Transcript
"…but what the two tower speakers from Pulheim demonstrated acoustically in the listening room exceeds our expectations."
Music Style 1000
HIGHLIGHT SOUND: OUTSTANDING PRACTICE: VERY GOOD FINISH: VERY GOOD
Lise-Meitner-Str. 9 · 50259 Pulheim · Germany · www.heco-audio.de
av-magazin.de May | 2016
Music Style 1000 Lise-Meitner-Str. 9 · 50259 Pulheim · Germany · www.heco-audio.de
Heco Music Style 1000 floor-standing loudspeaker: Sound expert Heco's Music Style range offers a lot of technology for the money invested. For example, the top model presented here with the model no. 1000 costs around €800 for a single speaker. For this price, the customer gets a fully-fledged floorstanding loudspeaker equipped with lavish drivers, smart design details and the very finest technology. With its great acoustic performance and efficiency, a loudspeaker like the Music Style 1000 can also certainly be used in a home cinema system in addition to its classic stereo application. Anyone still shying away from purchasing the components needed for this has already created the perfect foundation with the Music Style 1000. There are three other speaker models to choose from to expand to a multi-channel surround sound system. Also available is a centre speaker, a compact speaker, a flat wall speaker as well as an active subwoofer. Shape and colour What all the models in the range have in common is the special cabinet design. This is very much characterised by the raised side walls. The rounded tapers on the vertical edge areas give the Music Style speaker a very classy and stylish look. Heco has come up with a special piece of design flair in this respect. While a silk-gloss wood-decor foil veneer has been applied to the sides, the baffle as well as the top and the offset base have a high-gloss paint finish. The visual contrast between the two cabinet surfaces is sometimes more and sometimes less noticeable depending on the light. All Music Style speakers are available in black, white or dark brown. Lying beneath the surface is a multiple-braced and, therefore, reinforced housing made of individual MDF boards. This has enabled Heco to reduce the body's tendency to resonate, benefiting the sound quality in the bass and fundamental tone ranges. Four hard rubber spikes fitted ex works and attached beneath the bass board ensure that the speaker stands firm in an optimum manner. This type of floor contact is ideal for hard floor coverings such as parquet, laminate or tiles. For soft covering like carpet or cork, Heco provides a set of metal spikes suitable for this. If needed, these can quickly and easily be screwed into the bottom of the base board.
To ensure optimum alignment of the floorstanding loudspeaker, the rounded spikes are adjustable and their height can be set using lock nuts. Technology A total of four drivers are used in the Music Style 1000 for wide-band sound reproduction. Installed in the lower section of the floor-standing speaker are 2 x 20 cm subwoofer drivers. These are rear-operated into a ventilated bass reflex volume, with the outlets located at the bottom of the back wall. To optimise the air flow and avoid the flow noise that occurs at high bass levels, both tunnels are very rounded at the inlet and outlet flange. The imposing mid-range driver takes over the sound conversion over a pitch of around 270 hertz. Like the two subwoofers, this driver has the kraft paper cone specially developed by Heco. The latter is intended to offer an optimum ratio of high rigidity to internal attenuation with a lightweight design. With a diameter of 170 mm, the mid-range driver is relatively big so as to ensure powerful sound conversion with a stable level even below the fundamental tone range. A traditionally designed tweeter then takes over at the range above 3,200 hertz. With its small 25 mm domed textile membrane and the specially shaped front panel, it ensures particularly good omnidirectional sound. In order to be able to operate true to the parameters even at high levels, Heco have provided it with voice coil cooling via ferrofluid and a potent drive section with ferrite magnets. The range of opulent technical features is rounded off by an amplitude and phaseoptimising crossover with high-quality passive components. Listening test The Music Style 1000 is a really large loudspeaker. Consequently, our demands in the sound test were correspondingly high. But what the two tower speakers from Pulheim demonstrated acoustically in the listening room exceeded our expectations. The sound surprised us with its extremely wide-band reproduction. From the very deepest bass range to the highest pitches, the Music Style 1000 sounds exceptionally clean and controlled – serving all the musical details to the listener on a silver platter and without sounding analytical. It is impossible not to notice how huge the performance of this speaker will be in the next few minutes of listening.
The two 20 cm subwoofers feel very content in the large-volume reflex enclosure. Thanks to the perfect matching of the chassis, crossover, housing volume and tunnel frequency, the Music Style 1000 is brilliant with virtually infinite bass power, characterised by high pressure capacity and first-class dynamic development. This results in the 1000 being able to manage the skilful balancing act between agility and voluminous depth. And that's quite a feat that is seldom seen in this price category. And the mid-high range is also convincing throughout. With Mariah Carey's "Music Box" studio album, the singer's powerful voice is reproduced with great expressiveness, complemented by a beautiful silky brilliance. The extremely wide-band design of the woofer enables the Music Style 1000 to generate all the important tonal frequency bands from a sound source, ultimately resulting in clean and clear vocal and instrument reproduction. The tweeter rounds off the soundscape with richly detailed and highresolution clarity, which opens up the music in the upper ranges and results in a hugely authentic clarity of sound. Clear text Heco has achieved a major breakthrough with the Music Style 1000. The lofty floor-standing loudspeaker offers extraordinarily high sound quality, which sets standards beyond its class. When so much power and control come together in one speaker, it is definitely worth AV-Magazin giving a Highlight Award.
