuoso’s, these aren’t normal wooden enclosures, they’re made from Corian, a low resonant and high density material used for industrial desktops and kitchen counters.  Hidden inside the Royal Virtuoso’s as with other designs by Reference 3A is the patented Vibro-Puck, a specially designed wooden disc made from multiple layers to absorb any resonance inside the cabinet.  The cone driver is made from carbon fibers woven together to give it high degrees of sensitivity and strength.  The cone features a front baffle designed to eliminate cross cone frequency cancellations.  The result is only the purest sound from the amplified source filling the room.  These speakers are especially efficient and Reference 3A claims they will run only a handful of watts.

I sat down in front of these speakers with an equally exotic kit powering them and speaker wires that look like industrial power cables, sorry I can’t give any further details of the rest of the kit.  But the musical selection was vinyl, a high end turntable with a Jazz recording, a lady doing up to date Billie Holliday songs.  Being a fan of Billie Holliday’s well made Verve recordings I’m familiar with many of the classics she’s sung.  This might have been the best I’ve ever heard them.  I took particular interest in hearing vinyl again, it’s been years and I’ve always heard the hi-fi snobs speak of how great analog records sound.  Not that I don’t believe it, I just realize it’s so far out of my price range to go analog the way God intended I usually don’t bother indulging in listening sessions as I did on this day.  I must say it was beautiful.  I am not given to exaggerations of sound quality; I heard the expected pops and rustle as the needle hit the record, kind of reminiscent of a bygone era.  The opening punch of the drums that kicked our starting number prompted me to ask if the two speakers were really all we’re listening to with no subwoofer.  Not that the frequency was particularly deep but the impact of the drums seemed more powerful than I imagined you might get from unassisted bookshelf speakers, even as large as the Virtuosos.  The imaging was also amazing, the wide soundstage seemed to envelop me so completely I started to imagine how this could possibly be assisted by pro-logic II.  But there was no pro-logic II digital algorithm involved, there was no optical storage, this was the analog realm, a sort of visit to our acoustic past.  I quickly stopped hearing any evidence of the mechanical source, the needle became invisible as the music got underway.  It became clear this is the way sound was meant to be heard.  All the efforts of every digital recording technology combined exist to simulate old fashioned analog sound.  I take nothing from two channel sources being helped along by Pro Logic II, they produce sound that gets as close as possible to what I heard from the Royal Virtuosos for a fraction of the cost.

I kept listening for placement of individual musicians, indeed I could hear placement very well.  Now, I don’t have a lot of experience with gear at this high end but I can say that the tones were refined compared to the more average stuff I listen to.  I can’t tell you if the sound had any weaknesses, I paid as close attention to the mid, bass and treble and found each frequency range presented in sweetened tones I could sit and listen to all day long.  The most important question to me however; is this listening experience worth the $6K price tag?  For me, at this time I must say no.  That’s no knock on the speakers, they’re fantastic.  But I enjoy my comparatively lower priced NHT speakers at home too.  A high end analog kit offers a different kind of pleasure for those who can afford a taste for it, that doesn’t necessarily replace the effect of a nice 5.1 system.

In the realm of high end equipment the Reference 3A is not considered particularly over-the top, the cost of some of the very exotic handmade speakers with similar engineering standing behind them gets downright silly by comparison, you could spend many times their amount for similar quality.  So, if you had a taste for well engineered hand crafted speakers with a design that has thought of “everything”, you can’t do much better than the Reference 3A Royal Virtuoso.