The Neodio Lilli Loudspeaker

By Roy Grégory.
Original article : https://gy8.eu/review/the-neodio-lilli-loudspeaker/

Because small can (still) be beautiful…

“Less Is More” is a mantra repeated with almost-Pavlovian regularity by the audio community as a whole. It’s a deceptively simple construct with an appealing apparent clarity, but like many philosophical constructs, it’s little more than the label on the lid of a very large can of worms – starting with the whole concept of “Less”. Less of what? And what constitutes less anyway? Less parts, less mass, less volume, less cost, less material, less power, less silicon… The possible less-list is almost end-less! All of which makes it particularly ironic that the one place in which you rarely hear the trope is referring to loudspeakers.

Bigger, more complex, more costly (and way heavier) loudspeakers aren’t just the final destination of most audio journeys, they’re the Holy Grail of audiophilia. Whatever else audiophiles struggle to agree on, the absolute need for (and desirability of) large loudspeakers is pretty much a given. Yet it’s indisputable that, the more loudspeaker you have, the more problems you face: from amplifier and room matching, to integration within and the mechanical behaviour of the speaker itself. Nowhere in audio is the conflict between size/complexity and musical performance more immediately apparent than it is with enormous, multi-driver speaker systems. Get it wrong and it’s the equivalent of sticking a sonic moustache on your musical Mona Lisa – often a serious handlebar moustache at that! Which at least in part explains why the few, really successful large/wide-bandwidth speaker systems are invariably expensive. There simply isn’t a simple solution to what should be, in many ways, the simplest part of the audio chain.

But if you do apply the Less Is More mantra to loudspeakers, where does it take you? Well, we could reduce the number of drive units, thus also reducing matching issues and the complexity of the crossover. We could make the cabinet smaller, using less material and taking advantage of the higher resonant frequency of smaller structures. Hell, why not eliminate the cabinet altogether? Ultimately, I suppose, you could argue that we should all be listening to single speaker, single driver, open baffle systems. After all, there’s no denying that ‘going mono’ offers a whole raft of cost and complexity savings – from the microphone all the way through to the listening room: No more spatial anomalies and fewer phase issues, only one speaker to accommodate and no bass problems… Except that stereo does have a very real role to play in recorded music sounding, well, ‘real’; and you can say the same about bandwidth.

Like everything in audio, you need to be careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Simplicity is all well and good, but taken to the (il)logical extreme, it’s a limitation in itself. It’s impact on bandwidth in particular, limits its relevance to serious high-end systems. But further down the price range it certainly starts to come into its own. Which means that the question quickly becomes, how little can you get by on – or, how much is enough? In practice, there’s a very real tipping/price point, below which you are very likely better off with a smaller speaker than a larger one – at least as far as conventional box speakers go.

Kan can…

Linn’s Ivor Tiefenbrun is indisputably one of the audio industry’s iconoclastic characters. Most people would point to the LP12 as his most significant product – and in terms of sheer numbers, they’d be right. But in many ways, if you look at the early days of Linn, it was his smallest, apparently most conventional and most affordable product that actually presented the greatest challenge to accepted industry wisdom. The Linn Kan was an LS3/5a sized loudspeaker that demonstrated exactly why the BBC monitor really wasn’t (and still isn’t) a serious hi-fi product. It demonstrated just how effective a miniature speaker could be, especially when it came to musical communication and involvement. Discarding the ‘gold standard’ of flat frequency response, the Kan rested its considerable musical capabilities on the twin foundations of rhythmic and dynamic integrity.

The original Kan used a classic, thin-wall, ply-wood enclosure (actually, the same enclosure as the LS3/5a) but modified the KEF B110 bass unit and swapped out the tweeter for the more dynamic 19mm Scanspeak. It was voiced for near-wall placement, with a distinct step in its frequency response, using boundary proximity to reinforce the bass. The crossover was tuned for low-loss dynamics and timing integrity, rather than a flat response and tonal neutrality. There was a dedicated, 24” space-frame stand that followed the low-storage ethos of the cabinet design and it quickly became apparent that near-wall wasn’t enough. To get the best from the Kan you needed to physically brace it against a solid rear surface.

