Seiren Speaker & Minotaur
”Dynamic, relaxed and listenable at low and high volumes”. That’s roughly how the designer and co-owner of the Finnish Seiren Speakers, Ville Riikonen, would like their Minotaur speaker sound. Of the last mentioned feature I cannot say much on the basis of a relatively short listening session - which is why this is not a standard review - in the basement of Modern Audio. But it appeared as if the manufacturer had succeeded in the two first goals. More of that later.
Yet another Finnish loudspeaker manufacturer, and yet another 2-3 way dynamic speaker? Don’t we have them enough by any measure? Even if the new speaker sounded exceptionally wonderful the sound is just a small portion - one fifth? - of a success story. I always wonder how are the newcomers going to manage on the highly competitive markets, and how some of them eventually will? Ville and his brother do not lack guts.
Ville had an unusually favorable starting point for a more serious speaker building. He had previously built DIY speaker kits, and wanted to develop further a floorstander model that he was especially fond of (HIFI 85). As a student at the Helsinki Technical University he had a privilege of measuring his proto types in the University’s anechoic chamber. In this way he’s been able to obtain the desired behavior of his speakers in terms of frequency responses (the one below shows one of Ville’s measurement).
The mid unit is slightly larger in diameter (6,5”) than what seems to be a norm in this type of designs but otherwise the design has no really unique features. For example, to place the woofer close to floor on one side of the speaker is almost an industry rule nowadays. And it would require particular courage not to use a waveguide for the tweeter when the speaker is of Finnish origin. Of course, because the upper cross over frequency is set beyond 3kHz, the mid frequency unit starts to be fairly directive at those frequencies, and therefore the tweeter requires a waveguide in order to go seamlessly with the mid unit. This is sound engineering.
The design is Finnish but the cabinet and the crossover boards are made in China. The cabinet is braced but I got the impression that Ville and his brother have not wanted to go extremes in this respect either. Minotaur comes either piano black or with a black front plate and rest veneered with exotic plywood. The finishing looks very good. One of Ville’s driving forces has been to combine world class finishing and high quality with a reasonable price, to use quality components, and extend Scandinavian design to somewhat unusual veneers.
Relaxed and untiring, not causing listening fatigue, Yes, but not colored, says Ville. In the basement with stonewalls, and Parasound electronics, a few bass notes were excited so the sound wasn’t fully non-colored. Even if these room-induced peaks of low frequency energy were ignored the Minotaur sounds warm in a way some would be inclined to call “colored”; not “incorrect” but colored in a way that reflects the designer’s likings. The manufacturer itself describes Mintotaur’s sound as “gentle” and that pretty well captures what I mean by “warm” and "color" in this context.
The gentle nature of the sound is not, in my opinion, a function of excessive bass, nor muted treble (above 5 kHz) but a co-product of present and deep bass and well-integrated unnoticeable treble (reflecting the downward slope of the room response). Making the woofers shoot on the outer side reduced the level of bass in this particular room but did not remove all accentuations. I must stress that this was not a typical critical listening session but a casual arrangement to meet the speaker’s designer. To evaluate the full potential of Minotaurs’s sound quality would require more careful auditioning in a more familiar and approved environment.
It was obvious that the speaker can play loud with no salient signs of compression. The emphasis is on general all encompassing reproduction of music, even heavy one, rather than searching for the inner meaning and peculiarities of compositions. If you love analysis and clinging to small details Minotaur may not be your first choice. The speaker is designed to provide a uniform and systematic performance with varying musical repertoires. And so it largely did.
The company’s future plans include completing the collection with a 2-way monitor. And Minotaur won’t be the last floorstanding Seireen Speaker, says Ville and looks excited and positive. That’s the way to go!
Seiren Speaker Minotaur, the current prices (in Finland) are 2990 € (piano black) or 3490 € (ebony). Minotaurs are for sale in Modern Audio in Helsinki.