Soliloquy 5.0s Loudspeakers and S-10
Subwoofer
Soliloquy. Say it slow and it just slips
right off the tongue until that "q" catches in the back of the throat. So-lil-o-quy.
Cool-sounding word. But what’s it mean? In drama, it’s literally the act of
talking to yourself. It was wildly popular in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, where long,
ranting monologues were considered the virtuosic set-pieces of revenge tragedies such as
Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy. In the twentieth century it has been revived
by dramatists ranging from Eugene O’Neill to Samuel Beckett, who has written entire
plays as soliloquy. In their hands, it has come to mean a monologue in which the speaker
reveals his innermost thoughts. Not such a bad name for a speaker company, all things
considered.
To take arms against a sea of troubles
At the time I received the stand-mounted 5.0s and the S-10
subwoofer, I was not terribly familiar with the company. I’d heard their
floorstanding Model 5.3 at CESes and HI-FI Shows, and I vaguely remembered that the line
was supposed to be easy to drive for SET power amps. In other words, I was stone-ignorant.
Soliloquy has an impressive lineup of loudspeaker and subwoofer offerings, only one of
which, by the way, is specifically designed for single-ended triodes.
Here’s the real skinny on Soliloquy: The marquee was
created by Dennis Had of Cary Audio, who decided Cary’s dealers needed SET-friendly
loudspeakers to demonstrate Cary’s amplifiers. The original Soliloquy models 5.2 and
8.2 were tuned-pipe transmission-line designs that were introduced at the 1997 CES. The
success of Cary's amplifier business caused management to concentrate on their core
products. Cary sold the rights to the name Soliloquy, as well as the original two designs
and all existing inventory, to Bernie Byers of Diagnostic Health Care Systems -- aka DHS
in nearby Raleigh, NC.
Luke-warm reception from the Cary dealers to the original
Cary-designed loudspeakers caused Byers and son Brock to re-evaluate, then
re-design/engineer the entire line. They hired noted speaker designer Phil Jones (Platinum
Audio, Boston Acoustics, Acoustic Energy) to design their new speaker line, and he
delivered a remarkable run of speakers. At CES '98 the stand-mounted Model 5.0, a totally
new product designed by Soliloquy's Jones-led team was introduced.
Since then, the line has grown to a total of eight models,
all of which share the following design characteristics: 1) easy drivability; 2) solid
1" MDF stock for all six sides and all internal bracing; 3) additional SoundCoat
damping on all internal cabinet panels; 4) proprietary shielded drivers; 5) curly maple,
cherry, rosewood or "black ash" real-wood veneers standard; 6) laser-cut steel
base plates with threaded inserts for massive custom spikes; 7) point-to-point-wired
crossovers employing StraightWire; 8) bi-wire capability on all models (except for SAT5
and SM-2A3).
Dennis Had's last remaining involvement with the new
Soliloquy was the creation of the crossover for the Model SM-2A3, which is otherwise
identical to the 5.0s. It was introduced, in concert with Cary’s new 2A3 monoblocks,
at the Chicago HI-FI Show, and is what Soliloquy refers to as a "special
application" product, as it was specifically voiced to supplement micro-power tube
amps -- its crossover is a series-type not suitable for power inputs of higher than 25
watts.
All Soliloquy loudspeakers are compatible with either tube
or solid-state amplification and none requires more than 25-50Wpc. Most models are also
compatible with extremely low-power SET amplifiers (always dependent on room size and
typical listening levels, of course). However, Soliloquy claims, its speakers can also
handle high-power amplifiers without any adverse consequences.
And by opposing end them?
The speakers under review here, the Model 5.0ses, are a
reasonably compact, stand-mounted, rear-ported two-way design. Rather than the
conventional driver-mounting scheme of tweeter on top, midrange/woofer below, the 5.0s
turns that expectation on its head. The speaker grille, covered with an acoustically
transparent double-knit fabric, is sculpted into a striking filled-in "U" --
which makes the 5.0s look sleek and less boxy. Too bad I never used it. Acoustically
transparent or not, it blunted the tweeter’s lovely clarity, so I forsook it.
Nevertheless, the speakers still looked like high-quality furniture -- even the bits
designed to be covered up are cleanly laid out and joined together.
The 5.0s sports four massive five-way binding posts to
accommodate bi-wiring. The speakers I reviewed were clad in impeccably finished curly
maple that would have looked at home on a Paul Reed Smith electric guitar. Tasty! On the
bottom, they have threaded insets that facilitate bolting the loudspeakers to their
(optional) custom stands (more on these later). Thanks to their 1" MDF construction,
they’re hefty little suckers that weigh in at 22 pounds despite their compact
7.5" by 14" by 11" dimensions.