Just how ‘different’ the Kan was, certainly compared to classic speaker designs is clear from a comparison with the BBC monitor whose cabinet it pirated and whose price it matched. The Linn speaker offered 6dB greater sensitivity, partly due to a pronounced midrange hump. Free-space frequency response offered -3dB points at 130Hz(!) and 16kHz. Compare that to the 90Hz to 20kHz range of the 3/5a. While wall correction gave a -6dB point of around 70Hz (59Hz for the 3/5a) it exhibited a distinct high-frequency droop, but played considerably louder than the BBC speaker. It also suffered a minimum impedance of 4.5Ω – hardly frightening by today’s standards, but enough to make many contemporary amplifiers go weak at the knees.

Reviled by some, mocked as the “Tin Can” by others, it was hard to argue with the little Linn’s musically engaging, immediate and communicative performance – even given the occasional excesses of its ‘Scan-squeak’ tweeter (okay, so I’m being generous when it comes to the top-end…). I’m not sure anybody would describe the Kan as a perfect speaker (despite the number that found themselves on the end of active NAP 250 or 135 systems – the high-end benchmark of their day) but that isn’t the point. What the Kan demonstrated was the yawning chasm between the demands of recorded music and then current thinking on loudspeaker design and the measurement techniques employed to guide it.

Out of kilter?

Indeed, if such a small loudspeaker can be so musically compelling, how much speaker does one really need: or more significantly, when does one need it? We might all want large loudspeakers, but would we actually be better off using smaller ones? As one’s system evolves, would it be musically more cost-effective to leverage the monetary and performance benefits of a simpler speaker, rather than reaching for the biggest and most expensive one that we can (almost) afford? Our ability to measure loudspeakers has evolved considerably, although there is still no measurement for sound quality. But the lessons of the Linn Kan hold true today. A speaker’s frequency response is interesting, but it’s far from the be-all and end-all of musical performance. Instead, the ability to preserve the pattern and timing of the music’s energy is what really counts – and that brings us right back to the virtues of simplicity…

While the Kan still divides opinion to this day, modern drivers, measurement techniques and materials mean that we can apply its lessons without the same, potentially crippling compromises. Small cabinets are inherently stiffer and less resonant than ones that use larger panels. They weigh less too. That means that they store less energy and the energy they do store is released at higher, less musically damaging frequencies. Two-way crossovers are far easier to engineer than three-way, generally offer the driving amplifier a more benign load (and an easier time), while it’s also easier to seamlessly combine smaller drivers than really big ones. The limited bandwidth of smaller speakers is obviously a limitation, at least in absolute terms, but brings its own benefits in the real world, in terms of easier low-frequency matching to rooms, making it considerably easier to maximise system performance. There’s a lot of generalisations in there, as well as the assumption that smaller/cheaper speakers tend to be boxes, but there is also enough push in the direction of compact two-ways to put meat on the bones of the argument.

ll of which begs the question, why has the audio community turned its back on compact, two-way loudspeakers? Two-way ‘bookshelf’ designs used to be the single most common speaker format: now they’ve all but disappeared at anything but the lowest price points – an apology until you can afford a ‘real’ floorstander. But like a lot of things in audio, we seem to forget more than we learn. We’re too quick to dismiss stand-mounted speakers and a number of new models winging in from left-field are serving as a timely reminder of their strengths, to anybody who cares to listen.

Current thinking…

If there’s a spiritual successor to the Linn Kan, it’s Neodio’s Lilli loudspeaker. A true miniature that embodies much the same design path and many of the same priorities as the Kan, Lilli is in many ways, a modern equivalent to the iconoclastic Linn model – albeit one that opts for different solutions, different materials and different technical compromises. Sit the two speakers side-by-side and the differences are stark. Listen to them and, although they sound quite different, their musical strengths are surprisingly similar.

I covered Lilli’s vital statistics in detail in an earlier piece https://gy8.eu/blog/neodios-lilli-loudspeaker/ but the salient points are the two-way topology, critically damped, thin-wall (but thick-baffle) cabinet, simple 2^nd order crossover and physically time-aligned drivers. There are also matching, low-mass stands. The ultra-long-throw bass driver and the length of the reflex port produces low-frequency extension that flirts with 50Hz, even in a free-space location. The crossover uses quality components, but they were selected on the basis of exhaustive listening, rather than price – meaning it wasn’t always the most expensive option that proved the most successful. Perhaps more importantly (and more in keeping with the Kan) Lilli never met MeLiSSA, or any of her close relatives. She was developed entirely as a result of basic measurements and a lot of listening. The basic recipe might be essentially simple, but there’s a lot of art (as opposed to science) involved when it comes to really successful speaker design. In fact, with small speakers, it’s possible (and pretty much always has been) to get by on art alone…

