New Flagship Acoustic Energy AE500 Series Loudspeakers At Audio T Bristol

This is not some "Holier than thou" new composite Unobtanium, forged in Mordor creation. This is a speaker that elevates performances in a really engaging way.

Based in Cirencester in the Cotswolds, Acoustic Energy have been around for over 30 years and are highly respected in the professional music industry, producing the highly regarded AE 1 Active and renowned by the Hi-Fi press for the original AE 100. They always seem to make a speaker that punches above it’s weight, puts a smile on your face and yet looks and feels very unstated.

The new AE500 series continues the tradition, currently comprises two models, AE500 standmount and the AE509 floor-stander. Both feature the brand new 25mm dome tweeter and 125mm mid/bass drivers with carbon fibre cone.

Until the end of December Acoustic Energy are offering 25% OFF a new pair of AE 100 / 300 or 500 series when you trade in your old loudspeakers.

Everything from the ground up has been redesigned to work with the new carbon fibre cones - beautiful woven to be stronger, lighter and faster responding to acoustic load than aluminium or paper. The lens surround of all the drivers has been redesigned and are closer together to cast a 170 degree even sound dispersion, most noticeable on the tweeter lens, softly embedded in the cabinet.

Talking of cabinets, the finish comes in Piano Gloss White, Piano Gloss Black and American Walnut veneer with three of the twelve edges with a bevelled curved edge. Personally, I prefer the rustic feel of the walnut wood, which also suits the slim cabinet design . Acoustically, this is the same cabinet construction as their reference series using new Resonance Suppression Composite to reduce cabinet acoustic sound radiation.

The rear firing bass slot, I found is a lot faster, direct sounding with low frequencies being less breathy. The slot design seems to be less sensitive to wall proximity, which increases the speakers placement possibilities.

The internal tuning of the floorstanders is a whittling craft of baffle placement and internally machined port. Lots of loudspeaker manufacturers prefer to handle issues of internal cabinet resonance by manipulating crossover frequencies. AE prefers to keep the crossover neutral at around 4kHz. The standing wave frequency resonances are handled by a hole in the mid-placed horizontal baffle that is tuned by altering the diameter, micrometre by micrometre until a standing wave cancels out the cabinet resonance.

The floorstanders come with these elegantly machined plates with spikes making fine adjustments to positioning easier than the usual mounting underneath. This also means that the speaker has a lower centre of gravity and feels better grounded for its slim design.

For testing, we connected the 500s to Naim's new Supernait 3 using Naim's NDX5 for streaming Qobuz (Audio T Bristol playlistl) content. I suspected that this combination would sound overly bright with squeaky clean dynamics - a clinical examination resulting in a Coroner’s report that the Music died of unnatural causes!

I couldn’t have been more wrong. These speakers are exquisite sounding. Regardless of genre, this series has an uncanny ability of producing a clean, dynamic sound, effortless stereo sound stage and an engaging listen without being overly detailed or fatiguing. Female vocals soar, orchestral classical pieces a new level of detail and very involving performance.

Head to Audio T Bristol and audition the AE500 or AE509. Until the end of December Acoustic Energy are offering 25% OFF a new pair of AE 100 / 300 or 500 series when you trade in your old loudspeakers.

Acoustic Energy Loudspeakers are available from the following branches of Audio T: Bristol, Cheltenham, Enfield, Online, Portsmouth, Reading, Swindon