Best Speakers $5k-$10k Series: Acoustic Energy Corinium

Sound Quality 

The Acoustic Energy Corinium is an impressive sounding speaker.  

It offers an overall balanced sound from bass to midrange to treble. This is something you notice as a pattern across many tracks, since any given track can have odd engineering. But if you take as an example Alison Balsom’s Baroque Concertos with Trevor Pinnock, you notice a nice balance of clarity and treble sweetness. Then put on Pearl Jam’s recent Dark Matter and you hear a kind of ‘Wall of Sound’ mix that features outstanding guitar clarity. Switching to the new remastering of Miles ’54, you’re treated to excellent clarity of all the instruments, but with an ever-present sense of the age of the recording. As you should.  

When it comes to octave-to-octave balance, there are some small variations in frequency bands that you might notice. Or not.  

The soundstaging is wide and deep when the recording suggests it.  On Annette Asvik’s Liberty the depth is impressive and natural sounding for the size of the group. I was impressed as well with the ability of the Corinium’s to keep the image off the speakers.  

The available bass depth and power work well on almost all music that needs it. On Francine Thirteen’s Queen Mary, my notes talk about deep bass. This is not an acoustic recording, so we get some synthesized material that goes pretty far down.  

Dynamics are quick, and recovery from transients lacks the blur or noise that some speakers can impose. On Nilufer Yanya’s My Method Actor, I noted the quickness of the transients, which requires good rise time and low resonance. I also was impressed here with the sense of tempo that the Corinium displayed.  

Now, we have to say that our test methodology is built around objective observation of how equipment sounds compared to the real thing. ‘The real thing’ being the sound of real musical instruments in real spaces. Check out our methodology paper in the Audiopedia section of the site for more, but the basic idea is that humans, with practice, are pretty good at observing when voices sound like voices or a guitar sounds like a guitar. Our goal here is for the sound to be ‘believable’ not for it to be ‘accurate’ becase we more or less can’t know that. We are aiming to minimize large, distracting audible distortions, although what constitutes distracting requires some study. Which bring us to… 

Voicing 

The thing is that different listeners have different sensitivities. I don’t think it mainly is the case that you can’t hear things that I can hear or vice versa. But it would appear to be the case that you may care more about certain sonic phenomena than I do or than some other listener does. My job is not to impose my point of view on these reviews, but to describe what is going on. Without some articulation of different points of listener sensitivity, it can be hard for you to know if a speaker like the Corinium would float your boat. 

So, let’s break this down a different way. If you can identify your “care abouts” in these descriptions, I think it will help you understand what equipment is potentially interesting.  

Upper Range Voicing: 

• many listeners are very concerned about upper midrange glare and treble harshness and edginess. The presence of these phenomena are a distraction and interfere with believability and with focusing on the music. This problem is created or exacerbated by some modern recordings that feature compression and excessive levels that lead to clipping. Add the preference of some mastering engineers for a balance on the bright side and, well, you can understand the problem. 
• other listeners want to hear the full resolution and detail and microdynamics of the recording. Blurring or softening these phenomena are a barrier to believability and constitute a distraction that takes focus away from the music. At times, with some modern recordings, this approach requires you to be selective or grin and bear it. 

On this somewhat artificial forced choice, the Corinium clearly leans toward resolution and an even-handed presentation. They seem aimed to deliver what is on the recording, and if the recording is good, you’re in luck! But if the engineers didn’t do it ‘to your liking’ because they assumed you are listening on a phone or a soundbar, well, don’t blame the speakers. I will add that the Corinium, unlike a few speakers today and unlike many speakers 15 years ago, deliver this honesty with relatively low pain. Thankfully, this is not a speaker, for the most part, that is pretending to deliver detail on the recording by adding distortions. But it also isn’t a speaker designed to consistently smooth over the rough edges of today’s occasionally overproduced recordings.  