My first experience with Lilli involved listening with the price-appropriate Heed Lagrange amplifier. That was enough to convince me that there was something a little bit special and different going on within the confines of this diminutive cabinet. This time around, I went straight for higher priced, higher quality amplification, using both the TEAD Groove/Vibe/Linear B pre/power combination and the Levinson 585 integrated. She might not present a particularly awkward load, but at 82dB sensitivity, she does demand a reasonable amount of power. The Linear B’s 80 Watts with minimum GFB were sufficient for most purposes, sounding spectacularly direct and communicative on smaller scale acoustic music, most rock and pop and all but big-band jazz. But running large-scale orchestral music encoded at lower levels on SACD (the recently released Noseda/LSO Shostakovich cycle, LSO 0907, for example) more sheer beef was necessary…

Critical listening…

The other thing that became obvious from that earlier listening was just how critical Lilli is of not just partnering equipment but set-up too. You simply can’t afford to take liberties with cable consistency or the system’s house-keeping. You will hear every change you make. To that end, the optional Harmonie footers on the stands should be considered essential, while investing in Neodio’s own cables, if not obligatory, certainly helps to guarantee results. I revisited both the latest Neodio cables and the complete Nordost Blue Heaven 3 loom that I’ve been working with recently, both delivering excellent performance. I also revisited that original near-field set-up – a tight, equilateral triangle (around 2.5m on a side) with the speakers heavily toed in to cross ahead of the listener. Once familiar from the likes of the Celestion SL6/600, it’s a layout that’s rarely seen these days – another indication of just how rare compact speakers have become. Move much further away from the speakers and they start to sound start to sound less dynamic and increasingly bass-shy with distance. Up close and personal is the way to go with Lilli, letting her draw you into her sound-field.

Talking of sound-field, it’s a good place to start with this little speaker. Listeners are fond of talking about the superb ‘imaging’ of mini-monitors. Yet this is both a ‘thing’ and a misnomer. Looking at Lilli in situ, with her incredibly narrow front baffle and acute toe-in, it should come as no surprise that she throws images outside the width of the speakers. However, close your eyes or, better still, switch off the lights and you will be surprised by just how wide that soundstage is – and how completely the speakers disappear within it. In fact, it’s as surprising as it is occasionally startling. At Stéphane Even’s suggestion, I also hooked up the Lillis to the TV system, driven by a Cyrus/PSX amplifier. He sees AV applications as a serious secondary use for his little speakers and, having experienced just how intelligible they render even modern dialogue (with the current fashion for actors who mumble and murmur) let alone how real incidental sound effects appear, beyond the confines of the screen/system, often outside the room, I can understand why. Items being dropped, doors opening, knocks and bangs all have a remarkable presence and are readily identifiable. So much so that you need to be careful how widely you space the speakers in this context, or the spread distracts from rather than adding to the on screen events. While the little Neodios might come up short on major explosions or train wrecks, if you are watching more cerebral material, they really elevate both individual performances and material as a whole.

It’s a quality that carries over to musical programme, but also one whose contribution needs to be examined or understood. Back in the TEAD-based set-up, play Steve Dawson’s ‘Sweet Is The anchor’ (from the album of the same name, Undertow RecordsCD-UMC-028) and the quiet count-in that precedes the opening piano chords is way, way left, its distant nature matching its location. The spread of incidental sounds, studio announcements and the pitch note that run into Buddy Holly’s ‘True Love Ways’ (From The Original Master Tapes, MCA DIDX-203/MCAD-5540) are separated, precisely located and spread across the wide soundstage. The tape ops and control room are clearly separate, each with their own PA speaker, the band and strings/sax, disposed within a single space, with their own conductor. It’s not that I’ve never heard these details before. It’s just that Lilli makes them so much more apparent. It’s this effect that bears examination.

“Imaging? I want to know why the musicians are on stage – not where…”