The driver complement consists of a 5.25" rigid
poly-fiber coned midrange/woofer with a cast magnesium basket and vented magnet system.
The tweeter is a doubled-chambered, magnetically shielded 1.125" coated silk dome
that crosses over at 3.2kHz.
The crossover is a straightforward 12dB/octave second-order
design with a conservatively rated +/- 45 degree phase angle and a 10-ohm nominal
impedance. With this design, Soliloquy claims, saturation is not a problem, so they
utilized iron-core inductors. The parts employed are all first-rate: only metalized
polypropylene capacitors, wirewound ceramic resistors, silver solder, 12-gauge
StraightWire hook-up wire and point-to-point connections are used throughout the design.
The quality of the joinery, wood finish, metalwork and
construction is without flaw. This is a seriously well-made loudspeaker. It’s almost
unbelievable that Soliloquy can sell it for only $895 per pair.
 The 25" custom speaker
stands designed for the 5.0s/2A3 are also works of art, although at $500, they don’t
seem to represent the same level of value as the loudspeakers themselves. I don’t
mean that Soliloquy is overcharging for them -- they look like a solid $500 worth of
stand. But the 5.0s look like $2k worth of loudspeaker.
The stands consist of a solid steel baseplate with
Soliloquy’s signature threaded spikes -- these are massive spikes that thread from
the top of the baseplate. Leave ‘em up while working out your speaker placement and
crank ‘em down when you’ve determined a permanent location -- they’ll
easily penetrate carpet and underpad, definitively stabilizing the speakers. On top of the
steel plate, Soliloquy places a slab of hardwood that matches the speaker cabinets; on top
of that goes another steel plate. A hollow tube rises 22" to the steel support plate
onto which the 5.0s or 2A3 can be securely bolted. Soliloquy suggests you fill the tube
with sand or lead shot to add mass and damp vibrations.
The S-10 subwoofer is a ported powered sub with a 10"
aluminum woofer. Its compact proportions are complemented by its superb woodwork and
subdued appointments. Mine came in curly maple to match the 5.0ses. The lightly figured
wood is matched to a "U" shaped black grille that mirrors the grilles I
abandoned on the 5.0ses. Experiencing a rare case of room pride, I employed the grille
with no seeming ill effects, but don’t kid yourself -- I just thought it looked
pretty.
The S-10 employs discrete Darlington circuits that provide
125W amplification. It employs a second-order active Linkwitz-Riley crossover and a
continuously variable second-order subsonic low-pass filter. It has both high- and
low-level inputs, on/off/auto modes, high-level and line-level outputs,
crossover-frequency control, 180-degree phase switching, and speaker connections.
Its 10" aluminum driver employs dual 50mm voice coils,
cast magnesium baskets and vented magnets. The subwoofer has an interesting feature called
an "L-Port." The internal cabinet configuration has the port firing straight
down; an L-shaped vent guides the flow through the dual slots in the front. By removing
the spikes and metal baseplate, you gain access to the woofer’s wooden base. This can
be rotated 180 degrees so the port now fires rearward. Re-attach the metal base and spikes
and you’re good to go. A nice touch that -- even if it wasn’t required in my
room. YMMV.
While there’s a lot of high-quality subwoofer
competition at $1395, the fine woodwork and clean lines of the S-10 seem to belong to a
price point quite a bit above its actual MSRP. If aesthetics are an issue in your
subwoofer purchase, the S-10 just might be the ideal candidate for that decorator living
room.
‘Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished
It was dead simple to get the Soliloquys sounding great
straight out of the box. I bolted them to their stands, brought ‘em out from the
front wall about 60" and placed ‘em about one-third of the way into the room
from the side walls. They immediately sounded coherent and musical, with a greater amount
of usable bass than I had anticipated from their size. They did sound considerably
smoother and more refined as they broke in -- and they did require some fine-tuning for
their final placement -- but these are not the fussiest speakers I’ve ever used.
Quite the opposite, in fact.
Beauty may indeed be only skin deep, but under the lovely
curly maple veneer, the 5.0s is a brute of a performer. I was so entranced by the airiness
and clarity of its sound that I really played to those qualities at first, pulling out
acoustic recordings and small-ensemble performances until the wee, wee hours.
