The highest compliment you can pay a loudspeaker is to say you can't locate it. That the music simply exists in the room, with no audible connection to the boxes responsible for producing it.
Despite the fact they are staring you in the face.
Making that happen is harder than it sounds, and most of it comes down to two things we obsess over at PS Audio: crossover design and off-axis response. Get those right and almost everything else follows.
Let's start with off-axis response, because it's where most speakers quietly fail. A speaker that measures beautifully on-axis but falls apart thirty degrees off-axis isn't really a flat speaker — it's a speaker that performs for one person sitting in one precise spot. Everything that bounces off your walls, ceiling, and floor before reaching your ears comes from those off-axis angles. If that reflected sound has a different tonal character than the direct sound, your brain knows something is wrong even if it can't articulate what. The image hardens. The sense of space collapses. The speaker stops disappearing and starts announcing itself.
The Aspens were designed from the ground up with flat off-axis response as a non-negotiable requirement. Not a goal — a requirement. This is why they work with minimal toe-in, something I've always preferred. Point them nearly straight ahead and they still image precisely, throw a wide and stable soundstage, and fill the room with consistent sound regardless of where you're sitting. The sweet spot becomes the whole room rather than a single chair.
It's also why the Aspens can be pulled well away from the front wall and continue to perform beautifully. A speaker that depends on boundary reinforcement to sound right is a speaker with a problem it's hiding. The Aspens don't need the wall. They're comfortable in space, which is exactly where speakers belong.
None of this happens without crossover design that's worthy of the drivers. The crossover is where a multi-driver speaker either becomes a coherent instrument or reveals itself as a collection of parts. Get the phase relationships wrong between the tweeter and woofer and images smear — you can hear where one driver ends and another begins, and the illusion of a coherent sound source dissolves. Chris Brunhaver's crossover work on the Aspens is, to my mind, some of the finest in the industry — maintaining phase coherence through the crossover region so that the drivers behave as a single unified source rather than a relay race.
When flat off-axis response and phase-coherent crossover design work together, something remarkable happens. The speakers get out of the way. You stop listening to equipment and start listening to music.
That's the goal. Always has been.
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