Oephi Lounge 2 speakers
Don’t know about you, but just sometimes I find it’s the simpler things in life that hit the spot. Back in my car journalism days, it would happen with surprising regularity. The odd supercar was great for a blast of showy shock and awe but, for pure driving enjoyment, it was more often a talented fast hatchback or modestly endowed two-seater – say, a Mazda MX-5 – keenly applied to the challenge of a twisty road that nailed the more enduring, real-world rewards. Anyone lucky enough to be intimately acquainted with the transparent dynamic joys of a Toyota GR86 will know what I’m talking about, especially if they live near the wilder areas of Scotland or North Wales.
Some say there are obvious ‘less is more’ parallels in hi-fi. I won’t deny that I’m one of them. It was with an odd mixture of excitement, curiosity and mild incredulity, then, that I read about Danish speaker and cable maker Oephi’s new entry level standmount and floorstander Lounge speakers. Excited because Oephi is one of the most uncompromising and focused hi-fi brands on the planet. Curious to find out what constitutes building down to a more affordable price point. And mildly incredulous to discover that after the inspiring, aspirational trajectory of Ascendence, Transcendence, Immanence and Reference, the company’s most accessible speakers were to be called Lounge.
Could it be that company founder and boss Joakim Juhl’s opportunity to build the Toyota GR86 of standmounts had, instead, been squandered for a speaker line as comfortable and cosy as a range of soft furnishings to occupy the ground floor of Oephi’s lofty model structure? The suspense was killing me and, of course, only a review (of the standmount Lounge 2 in my smaller listening room) would tell. The result, as it turns out, was simply remarkable.
Joakim Juhl knew exactly what he wanted from a loudspeaker when he started Oephi in 2021: low distortion, large bandwidth and unhindered dynamics combined with perfect phase-transition and time domain performance. In essence, acoustic output with least possible impact on the original signal, the goal to hear deep into the music while keeping everything ‘right’ and together through impeccable timing and musical insight and to preserve the musical meaning by keeping the message intact without adding distortion nor blocking information.
The Juhl method made a huge impact on me when I first heard the Transcendence 2, a £5,495 2-way, rear-ported standmount, one down from the £8,500 Immanence 2, featuring the increasingly adopted Purifi mid-bass driver with its distinctive, long-throw asymmetric surround designed by Lars Risbo. The accompanying SEAS sourced metal dome tweeter had also received a makeover to reduce power compression so that when the music called for fast transients, the tweeter could follow the waveform more accurately. Its low, offset mounting on the baffle was said to benefit diffraction. And the sound? Revelatory and addictive.
When I reviewed Oephi’s identically sized Immanence 2 standmount flagship with its large true ribbon tweeter for the Ear, it did things I’d never heard a small speaker do before, not all of them compatible with my preferred smaller listening room. A unique blend of bewitching brilliance and exasperating edginess, with more space to breathe and express itself, it eventually gave a show of true greatness, though I concluded it probably needed a more talented front-end than my downstairs system could muster to fulfil its potential.
Oephi’s ‘timing is everything’ strapline certainly points the way and has its non-negotiable ingredient status embedded in a core Juhl belief, nay, obsession with time-domain performance. He claims he pays more attention to how drivers are perfectly synchronized in their overlap than any other speaker designer he’s met. The objective is that the drivers do not generate two slightly time-offset output signals that smear one another but rather one time-coherent signal. More ‘natural resolution’ results simply by not smearing the complex output of the two drivers in their overlap. It also ensures better defined pauses, again due to not smearing the silences between the note transients. Even simple drivers with less sophisticated motors and higher distortion figures can still get the technical parts of the presentation to ‘click’.
From Immanence to Lounge is a breezy four-tier leap back to earth but everything I’ve mentioned up to now is apposite to the entry-level speaker. As Juhl puts it: ‘The Lounge range carries our DNA in its most distilled form, setting the absolute performance bar at their price points, while also being easy to integrate into a wide range of systems’. Components may change but it seems Oephi’s core philosophy of absolute musical veracity does not, irrespective of cost.
That said, given the hardware changes needed to meet a £2,695 price point – not least, replacing the sophisticated, low distortion 165mm Purifi main driver with a much simpler, conventional half-roll rubber surround, paper-coned item – the sonic outcome gave me perhaps the shock of my reviewing career.
Joakim’s breakdown
There are a few hints why in Joakim’s breakdown: ‘The Lounge 2’s mid-bass driver is one place where we shaved off a good amount of costs. We source the unit from SB Acoustics. It’s designed here in Denmark but manufactured in Indonesia and one of those hidden gems that just performs way above its price point. I see it as a modern homage to the classic paper mid-woofers of the past with its small light 25mm voice coil and light paper cone that, due to its self-damping provides reasonable extension and a natural roll off with exemplary off axis characteristics. It’s just a simple, cost effective and incredibly well-balanced driver.
‘The other area of costs saving is the crossover. Here we dialled back the wax impregnated copper foil inductors (normally only seen in the most expensive speakers on the market) to a healthy, large, low resistance air core inductor you’d more typically find in competitors’ top range offerings. The cost saving here is roughly equivalent to the cost of the SB mid-bass driver! During development, I went through a bunch to find one that fitted the bill, and there was just one specific inductor that had the magic with this driver. It really is something special – simple, light, perfectly balanced. It just plays music like music should be played.
‘Also, we have simplified the crossover and omitted our bespoke capacitor network technology and used an ordinary capacitor solution. For Lounge models we mount the crossover directly on the filter plate and use solid core internal wiring rather than our inhouse cable technology. The terminals are brass based rather than copper based but we still do the crossover point-to-point style where the components are soldered directly to the terminal. Although this is time consuming to make, we feel that the benefits of this direct pure connection with no PCB and no cables between terminals and crossover far outweigh the costs.’
