Audiovector R5 Arreté

Audiovector spent five years developing the new model, with more than 2000 hours of listening and fine-tuning behind the final design. That fits the company's philosophy rather well, because Audiovector has long stressed that measurements are only the starting point, while final decisions are made by listening to music, preferably acoustic and live. It is easy to smile a little at that, because almost every high-end manufacturer talks about musicality, naturalness and emotion today, but with Audiovector it does not feel like a slogan attached to a finished specification sheet. The company has spent decades building loudspeakers around a consistent set of ideas - speed, low distortion, resonance control, open treble and a soundstage that does not end at the line between the two speakers.

At the heart of the R5 Arreté is a 3.5-way architecture. Instead of a conventional arrangement in which one woofer handles the entire bass range, Audiovector splits the work between two 16.5-cm bass drivers. One covers the full bass range, including rhythm and texture in the upper bass, while the other works only in the lowest frequencies, adding weight and extension where a more conventional three-way design would begin to fight its own limits. The idea is to achieve deeper, more physical bass without clouding the midrange.

That layout also explains why the R5 Arreté is intended to fill a larger room while keeping dimensions that remain fairly easy to live with. The cabinet is 111 cm tall, 22 cm wide and 41 cm deep, while the plinth increases width and depth to 26 and 48 cm. Each speaker weighs 32.1 kg, so this is a substantial loudspeaker, but not one that should require a major reorganisation of the house. Audiovector quotes a frequency response of 23 Hz - 53 kHz, average impedance of 8 ohms, sensitivity of 90 dB and crossover points at 200 Hz, 600 Hz and 2800 Hz. Some current dealer listings also quote a minimum impedance of 3.6 ohms, so the R5 Arreté may be friendlier on paper than many high-end speakers, but it still deserves capable amplification.

The new model uses Audiovector's Accelerated Force Concept in its bass and midrange drivers. Instead of a traditional, heavier surround, the company uses a light accordion-style construction made from a specially developed rubber compound. Combined with a titanium voice coil and an optimised magnet system, this is intended to reduce moving mass and improve the driver's reaction from the very first impulse. The point is simple: the diaphragm should start faster, stop faster and smear less information.

AFC works together with Low Compression Concept, which reduces the rise of air pressure behind the diaphragm. The aim is to let bass and lower midrange energy remain dynamic and articulate rather than compressed, thickened or blurred. In a speaker like this, that matters. Big bass is easy to advertise, but clean bass that does not pull the midrange down with it is much harder to achieve.

The highest frequencies are handled by Audiovector's latest Air Motion Transformer. The company remains faithful to the principle introduced by Oskar Heil in the 1970s, using an ultra-light pleated diaphragm driven by a powerful neodymium magnet system. The AMT N51 treble driver is specified to work from 2800 Hz all the way up to 53 kHz. Nobody needs to pretend they can heaR53 kHz, of course, but this kind of bandwidth usually tells us something about headroom, linearity and ease within the range that actually matters. In expensive loudspeakers, the goal is not to make treble shine like a polished handle. It is to deliver speed, air, microdynamics and freedom, so details appear naturally rather than jumping out of the recording as if highlighted with a marker.

The open rear structure of the high-frequency driver also forms the basis of Audiovector's Soundstage Enhancement Concept. Instead of trapping all rear energy inside the cabinet and fighting it only with damping, Audiovector allows it to radiate in a controlled and phase-conscious way through the back of the loudspeaker. The aim is to increase soundstage depth, improve image stability and reproduce more of the recorded acoustic. This is one of the reasons Audiovector loudspeakers are often associated with a particularly open and spacious presentation. It is not a trick designed to make stereo artificially wider, but an attempt to use rear radiation so that the listening room becomes part of the spatial picture rather than only a problem to be solved.

The mechanical design has also received a lot of attention. The R5 Arreté cabinet is made from dense HDF and heavily braced to create as neutral a platform as possible for the drivers. The narrow front baffle reduces edge diffraction, which should help stereo imaging, while the downward-firing bass reflex system is intended to improve low-frequency integration with the room. The new Arreté plinth has a wider footprint than the cabinet, precision-machined spikes and an integrated decoupling system.

These details say a lot about what Audiovector is trying to achieve here. The R5 Arreté is not a loudspeaker designed merely to look slim in photographs. It is meant to stand solidly, release energy in a controlled way and avoid turning the living room into a battlefield between bass output and room acoustics.

The crossover is a separate story. Audiovector designs and builds it in-house, using double cryogenically treated capacitors of its own design, copper coils working in a Dynamic Feed Forward arrangement, precision foil resistors and Audiovector x Duelund bypass capacitors. It is easy to smile a little at this kind of audiophile litany, but behind the terminology there is a logical engineering purpose - to reduce losses, distortion and phase issues in the part of a passive loudspeaker where an enormous amount is happening. In the R5 Arreté, the crossover is therefore not just a circuit that divides frequencies between drivers, but part of a larger system built around speed, low noise and coherence.

As this is an Arreté model, the second generation of Audiovector's Freedom Grounding system is also included. Its role is to drain unwanted currents generated in the mechanical and electrical structures of the drivers before they can influence the music signal. Audiovector says the new version is 50 percent more effective than the original and works into the megahertz range. The claimed result is a lower noise floor, more low-level information and greater transparency. Some listeners may be tempted to file this under audiophile magic, but Audiovector has been developing Freedom Grounding for years and treats it as one of the key elements of its higher-end loudspeakers.

The R5 Arreté also features a three-step damping adjustment system, allowing the speaker to be better matched with different amplifiers - from conventional solid-state designs to powerful amplifiers with a high damping factor and valve amplifiers. That is a useful detail, because a loudspeaker at this level is unlikely to live with only one type of electronics throughout its life.

The R5 Arreté is available in four standard finishes: Black Piano, White Silk, African Mahogany Piano and Italian Walnut. Custom piano lacquer colours are also available on request. Black cloth grilles are included, although looking at Audiovector's distinctive driver layout, many owners will probably remove them shortly after unpacking. This model is meant not only to sound like something more serious than an ordinary loudspeaker, but also to look the part. At its best, Scandinavian design works exactly like this - it does not shout, it does not try to become an Italian piece of furniture or a futuristic experiment, but after a while it becomes hard to imagine that any of the details should have been done differently. The R5 Arreté is available now, priced at around €19,950/£17,950/$24,500 per pair. Info and photos by Audiovector.