⌈ XAVIAN is a company specializing in the production of loudspeakers. It was founded by ROBERTO BARLETTA, of Italian descent, in Prague, Czech Republic, in 1997. Its name comes from Greek mythology - "Xavian" is a sacred place for muses, considered a source of inspiration. We test the latest loudspeakers in its lineup, the CONCERTINO. ⌋

n the descriptions of both XAVIAN and its products, we usually return to several, the same, leitmotifs: Italy, Prague, wood, natural, organic feel and sound. And it’s not an accident. If you have ever had contact with these loudspeakers, you know that when even looking at them we have the feeling of communing with a product that is not just another "box", but something else, beyond the usual "how does it sound".

There are not many similar companies in the world, and from those that I know and value especially, and at the same time get to test them from time to time, I could mention Harbeth, Spendor (mainly for the A series), Opera Audio, Chario, Graham Audio, Trenner & Friedl, Avatar Audio, Closer Acoustics and Xavian, to mention only those that came to mind at that moment. As you can see, country of origin is secondary, although I think there is a pattern there. It would be about an interesting use of wood and a body which - returning to the first paragraph - "feels right".

▌ Concertino

XAVIAN'S LINEUP IS DIVIDED into several series. The tested loudspeakers belong to the "Armonia" series, or "Harmony". The manufacturer first announced it in mid-May 2022. Its development took over two years, and it includes three models: Aria, Concertino and Concerto with the latter being the latest addition. The manufacturer describes this designs as follows:

We follow up our successful Concerto with the smaller Concertino, whose name tells you everything you need to know. We have decided to offer, at an extremely attractive price point, all the know-how behind the liveliness and freshness of the Concerto’s sound in smaller proportions – both sonically and physically, but retaining the dynamics and highly superior sensitivity that allows you to experience every nuance of your favourite music.

⸜ www.XAVIAN.cz, accessed: 9.03.2023.

And indeed - the speakers measure 1030 x 220 x 300 mm (height x width x depth), which means they are not too big, but quite large. They are finished with a very nice veneer, available in one of the following colors: Zebrano, Rosewood, Cherry, Walnut, Oak, but also in two high-gloss varnishes - black and white. Despite their compact size, they feature as many as three drivers, in a two-and-a-half-way design, in a bass-reflex cabinets.

»«

| A few simple words…

ROBERTO BARLETTA
Owner, designer

THE CONCERTINO IS A SMALLER VERSION OF THE CONCERTO. These loudspeakers are designed for smaller listening rooms, and their housing is smaller than in the Concerto.

Concerto and Concertino are quite close to each other in terms of construction, you can see a similar design approach in them. The lower mid-bass driver reproduces music in a ventilated large chamber, while the upper mid-woofer is mounted in a closed cabinet. All drivers come from the Danish company Scan-Speak. Their impedance is linear, I tried to get a consistent response in the mid-high range, hope you enjoy this aspect.

The tweeter uses a large, damped silk dome with an extremely low mass, probably the lightest 1-inch dome on the market. This produces fast, clear and sweet highs. The woofer uses a rather large diaphragm woven from Kevlar, heavily damped on the inside. The speaker has a linear frequency response over a wide range with low distortion, and we have the ability to filter this driver very gently with low slopes, resulting in a natural sound. RB

»«

DESCRIBING THE CONCERTINO’S DESIGN, the manufacturer says that "under the conservative shapes, luxurious, natural veneers, we will find advanced technologies". Mr. Barletta reached for the Danish Scan-Speak drivers, which he likes very much, paired with an accuracy of 1 dB: a 26 mm, a custom-made soft dome tweeter, and two identical, but working differently, 181 mm, also modified, low-midrange woofers from the same company. The bass-only driver, cut off at 350 Hz, was placed close to the floor. In this way, a quite wide frequency response was obtained, 50-30,000 Hz (-3 dB, on axis). The two larger drivers use Kevlar, black-lacquered diaphragms, and the distribution of the signal between them is achieved using a crossover with an "innovative layout".

The down-firing bass-reflex port is supposed to be a convenient solution for the user because, firstly, it is not visible, and secondly, it guarantees a constant load. This is not an ordinary arrangement of this type, but a variant developed by Xavian, bearing the company’s name Mirror Bass. According to the manufacturer, there are openings in it that cause the air to be blown out evenly in many directions. This is to help achieve an "optimal bass propagation". And the name comes from the fact that such a load on the bass-reflex results in twice as much bass pressure, as if there were twice as many woofers in the cabinet.

Looking at this design at its parameters and reading the company literature, it is clear that in the case of this series the idea was to make the loudspeakers included in it the easiest possible load for amplifiers, implicitly - for tube amplifiers. Although the nominal impedance of the Concertino is 4 Ω, which is not too much, it is linearized and should not fall too much below this value. And their efficiency is really very high, up to 95 dB.

