Athena Technologies S1/P1.

Manufacturer: Audio Products International, 3641 McNicoll Avenue, Scarborough, Ontario, Canada MIX 1G5; 416/321-1800; www.athenaspeakers.com

Price: S1 satellites, $275/pr.; P1 woofer, $275 ea.

Source: Manufacturer loan

Reviewer: David R. Moran

Let me lead with the news here: these Athena speakers' performance is fully competitive with (if not superior to) what you will find similarly priced from the other high-value loudspeaker companies, say NHT, Polk, Boston Acoustics, PSB, etc.

The Athena S1 satellites with P1 powered "subwoofer" (it's really a woofer) are from Canada, part of the Audio Products International family; API also makes Energy and Mirage speakers, among others. The S1 is a 5.5" smoothly baffled conventional 2-way, and the P1 unit contains a single 6.5" bandpassed (internally mounted in a vented cabinet) woofer with 75W amp and several useful controls. There are bigger Athena models, S2 and S3 satellites with P2 and P3 subs. Everything is shielded, including the subwoofers.

The novelty of this line is that the systems can be easily configured in two different ways. The satellites can be placed on stands (or wherever) and driven by the receiver or amp, with the receiver or preamp's line-level subwoofer (bass-only) output going to the woofer module(s), presumably tucked away in or near a corner; this is a standard partially powered 3-piece or 4-piece sub/sat system. Alternatively, the satellites can be docked atop the P1 cabinets, assuming you get a pair, via connecting rails, to create floorstanding towers with powered woofers.

Finally, one or two subs can be hooked up with some other company's satellites. Upgrading later on for an all-Athena home theater, with additional satellites and a center speaker, is a cinch, as is adding the bigger Athena woofer units.

The woofer cabinet comes with controls for overall level and variable-crossover point (lowpass function, governing the driver's upward reach) along with a switch to invert polarity for smoothest stitching with the satellites. The latter two controls can be defeated to default settings, depending on what satellites you are going to use. The whole system is surprisingly lightweight, making canny use of plastic yet with lots of wood as well, and is pleasingly finished in light maple (but no Maple Leaf flag). The target audience may well be young consumers who are budget-conscious yet looking for something with serious performance.

Marketing hype aside, it is unclear in my view how many consumers really care or make use of the degree of versatility the Athena line offers, and one wonders if it has been researched post-sale. This may ultimately be a "So what, who cares?" question, but I was particularly interested in it here because of my slightly unexpected experience with the product as a tower. Generally I am big on the convenience and real-world "decor fit" of sub/sat systems, and have been since they were the new thing in loudspeakers 15-20 years ago. Yet with the 4-piece Athena S1/P1 system under review, however good the results I achieved in separated sub/sat mode given considerable placement experimentation, the sound and measurements were always better with the system configured as docked-pair floorstanding towers. This outcome is not typical in my experience, and your mileage may vary. The difference was not huge, and separated sub/sat performance was entirely respectable. But if possible, do audition and compare the Athena S1/P1 docked and floorstanding.

Before getting to the sound and the measurements, I must mention the manual. While it is impressively lengthy and detailed, almost wordy, it also is, by quite a margin, the most confusing and unclear document I've ever seen for a loudspeaker system. There is almost no sense to the sequence of thoughts and paragraphs, and even the heading styles (larger, smaller, boldface, italic) don't follow any usual logic. I've never read anything quite like this. As someone who writes user manuals for a living (including, in the past, instructions for complex loudspeakers), I immediately sympathized with the difficulty of saying it all clearly and pithily; evidently the Athena writer was organizationally defeated by the hookup and configuration possibilities. But I also have little patience for so much effort gone to such a poor result.

The bottom line is that typical Athena users will be flummoxed, that is if they bother to read the thing at all. Worst of all, there's not one picture or drawing, hookup or otherwise, in the entire book! The website's write-up on configurability is similarly artless and chaotic, and beyond that is misleading.

How did the Athenas sound and measure? Well, they sound fine. Just fine. They sound unexceptionable. They sound solid. They have no major anomalies and few minor ones. Was I bored? Not at all, but I always enjoy having something to crab about, and here there was nothing of the sort. They went loud and stayed pretty clean. Balances were always natural. There is no lowest bass, and little sense of easy, effortless power on the very loudest rock. But they are powerful enough.