Soundstage, image specificity and acoustic space/dimensionality tend to get collapsed into a single performance category – ‘imaging’. However, in reality they are quite distinct, if related, qualities captured in the recording and reproduced by the system replaying it. Of course, not all recordings are created equal – and not all systems are equally capable of reproducing them. Let’s start with sound-staging – the ability of a system to recreate the layout (width and depth) of the musicians making the recording. Image specificity defines how precisely you can locate a sound-source, in space and distinct from other instruments or voices. Dimensionality is all about the physical volume of instruments or singers, the air and space around and between them, the space in which the performance as a whole takes place – including side and rear walls, the height of the space and the floor or any staging. A really convincing 3D rendition requires all three aspects of spatial reproduction working in concert. More often than not, a system offers partial but uneven presentation of all three. Most systems manage a reasonable lateral spread, but image specificity is a rarer quality, while a natural and coherent sense of depth and dimensionality are unusual, the latter dependent to a large extent on system bandwidth. So, it should be no surprise that while the epithet “images like crazy” might well be applied to Lilli, that ‘imaging’ is largely confined to width and specificity. The depth dimension is slightly flattened (even with considerable attention expended on toe-in angle) while dimensionality and acoustic space really don’t feature at all. In that last regard, she’s exactly like most other compact speakers – but when it comes to locating and separating performers and instruments, she’s up there with the best. Which helps explain the explicit nature of her musical presentation.

But there’s more to Lilli’s sense of musical clarity and purpose than just lateral separation. The perennial problem of box speakers is stored energy. The drivers vibrate to generate acoustic output, but that output has an equal and opposite equivalent that is projected into the enclosed air volume and, ultimately into the cabinet structure itself, along with direct energy bled from the driver baskets and motors. That mechanical energy either has to be dissipated by the box or it finds its way back into the drivers, where it muddies and confuses their output. There’s no box like no box, but that leads to no bass either, at least in small speakers. But if you have to have a box, the smaller it is, the easier it is to control its rigidity and behaviour. Boxes don’t come much smaller, or better behaved, than Lilli’s – at least, not unless you are going to spend vast amounts on exotic materials or complex composite structures. Neodio takes the inherent benefits of those small panels and improves their mechanical performance still further with thoughtful construction. Thick front and rear panels provide a firm launch pad for the drivers, thin walls store less energy while the polymer damping discs on either side help dissipate what does enter the cabinet.

The resulting lack of intermodulation distortion through mechanical feedback helps explain Lilli’s smudge-free, leading-edge precision and cleanly focussed output. Combine that with the light-touch, phase-coherent second-order crossover and it’s hardly surprising that the resulting rhythmic and dynamic tracking are so agile and articulate. Notes start when they should, stop when they should and the gaps between them are preserved, rather than smoothed over. Just as instruments are placed with precision, so are notes and phrases. Dynamic range might not be full bandwidth, but it is beautifully scaled and modulated. Along with the sure-footed placement of notes, that gives music shape, pace (whether that pace is fast, slow or variable), purpose and direction.

Il virtuoso, il poeta

Play Locatelli’s Violin Concerto in A Major, Op.3, No.11 (from il virtuoso, il poeta, Isabelle Faust with Antonini/Il Giarino Armonico – Harmonia Mundi HMM 902398) and you will immediately hear what makes Lilli so special. The small orchestra is spread in a natural arc, wide, with reasonable depth and (of course) superb instrumental separation. Bass, theorbo and to some extent the cellos, lack body and fundamentals, but their musical foundation is taut as a result, pressing forward, reinforcing the music’s drive and momentum, bringing a new sense of toe-tapping intent to the continuo. Faust stands clear and distinct, in front of the band, but what really impresses is the sheer clarity and articulation with which the speakers deliver her playing. The first movement is characteristically Locatelli, carefully sculpted figures that stand against the backing, before the solo part develops with extended passages that flirt with and edge up against the instrument’s highest register, often punctuated or driven by notes from its lowest string. Not only does Lilli measure the steps in pitch and bow pressure with absolute but unforced clarity, there’s an almost physical/visual sense of the rocking bow as Faust saws from top string to bottom with astonishing speed and control. It’s as if the speaker measures (and displays) the distance across the instrument’s neck! That’s how directly this speaker projects its musical information – and it’s that that makes it so reminiscent of Linn’s Kan. The playing, the performance, the music come across as properly feisty, full of angles and corners, jaunty energy and measured poise. The disc isn’t titled il virtuoso for nothing and Lilli captures and communicates the swaggering brilliance of Locatelli’s work perfectly.

