Best Speakers $10k-$20k Series: PSI Audio A25-M

Product Description

The A25-M is a large stand-mount monitor, 23” tall, 12 1/2” wide and 15” deep. Like most studio monitors, this is an active speaker, with dedicated amplifiers on board for woofer, midrange and tweeter. The amps are rated at 95 watts, 30 watts, and 12 watts continuous and 330, 130, and 55 watts peak output. Class G and H amplifiers are used, which simply means a normal class A/B design but with power supply voltages that vary with the signal to increase efficiency and headroom. Continuous max SPL is 111 db at 1 meter. Price in the red finish I received is $13,798 per pair. Black and white finishes are also available for a small upcharge. There is, by the way, a residentially-oriented version of the A25, called the Heritage3, which uses the same drivers but in a veneered floor-standing design at a significantly higher price. I used the A25 on SolidSteel SS-5 stands which placed the tweeter at ear level and provided robust support for each 60 lb A25.

Active speakers are troubling for many audiophiles, largely I think because tweaking sound quality with amp selection is off the table. That’s your call, but listeners not committed to tweaking should consider some of the advantages of the active approach. Active speakers use electronic crossovers, and these can more easily (which lowers costs) and efficiently create adjustments to compensate for some driver and cabinet behavior than the typical passive crossovers used in most non-active speakers (which means a nominal 137 watts per channel may be more like 250 or 500 watts with a passive speaker). Sometimes designers can do things with electronics that are almost impossible with passive components. In addition to tailoring the crossover slopes, the A25 has circuits that PSI calls Compensated Phase Response and Adaptive Output Impedance. Certainly, the phase response measurements that PSI supplies are impressive. All of this electronic processing is done in the analog domain.

Speaking of impressive, PSI supplies a measured frequency response for each speaker. You can see one of these here. Note that the massive deviations from flat that are assumed by some to be part of the weird culture of studios seem entirely absent. This is an anechoic response at 1 meter, so we would encourage filing this in the ‘interesting factoid’ department because you don’t listen in an anechoic chamber, you don’t listen at 1 meter, your ear/brain is not a microphone etc. (see our Methodology FAQ in the Audiopedia section of the TAS website for more about this). That said, linear response suggests a potentially well-behaved system, and PSI supplies other information about directivity that supports this. Or not, depending on which of the 30 or more measurable parameters of speakers you like to count as favorites.

We say, however, that I can’t reason well, and most of you can’t reason well, from measurements to sound quality. So, we listen.

Sound Quality

Those of you who have watched some of my other reviews will know that I like to think about the user and the context of preferences for each product we review. My experience is that most listeners hear the same things, but they don’t care about them equally. We call these differences preferences, though I am afraid that word makes individual reactions seem more arbitrary than they in fact are. If your tastes and another listener’s tastes simply have nothing to do with the sound of real instruments or the space in which performers are reproduced, or the artist’s idea of what made the music emotionally powerful, well, I can’t say anything of use to you. However, talking to hundreds of audiophiles a year, I observe that our views are more similar than such a theory of the arbitrariness of music and sound would lead you to believe. There is a baseline reality we are trying to approximate with a believable rendition of music. The choice from among the inevitable errors with respect to believability is the focus of our different preferences.

So, I offer the following simplification of reality to, I hope, aid viewers in understanding where the PSI A25 fits for them. From discussions with consumers, I am finding that we can roughly divide listeners into two camps:

• those who prize vividness and engagement very highly
• those who prize tonal beauty to a great degree

Remember, it isn’t that ‘tonal beauty’ listeners don’t hear or value ‘vividness’. But they are at least willing to accept less of it and there may be a level of vividness that is ‘too much’ in that it acts as a distraction. Similarly, it isn’t that ‘vivid engagement’ listeners don’t hear or value ‘tonal beauty’. But they are willing to accept tonal errors, to a degree, but are less tolerant of the loss of transparency and dynamics in reproduced music.

As with all segmentation schemes, this one does some damage to reality in the interests of simplicity. My motivation is that a quick survey of reviewers suggests that a majority are ‘vivid engagement’ listeners. That leads them, with no malice aforethought, to describe ‘vivid enagement’ qualities as getting closer to the absolute sound, which indeed is the case. But, it may also cause them to under-emphasize ‘tonal beauty’ in their analysis. So, forthwith and forsooth, I will endeavor to attend to both these groups of preferences in as balanced a fashion as I can muster. You can then decide if any given product’s balance seems right for you.

The PSI A25 is a suitable subject for launching this approach. I found the A25 deeply disturbing because it does tonal beauty relatively well, if that’s what you want, and yet engagement isn’t tossed aside as an irrelevance. In fact, anything but.

The A25 works well on both hi-res classical recordings and on older recordings that were, perhaps, not ideally recorded. Remember, we use classical recordings as test signals not because we think that’s what you prefer, but because we have an ‘absolute sound’ reference for evaluating what certain gear does. As an example of how the A25 performs, I used the Messiaen Turangalila Symphony with Nelsons and the BSO. This recording can induce ‘high-frequency zing fatigue’, but the A25 nicely controls the zing. The big thing, perhaps, is that the A25 retains a superb sense of instrumental separation, so that you can follow the various lines of the work easily. This is in contrast to some speakers that seem aimed at tonal beauty but bring a bit of a pillowed sound along for the ride and end up muffling the fun. As another example, on Elgar’s ‘The Dream of Gerontius’ with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the A25 presents so much of the work as you can imagine hearing it from about Row J that I was deeply impressed. The violin tone is clear but not etched and the singers come through with effortlessness as output rises and the various choirs are delivered without the all-too-common muddled delivery.