Buddy Miller’s Cruel Moon [HighTone HCD 8111]
practically lived in the CD drawer during the audition period. Miller is an
exceptionally talented singer, songwriter and guitarist -- he was bandleader, guitarist
and back-up vocalist on Emmylou Harris’ spectacular live set, Spyboy [Eminent
EM 25001-2]. Cruel Moon highlights Miller’s voice, which is a light tenor with
a true country twang. He manages to strike a common chord somewhere between Hank Williams
and Robert Johnson -- hellhounds might be on his trail but he’s going to outsmart
them by dying young.
The album’s title song is pure yearning. In a duet
with Emmylou Harris he begs the moon to leave him "… in the dark / You’ve
never had a broken heart." It’s a deceptively simple song and Harris and Miller
pour their souls into it, her fractured soprano soaring above his depressed plea. The
5.0ses threw Harris and Miller deep into the soundstage, just left of center stage, and
darned near life-sized. Harris’ voice floated in the air like some silver vapor trail
shining in the desert moonlight, while Miller’s cracked tenor pulled it steadily
earthward.
The band -- Miller on guitar, Byron House on bass, John
Gardner on drums, Phil Madiera on accordion, and Tammy Rogers on mandolin -- was grouped
around the two, close together but not jammed on top of one another. It was almost like
being there, except that I could hit repeat and hear them do it over and over -- which, of
course, I did.
To those of us used to the constraints of monitor-type
loudspeakers, the 5.0s sounds pretty much right on the money. It’s true the balance
was a little light, and there’s not all that much bass slam, but these aren’t
wimpy-sounding loudspeakers. Drums and bass have heft and the 5.0ses can play loud as the
dickens.
Phillipe Herreweghe’s recording of Matthäus
Passion with Collegium Vocale Gent [Harmonia Mundi HMC951676/78] sounded gloriously
full and life-sized when played through the Soliloquys at roof-raising volume. The
instrumental sound was crisp and cleanly arrayed throughout the soundstage, and it was
obvious that Herrweghe had arranged the choir to make the most of the antiphonal choruses.
As the instrumental lines wove their way sinuously forward, the massed voices filled my
listening room as rich and weightless as the head on a glass of Guinness -- and within
that delicate architecture, the voices passed the melody back and forth and from side to
side like a sacrament meant to be shared by all.
Of course, when speaking of Bach, can we truly say there is
any difference between melody and sacrament? After all, as Casals said, "To strip
human nature until its divine attributes are made clear, to inform ordinary activities
with spiritual fervor, to give wings of eternity to that which is most ephemeral; to make
divine things human and human thing divine; such is Bach, the greatest and purest moment
in music of all time."
I was stunned by the amount of detail the 5.0ses revealed
without ever sounding bright or analytical. They did not remind me so much of the Platinum
or BA speakers I’ve heard that were designed by Phil Jones as they did my reference
small monitor, the ProAc Response One S. Comparing the two directly, the
twice-as-expensive ProAcs clearly have the edge in both timbre and bass extension, but the
Soliloquys were not embarrassed by the comparison.
To take arms against a sea of troubles
As good as I found the 5.0ses, they lacked ultimate bottom
end impact. I love the benefits of small monitor speakers and would rather live with their
subtractive deficiencies than with the thick, muddled sound of a poorly designed
floorstanding loudspeaker. But that’s a personal choice -- other listeners value a
physical sound far more than I do.
Of course, I’m not stupid enough to reject an extra
octave or two of bottom end. And that’s exactly what the S-10 supplied once I got it
set up properly, which took a little fiddling.
I didn’t have a lot of placement choice, so the S-10
went against the front wall about a third of the way into the room. After experimenting
with the phase control, I found that, in my room, at that position, I needed to reverse
phase by 180 degrees. And, while the subwoofer has a high-pass filter, I wound up
preferring the sound when I ran the 5.0ses full-range without passing their signal through
the subwoofer at all. After careful adjustment of the subwoofer’s adjustable low
pass, I managed to find a point where I wasn’t doubling the speakers’ bottom end
(at least not noticeably) and removed any holes in the response.
Suddenly we were in an entirely new ball game. Going back
to the Herrweghe Matthäus Passion was a revelation. The venue changed entirely. It
had been a large room before, now it was vast -- and that vastness was specific, not
general. The basses had bodies, and their voices were fuller and rounder. Then again, so
were the sopranos and altos more fully fleshed. It was enough to make me contemplate
conversion -- if the Lutherans had a foreign legion, I’d have stormed the recruiting
office.
