The Acelec Model One speakers I’m auditioning are not princesses in pink, or frog green, or made of some chemically distilled polypudding. Nor are they conventional-beyond-reason MDF boxes covered with stickon vinyl pretending to be wood. The Model Ones are squat, small, serious-looking, two-way standmounts. They are 11.2" tall, 7.7" wide, 11.5" deep, and 37.5lb heavy.
My review samples look serious because they are constructed of black, 15mm-thick, internally damped “bituminized aluminum” panels, which, besides being rigid, look full-metal stealth and recording-studio professional. Cees Ruijtenberg of Sonnet Digital Audio—Acelec is a Sonnet Digital Audio brand and Cees is Acelec’s chief designer—wrote to me in an email that this well-damped stiffness “avoids ringing and time-smearing with regard to fast, powerful transients.” If you don’t want black, you can also get silver, and fancier colors available on request.
Ruijtenberg continued: “We believe that our aluminum construction differs from what we see from other manufacturers. Typically, their panels are tightly connected to each other, or their cabinet is milled from a single piece of aluminum. These tight connections … make their enclosures resonate like a bell. In our design, the panels are connected with a kind of rubber glue so that there is no unity between the individual panels.”
The Model One’s Mundorf AMT tweeter and 5.9" sliced-paper–cone Scan-Speak bass/mid drivers, which have neodymium magnets, are crossed over at 1.8kHz in what Cees calls a “dual slope design”: “The crossover frequency is initiated with a first-order [filter], 6dB/octave, but further away on either side of both slopes, a second-order [filter]—12dB/octave—kicks in. This allows for a milder phase behavior at the crossover frequency.”
I asked for placement tips. “Placement within a normal living environment was also
