Shahinian Compass
This article first appared in hificritic magazine in 2008.
I feel obliged to state at the outset that I have a soft spot for Shahinian loudspeakers. How can one fail to respect anything that remains eminently musical and thoroughly enjoyable while quite literally blowing panes of glass out of one’s windows through playing a little bit of Aaron Copeland at an enthusiastic – but entirely realistic volume – level? That was back in the 1990s and, admittedly, with a slightly larger model, the Arc, than the Compass that’s under consideration here.
In truth there is little not to like about Shahinian’s designs, which flount conventional wisdom at every available opportunity. Bi-wire connections? Not here. Spiked feet? Another no. Drive units facing the listener? Only if the listener happens to be suspended from the ceiling. Cuboid cabinets? Don’t be silly!
Dick Shahinian, the Armenian American who designed the speakers that bear his family name, has some distinctive views about what constitutes a good loudspeaker. Needless to say, those views are not shared by the majority of the commercial speaker building community even though they can be traced back to tenets held to be true by early and respected pioneers in the world of loudspeaker design. His endeavours are driven entirely by his intense passion for music, of which he has an encyclopaedic knowledge. He is particularly fond of English composers, and ‘warm’ English beer, which I found especially endearing traits when he visited me in London many years ago.
Shahinian observes that his company is “far too small to have grand commercial aspirations” and that he is “foolish enough to believe that if we study and practice hard enough, we may discover real artistic solutions to acoustic problems.” His writings about the Compass continue thus: “[This] brings us to 1934, Westphalia, and Enckel, the original designer of the omnidirectional or Kugellautsprecher. His loudspeaker was brought to the USA in 1955 and was used for the first FM stereo experimental transmission of the Chicago Symphony under Stokowski to New York via the Crosby system. The impression, shared by many, was that this was a stunning achievement technically and artistically. Of course, it was hardly commercial or mainstream and thereby disappeared.
“The effect on me was absolutely conclusive. It was clear that the only valid approach to recreate the radial omnidirectional waveforms in real life was to use omnidirectional loudspeakers. The new vertical loudspeaker with a diamond shaped baffle shall be called the Compass. It is nothing more than a continuation of the work we started in 1977 after many years of investigation begun in 1952.”
This means that the work upon which this speaker is based began two years before I was born, which is a sobering thought in these days when product lifetimes are measured in months. It puts ‘progress’ into some kind of perspective.
The Compass enclosure is a rigid pipe containing two dissimilar chambers. The bass loading is achieved through strategically placed friction slots. The diamond baffle is ideal to reduce unwanted typical diffraction problems and thereby produces a smooth, uniform radiation characteristic. The one-inch titanium tweeter with a neodymium motor is Shahinian’s first choice device and is used in several of its other loudspeakers. The six-and-a-half inch woofer with a truly extraordinary new see-through hybrid cone is almost equally spectacular. The filter network, as in all of Shahinian’s designs, has a 6dB trailing edge for the woofer and an 18dB leading edge for the tweeter. There are, to quote the maker, “no zobels, resistors or special correctives. The phase is correct and seamless.”
The enclosure is a standard 19mm Finland birch ply with a variety of face veneers. All four surfaces are finished, permitting a variety of placement choices, including surround applications for those who are inclined towards such musical abominations. Connections are made in the base of the enclosure.
Shahinian notes that “We take a peculiar view of so-called specifications as they tell very little about the actual sound produced. (Almost like specifying the smell and taste of food.)” It is hard to disagree with such a sentiment especially now that current Shahinians appear to be far less challenging for amplifiers than earlier models were with their murderous impedances at high frequencies.
I connected the Compass to a Naim NAC52 pre and NAP250 power amplifier using Chord Company Signature cable. I also briefly tried the speaker with a range of £600 amplifiers that I reviewed in Issue 8 of this fine journal and with a £2,000 Roksan Caspian pre/power combination. Sources were my Naim CDS and a Roksan Caspian M Series-1 CD player.
From the outset it becomes abundantly clear that this is a very special loudspeaker. The Compass communicates with such outstanding fluency and ease, especially when you consider its relatively compact dimensions. It is a small loudspeaker but it has the reassured, confident presentation and scale of a much, much larger model.
Rather than creating the impression, as many loudspeakers do, that the sound is being squeezed out of them like toothpaste from a tube, the music trickles effortlessly from the Compass as though there were no mechanical processes whatsoever involved. Given an amplifier with a suitably stiff power supply the music simply appears almost as casually as smoke rising from a cigarette resting in an ashtray.