Compromise is always the name of the game when building down to a price but perhaps it’s the nature of the execution that really matters. Joakim certainly thinks so. ‘I believe the Lounge 2 speakers are a true expression of Oephi speaker design principles without fancy and expensive components and drivers,’ he explains. ‘It’s like a base formula upon which the higher models maintain the same approach and priorities, but we can spend more on parts. As always, the design and how things are made to work together are most important. Only when this is perfected does it make sense to spend more on drivers and components. But no matter how much you spend, it won’t fix any shortcomings in the fundamental design!’ Agreed, but I’d go further. Just occasionally, I reckon judicious paring back can have positive consequences that comfortably exceed the sum of the downgraded components.
Why? I’ll cut straight to the chase. Of the three Oephi standmounts I’ve had in my listening room on the end of the same Leema Acoustics and Chord Electronics based system – the £8,500 Immanence 2, the £5,450 Transcendence 2 and the £2,695 Lounge 2 – it’s the latter I’d nominate as the daily driver and forever keeper. Yes, even over the remarkable Transcendence 2. And not because it’s the least expensive. Or to say that, in absolute terms, the Lounge 2 is the most capable of the three. It isn’t. Rather, it’s the most skilfully accommodating, the best sounding in my rooms, small and large, and, in any kind of real world reckoning away from meticulously optimised dealer demos, the real unicorn in the range and Joakim Juhl’s most significant gift to high performance audio.
I suspect Joakim knows just how good the Lounge 2 really is but, with the vertiginously ascending model structure above, must back the up-sell potential. That said, he gives a pretty good account of what he was aiming to achieve: ‘With the Lounge 2 I was aiming to hit a special balance between being technically correct and, at the same time, highly listenable. That’s correct tonal balance, enough bass weight while still sounding quick on its feet, an open midrange without the edginess that sometimes can be difficult to escape and a 3D soundstage with proper width, height, depth and proper image stability.
It does all these “technical” things very well, yet it does them without peeling off too much of those artefacts that are not really from the signal itself but rather added to it as a hint of warmth; slightly extra tonal density, a bit more flesh on the bones so to speak. I think that these things combined are why the speaker can both open up whatever music you throw at it but do so without becoming “analytical” and, at the same time, not hiding anything. I think it keeps everything together but without hiding anything either. It articulates but without undressing.’
Sound quality
When something’s getting it right, you know within the first few bars. I don’t doubt it’s a timing thing. And back when I reviewed the Immanence 2, its influence was certainly the felt playing a Qobuz stream of Robben Ford’s 1993 concert at Montreux. The portrayal of space, energy, drive, dynamic expression, timing and the sheer rhythmic physicality of Ford’s playing had a raw, unvarnished immediacy that nailed the feeling of performance and ‘being there’, both in place and moment. But, intoxicating as that big ribbon tweeter’s contribution was, I could never quite forget I was ‘hearing’ it. Even the considerably more room-friendly Transcendence 2 had its moments of unbridled excitement and unforgiving scrutiny, such that during my time with it I would occasionally reinstate my resident Falcon Acoustics LS3/5a or Russell K Red 50 SE benchmarks with certain ‘hot’ recordings for a bit of a breather.
Playing the Ford cut once more, at no point do I feel inclined to side-line the Lounge 2 for a break. Quite the opposite. Placed on 24-inch Slate Audio stands positioned and toed-in for the Falcon LS3/5as and plumbed in with Nordost Red Dawn cables rather than Oephi’s own Lounge level loom, the Lounge 2s simply work beautifully straight out of the carton, exhibiting Oephi’s signature transparency, dynamic realism and temporal precision but with a beautifully judged cooling of the ‘take no prisoners’ interrogation prosecuted by the Immanence and, to a lesser extent, the Transcendence. Indeed, anything and everything I play, from Norah Jones to Rush, merely stokes up the listening session with the desire to replay old favourites for new insights and explore new music and genres previously off the table, just as better hi-fi should.
In absolute terms, the Lounge 2’s resolution and dynamic reach might not hit Transcendence and Immanence levels, but what isn’t obviously dialled back is the Lounge 2’s uncanny facility to expose hitherto unrealised insights, nuances and textures and a degree of soundstage dimensionality that’s almost spooky. Playing Caravan from the Whiplash soundtrack on CD, the blistering speed of that relatively conventional, paper-coned main driver is more than equal to the most dazzling drum licks while integration and voicing are so good that the orchestral crescendos sound as nape-tinglingly thrilling as they should but seldom do. Yes, tonally, the Transcendence 2 is a tad richer, its bass digs a little deeper and it can take more of the Leema Tucana II Anniversary’s 150 watts without strain, but the Lounge 2’s low frequencies are wonderfully agile and tuneful and there’s a sense of upper register air, energy, start-stop acuity, image focus, separation, ambient dimensionality and sheer musical coherence that’s up with the best I’ve ever heard.
Conclusion
As I’ve already mentioned, of those I’ve heard, the Lounge 2 is my favourite Oephi speaker – not just the most engrossing, temporally exact, endlessly entertaining and dangerously addictive sub £3k standmount ever to come my way but the only standmount I’ve had in my room that hasn’t been humbled by my resident Falcon Gold Badge LS3/5a for midband believability, sounding as if there really has been some progress in speaker design since 1975. Bravo. I think it’s Joakim Juhl’s masterpiece, capable of giving a taste of high end with modestly priced mainstream electronics and the real thing with more ambitious kit. It’s my hi-fi bargain of the year.