The loudspeakers are manufactured in the Xavian factory located in Hostivice, near Prague.

▌ SOUND

⸜ HOW WE LISTENED The loudspeakers were tested in the HIGH FIDELITY reference system and were powered by the Soulution 710 transistor amplifier, but for some time I also listened to them driven with the Leben CS600X tube amplifier. They were connected with the Soulution by the Siltech Triple Crown cable, and with the Leben by the CRYSTAL CABLE ART SERIES DA VINCI cable, test → HERE.

The loudspeakers were placed in exactly the same place as the Harbeth M40.1, 230 cm apart and 240 cm from the listening position. Their back baffle was at the distance of 90 cm from the wall. They were aimed directly at the listening position.

I determined the distance between the speakers and their leveling using the Bosch PLR 50 C rangefinder. More about the speakers setup in the article Micro-tuning, i.e. setting the speakers, HIGH FIDELITY № 177, January 1, 2019, → HIGHFIDELITY.pl, access: 08/03/2023. More about the acoustics of the HF listening room in the article High Fidelity listening room in the eyes of Mariusz Zielmachowicz, HIGH FIDELITY № 189, January 1, 2020, → HIGHFIDELITY.pl, accessed March 8th 2023.

⸜ Recordings used in the test | a selection

⸜ MILES DAVIS, The Complete Birth of the Cool, Capitol Jazz/EMI 4945502, CD (1957/1998).
⸜ Ultimate Audiophile Reference Test Disc, COI Records COI 001, 2 x Master CD (2022).
⸜ Test Disc III, Hi-Fi News HFN 020, CD (1993).
⸜ SONNY ROLLINS, Saxophone Colossus, Prestige/Analogue Productions CPRJ 7079 SA, „The Prestige Mono Series”, SACD/CD (1957/2014).
⸜ MICHAEL JACKSON, Thriller, Epic/MJJ Productions /Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab UDSACD 2251, serie „Original Master Recording”, „Ultradisc UHR”, SACD/CD (1982/2022).
⸜ RIVERSIDE, ID.Entity, Mystic Production/Sony Records Int’l SICP 31600, Blu-spec CD2 (2023).
⸜ MEGADETH, Peace Sells… But Who’s Buying?, Capitol Records/Universal Music LLC UICY-80237, SHM-CD (1986/2023).
⸜ ROBERT KANAAN, Music Therapy: Whispers Of The Five Oceans, Soliton SL 821-2, CD (2018).

»«

BEFORE I started listening to the Concertino loudspeakers for good, I spent a long time checking whether I had connected them out of phase. Because, you see, listening to the monophonic Birth of the Cool album by MILES DAVIS, in the excellent Mark Levinson remaster, I sat a little confused for some time. Instead of a not very wide view of the instruments in front of me, I got a wide panorama. Admittedly a mono one, no shifts relative to the listening axis, but still a wide one. Moreover, it was also quite high.

So I listened to the Stereo walkaround track from the "Hi-Fi News" magazine test disc, and then the next one, used to check the phase, from the Ultimate Audiophile Reference Test Disc. They allowed me to confirm, that I connected the speakers correctly, in phase. But it was the first disc that showed something that turned out to be an answer to what I heard with Davis. Namely, that these are loudspeakers that build a large, spacious, but also intimate space when needed. The virtual sources they create are large in every dimension. These are real "bodies", not their cardboard substitutes.

This was confirmed when listening to the SONNY ROLLINS’S Saxophone Colossus, remastered in 2014 by Analogue Productions and released on SACD. Its image was, again, large, full, saturated. I would even say - warm. Yes, that’s what these speakers are like. In their case, the word "warm" is a compliment. It does not mean a loss of treble, there is a lot of it, but more about boosting the midrange. This is achieved by a slight emphasis on the upper bass and a slight withdrawal of the upper midrange. So when Rollins, in the second track on the album, Blue 7, somewhere around 2:38, suddenly, for a short moment, blows harder, it is very dynamic, and also at your fingertips .

And then there is the already mentioned space. Concertino serve everything with panache. We get a large-scale presentation, because the virtual sources are large, but also because the sound is not trapped in a "grid" between the loudspeakers. The already mentioned test piece from the "Hi-Fi News" disc consists in the fact that the lector moves in real space from the extreme left to the extreme right. He tells you where he is in five places. And saying that, standing all the way to the left, and then all the way to the right, it sounded as if his voice was coming from outside the outer edge of the given loudspeaker.