And lest that creates the impression of this loudspeaker sounding in the least bit vague or ephemeral then allow me to dispel that notion immediately. The Compass excels dynamically and in terms of timing: it swings, rocks, boogies and funks like very few others. This might seem unusual for a loudspeaker designed by a lover of, in particular, English orchestral music but I don’t think that Dick Shahinian would ever compromise his designs by listening solely to his preferred genres: indeed his son and colleague, Vasken, used to keep and play a full rock drum kit at the factory and you rarely hear those in classical arrangements. That might be why its lack of floor-spikes does nothing to temper or modify the starts and stops of musical notes or reduce their dynamic impact.
If you want to check the veracity of the way this speaker handles drums listen to Brad Wilk’s exuberant and committed playing on the eponymous Rage Against The Machine album: this warehouse-band recording is so raw and unprocessed that the kit, for once, truly sounds like a drum kit. Wilk’s exciting and spartan drumming style — with its lack of flashy fills and transitions along with his ferocious attack on the snare and kick drum and the varying spaces he leaves in his patterns — create a savage tension, a disquiet that the Compass seems to savour. Listen to Bullet in the Head, for example, and the speaker lets you know that this is definitely not Phil Collins — nor someone who came from any remotely related gene pool — holding those sticks. Wilk cites John Bonham, Keith Moon and Elvin Jones as his top three influences and the Shahinians convey the weight, timing and authority of his playing so convincingly that you would never contradict his assertions.
These speakers don’t just sound astonishingly convincing with percussion but also do an equally compelling job of portraying the album’s bass, electric guitar and vocal elements. And portraying them with an egalitarianism of which radical left-wing vocalist Zack de la Rocha would thoroughly approve. Some speakers tend to subjugate the bass lines, effectively combining them with the kick drum but the Compass keeps them distinct and separate. De la Rocha’s rap-metal vocalising is never anything less than crystal clear and perfectly intelligible, whether he is whispering or letting rip with a full-throated yell. And the Compass seems to take great delight in exposing the intricacies of Tom Morello’s impudent, DJ-style guitar excursions. Listening through the Compass is almost like watching a high-definition DVD: you can visualise him tapping strings, cranking the whammy bar and flicking the pickup selector switch, along with all the other wizardry he employs to make his guitars sound like hip-hop DJs’ turntables or stuttering ambulance sirens – anything other than a regular guitar.
While it is easy to detail specifics of the Compass’ musical performance, what is harder to articulate, but which represents the most crucial factor, is the Shahinians’ ability to knit all the instruments’ and players’ individual sounds and performances together so compellingly and utterly persuasively, something it does with ease and completely without artifice. If one listens to many hi-fi components one often detects a quality that can only be described as plasticky; they create a sense that one is definitely listening to a CD or LP, an artificial and mechanical fabrication of the original performance. The Compass comes tantalisingly close to allowing one to suspend disbelief utterly and allow oneself to accept as true, if only for a fleeting moment or several, that the musicians are actually with you in the room – or, more correctly, that one is in the venue with the musicians.
Never before have I felt this so strongly as while listening to the Dr John album, Duke Elegant. Perhaps it’s an American homeland thang but the Compasses convey the Dr’s lethargic Louisiana drawl with such conviction that I feel compelled to raise a glass of Bourbon to the space in the soundstage he occupies. This rendition is about as far removed from ‘plastic’ as one can get. His voice resonates like a true human being’s and has all the qualities one would expect of the same – a sense of body resonance, space around it and air moving through his lungs and larynx. Magical!
It goes without saying that the Compasses pay identical respect to his piano and Hammond B3 as they do to his voice, the bass – acoustic and electric – and all the other instrumentation on this fine album. The same is true of the way they respectfully and graciously handle the delightful and, perhaps, superficial Euro pop of Ulla Meinecke on her album Wenn Schon Nicht Für Immer Dann Wenigstens Für Ewig. Few loudspeakers can truly present this woman’s voice so scrupulously and sympathetically, conveying it with its inherent blend of fragility and power. The Compass simply allows her voice to float before me, sounding as young and naïve as it probably did back in the 1980s when the recording was made.
There’s an almost magical sense that these speakers somehow know what each individual listener wants. I say this because they delighted all of the listeners – each of whom has different and very specific criteria – who heard them in my home. One, for example, excitedly observed that they presented a solid and coherent soundstage no matter where he sat: even when he was wildly off axis the musicians maintained their relative positions in the sonic picture. While that isn’t a major consideration for me I have to say that the Compass certainly maintains tonality, instrumental timbre and dynamic authenticity far better off axis than most directional designs. In fact it does so many things more fluently and with greater ease than ‘conventional’ loudspeakers that I wouldn’t take issue with anyone who elected to subscribe to Shahinian’s supposedly ‘radical’ way of thinking. Why not dare to be different and enjoy your music like you probably have never before?