However, I think some ‘tonal beauty’ listeners want to avoid harshness and distortions above all else, and I think the A25 will not go far enough for such listeners. The A25 takes a balanced approach, and this balance of softening some of the hash while revealing the instrumental lines is the speaker’s strength or weakness, depending on your point of view. If you want violins to sound like violas, you have to go farther than the A25 does. If you want a Strat through a Marshall overdriven to sound like a Les Paul through a Twin Reverb, nope. And the A25 won’t correct DAC distortions because those aren’t in the frequency domain.

I also think it is possible that some ‘tonal beauty’ listeners find, in some music, that the large array of musical lines and the dynamics of different instruments or musical parts to be almost overwhelming. I relate this to an experience at CEDIA last year, where demo after demo of high-end home theater felt pretty much frightening or terrorizing. It was an unpleasant feeling, and I wanted to leave each demo as soon as possible. At the time I said “for me, when a volcano is erupting on screen and dinosaurs are marching out of the forest toward the audience (and our hero), I’m already agitated and fearful. I don’t really need to have four 15” subs blasting dinosaur footfalls at 100 db to be afraid. Scared is appropriate, terrorized is bad. IMHO. Maybe a lot of musical detail, even if accurate to the real sound of the instruments, is simply too much for some listeners? I don’t think the A25 goes far enough in the tonal beauty direction to address this overload, if it is an issue for you, because it actually delivers a lot of detail and instrumental color and dynamic punch.

Now in the world of listeners who want some ‘vivid engagement’, this dynamic quality with reduced harshness might be ideal. I noticed time after time with rock and jazz recordings that difficult transients like rim shots had excellent snap. This includes good rise time, but also the sense of fast settling time too. And, I reiterate that the delineating of musical lines is very good.

Voicing

The bass of the A25 is nicely judged. This is of course room dependent, and PSI provides a low frequency contour control for mounting near a wall or in a corner. I used the speakers out in the room, in the calculated smoothest positions in my room, so I left the control set to flat. Low bass is solid into at least the low 30s (I measured a 26 Hz low frequency -3 db point in room). Even more important for many is that mid-bass from 40 Hz to 80 Hz is perhaps very slightly elevated, yet quite detailed. This seems in line with the -1 db tilt per octave that seems desirable. The A25 is a ported design, and I would say it has a little port blur, but not much. Frankly the bass has plenty of detail and sounds quite realistic, it just isn’t as dry as some studio performances can be. I think for a lot of people this will be a plus.

Upper bass to lower midrange is nearly flat, but I sense that the 200 – 400 hz range might be a touch diminished. This happens with many speakers and I suspect floor bounce interference is a factor, so it may seem normal or even right to you.

Midrange really shines with the A25, but in a specific way. Voices are very slightly set back in the mix, which many listeners find more believable; however, you should be the judge. But voices are clear and show good octave-to-octave balance.

I was worried that the treble would be too strong (that urban myth thing), but the treble is balanced and smooth. Upper midrange dynamics are simply superb in that the transient life is preserved, but an over etched attack isn’t what is happening. I did think you could criticize the A25 for being more dynamic as the frequency rises above the bass, but you really have to be finicky to notice this and many speakers will then be open to this critique. A more salient critique for the tonal beauty people might be that all this treble dynamism is distracting because it is so well done.

Imaging

The imaging of the A25 is quite good. Like many of the speakers I’ve been reviewing recently, we have to unpack what is happening. The A25 does two very useful things in my listening. The first, already alluded to, is that central images are well-delivered and are set back in various planes of depth, as called for by the recording. I would say that in general, images start at the rear plane of the speakers and extend 6-8 feet deeper, depending. The other imaging feature of the A25 that I thought was well done is the lack of pinpoint imaging. That might sound odd, but if you listen to live music you will rarely hear a performer positioned plus or minus 1 foot on stage. The A25 positions performers as small “clouds” of sound, placed across the stage as appropriate. If there is a weakness here, it is that performers placed hard left or hard right seem to come from the speakers, and since they are in a plane in front of the central images, the stage is more U-shaped than is believable. To be fair, I’ve noticed a version of this on many speakers and some of those don’t have the other imaging benefits of the A25. The A25 also seems to slightly restrict height presentation.

Value

Of course, I can’t know your budget, so value, in the sense of affordability, is really an untouchable topic. But value defined as quality compared to comparably priced and lower-price products can be discussed.

I do think we have to first point out the obvious fact that the A25s include amplifiers. If you would spend $2k-$4k on a power amp, then the A25s are $11k speakers, roughly. Other speakers I’ve reviewed that seem philosophically aligned with the A25 include the MoFi Sourcepoint 888 and the Sonus Faber Sonetto V G2. I think the A25 is at least as good as those speakers in offering a dose of soft tonal beauty while delivering more vividness and just plain lower distortion than they do. Of course, you pay a price for these gains, if they are gains for you. You might also find that one of those other speakers simply fits your room acoustics better (the bigger bass of the 888s for example). The excellent Acoustic Energy Corinium takes transparency up a notch from these lower cost speakers, though it doesn’t have quite the transient shaping as the A25 or its bass definition. The Corinium is, however, less expensive.

Summary

Thanks for hanging in there on this somewhat lengthy discussion of a sonically interesting speaker. For a listener who wants a wide variety of recordings to sound at least good and who also prizes a sense of transparency to the original performance, the PSI Audio A25-M is a very special speaker. It balances these goals brilliantly while costing only somewhat more than some of our favorite under $10k speakers. Well done, and not at all the sonic signature we expected.