So I did what any audioweenie would do -- I unplugged the
subwoofer and everything just withered up and died. Keep in mind that I’d really
liked the 5.0ses before hearing them with the properly set up S-10. Now I couldn’t
stand ‘em -- give me back my bass!
OK, perhaps I exaggerate, but everything I liked about the
5.0ses, from the soft clarity of their top end to their just-the-facts presentation of the
midrange, I liked much better with the S-10 engaged. Surprisingly, I didn’t
actually feel as though I’d increased the system’s bass output (most of the
time), I felt as though I’d increased everything else from tonal balance to
palpability.
Of course, some discs, such as Orb’s Orbus Terraum
[Island I2 24099] clearly showed how deep the S-10 was going. The synth basses on this
disc weren’t even audible on the 5.0ses alone. Through the S-10, it sounded
like I was spiking 30Hz pylons down to the basement -- and I live on the second floor!
The JVC XRCD of Mighty Sam McClain’s Give It Up For
Love [JVCXR-0012] showed how vital the S-10 was to the delivery of full-scale musical
thrills. Here Bruce Katz’s growling B3 and Kevin Barry’s Strat benefited
tremendously from the added heft and body imparted to them by the sub -- they creaked and
growled and screamed with true audio verité, while a very life-sized Sam moaned and
shouted his blues. And a life-sized Sam is a big man.
Yup, once you’ve heard the 5.0ses with the Soliloquy
S-10, you won’t be satisfied without one. That said, I had one small complaint. The
S-10 has two modes of operation: continuous and auto. Like a good, ecologically minded
lad, I initially chose auto. Big mistake! When it senses an audio signal, the S-10’s
amplifier turns on with a thump. And not a subdued thump either. It sounds
like a UPS truck backing into your house -- it rattles the walls. Once I switched the sub
to continuous mode, I never experienced this -- or any -- other annoyance throughout my
audition.
Enterprises of great pith and moment
I set the Soliloquys up in two very different systems. The
first used a Conrad-Johnson Premier 17LS preamp and VTL-TT-25 monoblocks to get a feel for
their operation with tubes, even low-powered amps. I never felt I strained the amp or that
the speaker lacked control, even when I ran the VTLs in triode at 27Wpc. And this system
had that sweet tube magic in spades.
The other system consisted of the Musical Fidelity A3CR
preamplifier and power amplifier with the MF A3CD CD player. I initially ran this one
because I wanted to hear the Soliloquys with affordable, fairly high-powered, SS gear, but
I kept that system up for several months because it had a synergy that totally captivated
me. The Soliloquy 5.0ses with the MF stack represents an almost $5000 system ($5400 w/the
5.0s stands) that would give a lot of $10k systems a run for their money. Add the
subwoofer, careful set up and the right equipment support, and you’d have a system
that would embarrass quite a few costing three times its price.
What dreams may come
It’s pretty obvious I enjoyed my time with the
Soliloquy 5.0ses and S-10. When I first received them, I knew so little about them that I
dragged my feet setting them up for fear of a disappointing experience. No worries there!
The S-10 and the 5.0s are thoughtfully designed -- designed
to sound good without costing an extravagant amount. They are extremely well built and
look as good as anything on the market. If you’re looking for a great-sounding
compact loudspeaker, you’d be hard-pressed to do better at the 5.0s’ price. Of
course, that price isn’t really $895, as I almost consider the 5.0s stands a
necessity, not an accessory. So call ‘em $1395, they’re still a bargain. And
while I liked the 5.0ses alone -- and not just a little -- once I heard ‘em with the
S-10, I began to consider that a necessity too. Fortunately, you can always add it
on later -- a system upgrade route that I can’t recommend too enthusiastically.
What more can I say? Anything can drive ‘em, they
sound great, they don’t cost a lot -- how long do I have to talk to myself to show
you what I really feel? The Soliloquy 5.0s and S-10 are worthy of consideration by anyone
looking for a high-quality loudspeaker system that won’t break the bank.
...Wes Phillips
wes@onhifi.com
Soliloquy 5.0s Loudspeakers
Price: $895 USD per pair
Soliloquy 5.0s Speaker Stands
Price: $500 USD per pair
Soliloquy S-10 Subwoofer
Price: $1395 USD
Soliloquy High Fidelity Loudspeaker Company
2613 Discovery Dr., Bldg. A
Raleigh, NC 27616
Phone: (919) 876-7554
Fax: (919) 876-2590
Website: www.solspeak.com
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