Combine locational precision with temporal and dynamic integrity and the result is a sense of almost preternatural rhythm and pattern. That same, almost physical intent and purpose that Lilli brings to Faust’s fiddle, she brings to guitar, whether it’s the delicate precision and almost aching beauty of Yepes’ opening lines in the second movement of the Rodrigo (Argenta, on Decca SXL 2091) or Neil Young’s more solidly sculpted riffs on Sleeps With Angels (Reprise 9362-45749-1). In both cases, Lilli captures the full expressive range – and in the latter, all of the attitude. The same is true of the intelligibility and impact she brings to vocals. This is the musical skeleton laid bare: all the message, just the scantiest wrapping. It’s not as stark as the harmonically bereft (and occasionally brutal) Kan: Lilli does do instrumental colour; just don’t expect the rich harmonics and instrumental body that go with wide bandwidth reproduction. This is pared back and ripped, its musical impact the result of focussed energy and lively dynamics, rather than sheer weight (and the musical padding that goes with it). Buddy Holly always wrote a catchy tune, but here his songs positively zip along, with more hooks than a long-line Tuna boat. The dirty groove of Steve Dawson’s ‘Love Is A Blessing’ has a real grind to it; smooth yet grubby at the same time.

Nor is Lilli’s affection for the TEAD electronics a coincidence – given their resolution, transparency and twin design goals of time and phase coherence. The electronics deliver a clean and organised signal with plenty of inherent musical integrity: the speakers pass it on, adding about as little of themselves as a small and relatively affordable speaker can. At the end of the day, that cabinet and the low sensitivity can’t help restricting the bandwidth and the ultimate dynamic range, but there’s enough bass to deliver the music’s rhythmic foundation, the dynamic steps are scaled so clearly and naturally that their diminished stature passes all but unnoticed.

Tonally, Lilli delivers a surprisingly natural mid-band and a clean, sweet treble, devoid of glassiness or edge. There isn’t the rounded warmth of a classic plywood cabinet, but there isn’t the sterile cleanliness of ceramic coned miniatures either. Sitting slightly on the leaner side of neutral, lacking the longer, harmonic tail to notes, helps explain how the speaker manages to sound musically so immediate and present, without having the efficiency one normally associates with that quality. She might only measure 82dB in terms of sensitivity, but her crisp dynamic response makes her sound a lot more energetic than that – a crucial factor in making her music so listenable.

If you can’t have it all, perhaps you shouldn’t try?

Even the biggest systems can’t match the sound and presentation of live music – although size definitely matters. As you draw back from the scale and extravagance of those super systems, you move deeper into a world of compromise: a world in which you have to start choosing what you’ll do without. By the time you reach the classic, compact four-box system (source, amp and two speakers) those choices have become critical and, in many cases chronic. That’s the reality that was confronted by the Kan – and now, by Lilli. Advances in materials (or at least, the understanding of them) and drivers make the Neodio a far more balanced performer than the Linn, but in musical terms it’s still a case of, “All the bits that matter – none of the stuff that doesn’t!” In listening to Lilli, it quickly becomes apparent that both sides of that equation are equally important. It’s hard enough for a speaker this size to do what it must to present a musically intelligible picture. Lightening the load by getting rid of ‘unnecessary clutter’ contributes directly to Lilli’s uncomplicated clarity and purpose, leaving no place for ambiguity to hide.

Listening to Lilli’s unadorned musical structures and incisive rhythms it’s easy to understand how listeners back in the day got addicted to the direct and engaging performance of the Kan. This is music as pattern, first, foremost and beyond doubt. Lilli dresses that pattern more – and more convincingly – than the Kan did, but she still cuts right to the music’s bone. In doing so, she delivers astonishingly entertaining and involving performance(s) – especially when carefully matched to an amp and source(s) that share her sensibilities. Shorn of the muddle and smudging that smears the clarity of so many systems, music takes on a familiar sense of direction, shape and purpose. Music with drive, like guitar driven roots or rock, gets turbo-charged. If the amps don’t go to 11, the attitude definitely does.

Given the necessary power, Lilli will do large-scale music, albeit from her own rather individual (but no less interesting) perspective. But I’d be reluctant to sacrifice agility and articulation in search of that power. If you choose to build a system around the Neodios’ musical connection, running a more modestly powered amp that maximises the speaker’s strengths at the cost of some editorial impact on choice of material is a compromise you mind find you make. Push-pull tube amps appeal, as does Neodio’s own HQA amplifier. If large scale romantic works, prog or heavy rock is your thing, then the Vienna Acoustics Haydn Signature is better able to project weight and scale. But if you are after the most direct and immediate musical connection, there are few speakers at anything like this size or price to match the charms of Neodio’s little Lilli. It’s worth making her acquaintance and learning just what she can do, if only to better understand the challenges that other (often larger) systems face – and the musical costs that come with their own chosen compromises. It all boils down to a question of music and/or message. It might seem bizarre to describe Lilli as a no compromise design, but in one, very real sense she is: it just depends which end of the telescope you’re looking through…