Room to room, location to location (these speakers are easy to carry), listening position to listening position, they were a pleasure to listen to, which is not an everyday occurrence when you review loudspeakers. What else? Smoothness? For sure, octave to octave, upper bass to lower treble. Airiness? My verdict is okay or better, not the ultimate in spaciousness, true, but airy enough, more than some 1" domes, helped no doubt by those smooth plastic baffles.

What about lower-midrange/upper-bass roughness on (say) cellos? Way less than the norm, especially when the system was docked floorstanding. Imaging? Very fine, with all the usual adjectives: stable in width, steady in position, focused, sometimes deep, sometimes floaty. Better than the good modern norm, which improves with each year.

Eventually I stopped taking notes on the Athenas and just listened to a bit of everything, from BSO Tanglewood broadcasts to a Who concert from last fall ordered on CD.

Things did not improve with choosing the sub/sat configuration, except that on rock it was clear there was a bit more free bass power with the subwoofer in a corner, meaning you could turn its bass level down on, to preclude a boomy balance and increase headroom, and still get a few more decibels for the octave below, say, 60 Hz, and to play louder in general. Such corner augmentation is not well-understood by many people in audio who should know better: once you are in an enclosed domestic space, the difference between a tower like this one well out in the room from the front and side wall, and its sub/sat configuration with the woofer in the corner, is only 3-4 dB at 60 Hz and only a dB or two below 30 Hz. That is significant and audible, but not as huge as many claim when they throw around the term "room gain."

Above 60 Hz or so things get different: the comparative augmentation will typically be quite large and boomy, followed at higher frequencies by the serious and audible suckouts that occur in the lower midrange due to cancellations as the wavelengths approach the distances to the boundaries in the first place. (A decade ago Roy Allison produced an invaluable Windows shareware program that graphs near-corner augmentation, good and bad, boosted and "ripply," for any speaker at any distance from said corner; I will e-mail a copy of it to any reader who writes me at [e-mail].)

The potential for roughness (peaks and dips in the two 60-240 Hz octaves) is aggravated with sub/sat configurations, which have their crossover in that region. As mentioned, I never got quite as smooth lower-midrange and upper-bass balances using the sub/sat mode, even as I enjoyed the increased ease of the bass output with the woofer units in the corners. (Or stacked in one corner, as Tom Nousaine recommends.) If you do opt for the sub/sat configuration, I suggest you go ahead and use not just the Athena's bass-level control (of course) but also the variable crossover (start at its highest, I advise, 150 Hz and work downward) and the polarity switch. Get a friend to make the experimental adjustments while you sit listening to favorite cuts with healthy bass, including upper bass.

After the audition, I measured the system inside and then took it outside for half-anechoic measurements, many of which were impressive. Figure 1 top shows the total horizontal output, averaged, of the Athena S1 satellite outdoors on its woofer stand (undriven), 5 dB/vertical division. The measurement was taken at seated ear height approximately 8' away, moving within the plane around the speaker, with my usual equipment (dbx pro 1/3-octave RTA with continuous averaging, AKG 2" mike, precision pink noise) and spatial averaging protocol. (This simply means that I move the mike a few inches up and down, side to side, and in and out at each measurement spot, to smooth out any "thin-slice" anomalies.) The 300-400 Hz valley gets mostly filled in in a room, with luck and placement experimentation, and can be mostly ignored here. The higher, small dip, between 800 Hz and 2 kHz, is real, as is the peak at 2 kHz, as is the broad gentle treble rolloff above. But we've all seen and heard much worse.

[GRAPH OMITTED]

The middle curve is of the subwoofer module alone, showing the bandpassed woofer's performance as lowpassed at its lowest and the highest crossover points. The design is evidently tuned to 50 Hz and gives usable healthy output to 40 Hz.

The bottom curve shows the best inroom response I got (similar to ones not shown), and real fine regardless. The system was in its docked floorstanding tower mode. Approximately 38-16k Hz @ 3+ dB or so if you like numbers. This is absolutely fine, and for the price, in-room power response like this is superb.

Let me digress for a chauvinistic moment for those readers who are muttering to themselves, "Of course it sounds good and measures well; it's from Canada, where they have their elaborate National Research Council facilities and have always known what they're doing with loudspeakers." It's not quite like that. Except for quantifying (in several important AES Journal papers) the key significance of smooth total loudspeaker output (smooth both frontally and off-axis and with wide, even dispersion) for listener preference, and except for helping numerous Canadian manufacturers get a quick and ready grip on these important design parameters, the NRC's work, its aid and influence, were not, in the intellectual history of audio, like the discovery of fire.

