Fully aware of all the technical elements of their design, Igor Levitsky and Eugene Gribov complemented the listening sessions with extensive technical presentations of the system and the specific configuration in the room. And the Consonus Tide deserved that level of presentation. Consonus, means harmonious, sounding together in Latin, and that is a fair description of the Tide’s design philosophy.
As Levitsky and Gribov explain, speaker designers have always worked hard to solve typical problems and challenges, often going to extremes with diminished returns. And yet, even with a great system, critical sonic ingredients are missing in reproduced sound. Consonus has geared up to help music enthusiasts finding what’s missing by introducing their unique audio system concept, based on decades of experience designing speakers and electronics for major brands, including all the critical components, and having learned about many approaches that most brands have never dared to fully pursue.
With the Consonus Tide, the two audio industry veterans showed that this fully integrated approach works, and that the results can be offered in a superior high-end audio system, with particular attention to industrial design and construction quality. Intended as its premier stereo audio system – Tide consists of two 4-way speakers powered by two quad-channel amplifiers with highest quality DSP processing and custom speaker cables.
The Tide Submerge subwoofer is a sealed design with a 13” high performance driver (sandwich cone and 3” voice coil with titanium former), while the Tide Breeze is an open baffle speaker, using a 1.5” thick trapezoidal composite structure that carries a 9.5” electrodynamic midwoofer (composite cone, 2” voice coil), and two planar ribbon drivers, 10” midrange and 3” tweeter in dipole configuration. This choice of drivers naturally includes the Radian Audio Engineering LM10n midrange and the LT3.2 planar ribbon tweeter, both designed by Igor Levitsky originally for demanding cinema sound applications. These planar ribbon drivers have been increasingly adopted for high end and studio monitor speaker designs and are responsible for the highly accurate but completely natural response in the critical midrange, extending to the highest resolution realm. An heritage that partially helps to explain the analytical abilities of the Consonus Tide design for critical listening.
This arrangement combining sealed subwoofer and an open back midwoofer, with partially overlapping operating bands, allows a smooth gradual transition from omnidirectional low bass via upper bass with cardioid directivity into midrange and HF with dipole directivity. The measured results of the push-pull symmetry show constant directivity in the critical 200Hz to 14kHz range. As Levistky explains, this concept was extensively tested and implemented in Tide to overcome problems that historically hindered performance of all great dipole speakers based on thin film technology, planar or electrostatic. Also, this cardioid directivity pattern, according to several research papers and the company’s own testing, helps to control room modes in the midbass region, resulting in a smoother in-room response and more accurate midbass reproduction.
The system is powered by two quad amplifiers with dedicated channels for each driver, also featuring the highest audio quality DSP engine in each amplifier, and a custom easy-to-use 8-conductor cable system. The two amplifiers were placed hidden in the background for the AXPONA 2024 show, given that the chassis were still not the finished product, even though all the electronics are according to the desired specs. Sold as a system acoustically tuned in its final location, Consonus also offers an optional Tide XO passive crossover to power planar ribbon MF/HF drivers from a customer’s amplifier, when they want to use their favorite amplifier, whether tube or solid-state, bypassing the active DSP-based crossover used in the standard Tide configuration.
Currently, the Consonus Tide system can be ordered for a Q3-2024 delivery. The company welcomes dealer enquiries. Email contact here.
www.consonusaudio.com