That is why it was so nice, so natural to play MICHAEL JACKSON's Thriller in the Mobile Fidelity SACD remaster. It was wide, it was deep, it was thick. Interestingly, the Xavians do not pump too much air at the very bottom of the band. I would even say that they behave quite carefully there. So you can be under the illusion that their bass is undercut. But it is not. But also, below - say - 50 Hz there is not as much energy as above. But there is everything we need there, and it is the lower bass that is responsible for the aforementioned large volume and a large, rich soundstage.

So if I were to point out the most important features of the Concertino, it would be the scale, space and treatment of recordings with a kind of gentleness. So we will not get a precise separation between the instruments, nor a clear, clean picture of the situation. However, that's not what these speakers are about, at least that's how I read it. They're more about playing any piece of music in the coolest, prettiest way possible. After all, I had a great time listening to both sophisticated jazz releases and MEGADETH albums with them. Peace Sells… But Who's Buying? and ID.Entity by RIVERSIDE or ROBERT KANAAN's electronics.

In all these cases, the Xavians remained completely calm and relaxed. In the sense that even high sound levels, when I turned the volume knob in the Ayon preamplifier really high with the Megadeth, they did not change the tonal balance and it did not lead to a place where the loudspeakers would be overdriven. I had scale, I had timbre, I also had dynamics. It was clear that this was achieved by shaping the timbre and directing the energy distribution in a specific way.

▌ Summary

SO THESE ARE NOT LOUDSPEAKERS for those looking for details in music, those searching for subtleties, and lovers of clear divisions on the soundstage. We won't get that. And we won’t get strong, sonorous upper treble and energetic low bass. The extremes of the band are present in the Xavians' music, but only as a background. Interestingly, the loudspeakers show all this equally well with a powerful transistor amplifier, as well as with a tube amplifier. With the latter, the precision will be slightly lower, while the saturation and density will be even higher.

The Concertino by Robert Barletta are "targeted" loudspeakers. They are focused on what is pleasant and good in music, what catches the heart. They are great at playing any kind of music, presenting what is best in them with equal commitment. They are not boring, because they build a large scale and a huge space, which makes us curious about what is about to happen. They are also really resolving, because despite striving for harmony, they do not eliminate the differences between the releases - the better the recording, the more time devoted to the release, the nicer it will sound.

So it doesn't matter what amplifier we use, which room we listen in and what kind of music to - the tested loudspeakers will remain completely calm. Therefore, it is a very safe purchase for all those who are tired of constantly moving the loudspeakers around the room and worrying that some new album or its stream will sound bad. With Concertino we will get the best of them.

▌ DESIGN

XAVIAN CONCERTINO ARE TWO-HALF-WAY, three-driver floorstanding loudspeakers vented with a bass-reflex. They measure 1030 x 220 (290) x 300 (370) mm (H x W x D) - the numbers in parentheses indicate the dimensions of their base. The relatively narrow shape of the loudspeakers was placed on slightly wider, black lacquered plinths. They have profiled openings on four sides, through which air escapes from the bass-reflex outlet located in the bottom. Thanks to this solution, a consistent appearance of the front and back panels has been preserved.

There are three drivers, all ordered from the Danish Scan-Speak: a 26 mm dome made of soaked silk and two 181 mm low-midrange drivers made of a fine Kevlar braid, also used for dust caps. The drivers have been modified by their manufacturer according to Xavian's specifications. The upper woofer reproduces low and mid frequencies, from 2500 Hz to the very bottom, which the manufacturer specifies at 50 Hz, and the lower one is filtered at 350 Hz, reproducing only the bass. This results in a two-and-a-half-way design.

The larger driver received nice flanges covering the screws - the upper ones feature the company's logo. Because these are very elegant speakers. Their beauty is emphasized by high-quality veneer, available in one of several colors or in two varnishes. The plinth, in all these variants, remains black. From the top, through the holes, we adjust the height of the feet on which the Concertino stand.

At the back, placed very low, there are single speaker terminals. They are solid, gold-plated and have the Xavian logo on them - so they were designed just for this company. They are easy to screw on because they have a large diameter, and an additional element is placed between the nut and the base, through which the spades are pressed. Thanks to this, they are not damaged when connecting cables. The only problem in my case was that the terminals are mounted very low, which makes it difficult to connect rigid spade-ended cables to them. ●

▌ Technical specifications (according to the manufacturer)

System: damped two-and-a-half-way bass-reflex with Mirror Bass technology and floor ported
Drivers: 26 mm custom Scan-Speak + 181 mm custom Scan-Speak + 181 mm custom Scan-Speak
Frequency response (-3 dB, on axis): 50-30 000 Hz
Nominal impedance: 4 Ω, linearized
Crossover frequency: 350, 2500 Hz
Sensitivity (2.83 V/1 m): 95 dB
Recommended amplifier output: 10-150 W
Dimensions (H x W x D): 1030 x 220 (290) x 300 (370) mm
Weight: 27.5 kg/pc.