If anything, it was more like a rediscovery of fire, inasmuch as the crucial roles of speaker system power response and of smooth, broad dispersion had been known by American firms, some of them anyway, for decades, starting way back when, with Edgar Villchur and Henry Kloss and later Roy Allison (and a few others). It is not that their companies, or other American competitors, always did it right. And not that it's easy to do in any case (much easier today than in the past, though). The old AR crowd and their many offspring companies focused more on smooth total power than on smooth output at all off-angles. And it is not that Canadian speaker companies always learned their NRC-aided lessons correctly, or were able to get it right themselves either. But today, more and more modern loudspeakers I listen to and measure are getting it right.

This is partly because some of the leading Canadian researchers took jobs at Harman, parent of several speaker companies (JBL, Infinity), a move which, with time, was hugely influential. And it's partly because more and more designers are finally understanding the severe sonic limitations resulting from reliance on the myriad FFT-based impulse-response measurement tools that give uselessly micro slices and snapshots of speaker behavior, are horribly and misleadingly treble-biased, and cause engineers and journalists alike to fret excessively about on-axis response and needlessly about any number of "time"- and "phase"-related matters.

And finally, it is partly because a second-tier speaker reviewer (myself) and a highly influential one (Stereophile's John Atkinson), who have little else in common as audio journalists, have written again and again, for well over a decade, about the strong and clear correlation between accurate speaker playback and spatially averaged in-room power measurements. In other words, the pernicious legacy of Richard Heyser's methodologies, which I ranted about a few issues ago, is at last in the process of being corrected, as a senior Harman engineer privately concurred at a recent AES function.

Imagine: now the top Harman loudspeakers are being designed with detailed frequency-response measurements at all angles (analysis of radiation patterns), similar to the way Consumer Reports, so regularly maligned by all good audiophiles and many speaker manufacturers, started measuring and grading speakers many years ago (even though they too concentrated more on total power than on off-axis smoothness). Hey, do you suppose that in the [21.sup.st] century, English and Japanese loudspeakers, which have so seldom gotten it really right in the past, will start to sound, and measure, uniformly smooth?

Figure 2 shows why the Athena's imaging is as precise as it is. These curves show the difference between perfectly flat on-axis response (normalized, in other words) and the loudspeaker's horizontal output at 30, 60, 90 (sideways), and 135 degrees off-axis, and directly behind (180 degrees). These are the responses of the reflections off the side and front walls, and not only do they influence timbral perception but they perforce help form the stereo imaging. What is desirable here is to have nice, evenly striated, uniformly spaced curves that are also smooth, without nasty loud "flare-ins" and scalloping at the crossover stitches. When this is achieved, the imagery, whatever it happens to be from the stereo recording, does not suddenly change width as a function of frequency band. Many speakers are much better in this regard than they used to be, and the Athena S1/P1 is about as good as it gets in such a modest and competitive design. There is one anomaly that, while I took no particular note of it during audition, may be a tad troubling: observe the moderately loud peak visible in the 1k-2k Hz octave in the output curve at 135 degrees off-axis, which in most rooms will persist "within" the reflections from the front wall and well down the side walls toward the corner.

[GRAPH OMITTED]

Oh well, as any sophisticated loudspeaker system engineer will be glad to tell you, it is a bear to design a speaker with uniformly smooth performance on- and off-axis and have it be implemented with real parts, few drivers, feasible cabinets; have it look more than acceptable; and finally hit a given price point. Most of the time, serious compromises and tradeoffs are entailed. To my mind, this versatile Athena system gets good marks for appearance, and quite high marks for value and sonic performance. Well done!

Postcript: Requiescat in pace, Woofer Moran, 1985-2000.

Since the bass driver long ago took its cute name from the animal's sound, I thought it would be a clever language reversal, and honorary besides, to name our large standard poodle "Woofer" 15 years ago. Woofer was a smart, funny dog who lived a long and happy life, and the chief audio memory I will carry of him is the time I was testing ultimate subwoofer levels (real subs, like Hsus and Velodynes) inside in the necessarily empty house. When I started some loud playback of nearly infrasonic tones, thwomp-thwomp-thwomp-thwomp, Woofer jerked up, looked at me shocked, barked once loudly, and raced outside to commence barking ferociously at the sky, certain there was something hovering over the house, or perhaps thinking we were under helicopter attack. --DRM

Track those lows, big guy.