Mid-Bass Voicing: 

• Some listeners prefer a slightly elevated mid-bass balance. This may be due to having rooms that are leaky in the bass range or rooms where ideal setup isn’t possible. It may also be that some listeners just really like a little extra bass because they sense that recording engineers are too timid. Sean Olive’s work at Harman suggests that this latter group is in the majority.
• On the other hand, there are listeners for whom bass resonance and bloat and overhang and loss of detail is a major annoyance. Olive’s work suggests that this may be 20-30% of listeners, and a higher percentage of females and older listeners. 

Any comments about bass balance are inevitably somewhat room dependent. I would say the Corinium is not elevated in the mid-bass, but neither are they rolled off. If you find yourself more aligned with the “no bloat club”, the Corinium may be the ‘Goldilocks’ setup because the mid-bass is solid, just not bumped up. Note that this can be, to some degree, adjusted by room placement because the lack of roll-off gives you output to work with via speaker positioning. 

Deep Bass Capability: 

• Some listeners who favor electronic music or some kinds of classical, may care quite a bit about deep bass output (defined here as approximately flat below 40 Hz). 
• Other listeners may focus on rock and bluegrass and jazz and chamber music and find that performance in the bottom octave simply doesn’t matter (the lowest string on a bass being tuned to 41 Hz). 

The Corinium does surprisingly well in the synthesizer world. Pipe organ can go even lower and really may require subs, but at least with the Corinium you would want to try the speakers alone before you spend the extra money and time on the separate subwoofer path. We measured good output from the Coriniums to just below 30 Hz (remember this will be room-dependent). We do not test for max volume while doing this, but at our reference 80 db average level the Corinium deep bass worked like a charm. Still, two 6-inch ported woofers can only do so much if you have a large room.  

Imaging: 

• The other big believability factor for some people is imaging. An image that lands on the speakers too often, or one that is presented on two planes, one near the speakers and one farther or closer, simply doesn’t sound right
• Other listeners are happy with sound coming from the speaker cabinets if the other elements (balance, bass, dynamics) are satisfying

The Corinium is a top-notch imaging device within the conventional forward-facing speaker category. Images are wide and deep with a stage size defined roughly by the speakers. And some material with phase effects can be presented out in the room.  

At the same time, the Corinium won’t do what a very few of today’s imaging kings, like MBLs or some dipoles, like the Linkwitz, can do. These more completely divorce the soundstage and soundspace from the area near the speakers. Of course, you could apply BACCH crosstalk-cancellation to do some of this with the Corinium. And I must emphasize that the Corinium better than most conventional speakers in this department as well as in presented some sense of soundspace.  

Value 

We review speakers across a pretty broad price spectrum, from under $500 per pair to over $500,000 per pair. It is a sort of tautology to say that a speaker you can’t afford is “insanely” priced. For you yes, for others who can afford it, decidedly not. A better question for those in the latter group is the question of value: “what do I get for extra money?” or “what do I lose by spending less?”.  

In the case of the Corinium, you probably get added bandwidth and resolution if you are stepping up from lower-priced speakers. I haven’t heard them all and I’ll be able to shed a little more light on the subject after a few more reviews in this category. But a lot of speaker-to-speaker differences come in the voicing category, so we encourage attention to that.  

Looking at this from the other direction, I was impressed by how similar the Corinium sounds to my reference Magico A5s. now, the Magicos cost about $19,000 more per pair. I could provide a list of places where the A5 outperforms the Corinium, but these are mostly matters of degree, like more even midrange and treble balance that leads to smaller octave-to-octave variations or more fine-grained harmonic detail. There are also differences in the mid-bass balance due to different choices about how to compensate for room gain. If you have excellent sources and amplification, and you care a lot about these features of music, the A5 is a good value if you have the money. If not, and you can afford the Corinium, it gets you surprisingly close to a widely praised but more expensive speaker. All this assumes the voicing fits your approach to music.  

Summary 

The Acoustic Energy Corinium is a superb speaker, particularly if you want transparency to the recording. While not inexpensive, it is among the lowest priced speakers to do so many things well. This includes high sensitivity, which can either save on amplifier costs or give you the flexibility to match the speakers with lower power but very low distortion amps. This one is the complete package.