Nola Boxer
It would not be incorrect to say that my hifi-me very much grew up with Alon speakers. The local hifi shop was also the importer for Alons, so over the years I came to learn almost every Alon model launched at the time. Just like I got in-depth knowledge of the universe of VTL tube amps. Those two went together then.
That was many harvests ago. The world was different then. The Soviet Union had just collapsed, trousers with nano-technology didn't exist, and the Manley family still pulled together. Lady Gaga had just passed 3. And ALON was still ALON, not NOLA.
Don't judge the dog by its hair. ALON or NOLA, no big difference, as long as the designer is the man himself, Carl Marchisotto. Those for whom the name doesn't ring the bell, Marchisotto is widely known for his inclination towards dipole radiation speakers, from his early realizations for Dahlquist to his own ALONs in the 1990s. In some Alon models, IV especially, the dipole midrange - if my memory serves me well - worked quite handsomely with VTL amplification. Dipole NOLAs I have heard only sporadically.
But even Marchisotto cannot reinvent the wheel, which takes us to NOLA BOXER: a 2-way box speaker with a low-mass 6,5 inch mid/ woofer, and an inch tweeter. The former sports a laminated pulp cone, and the latter is a high-resolution silk dome surrounded by a diffraction ring.
The BOXER cabinet features somewhat unusual dimensions: W 205, H 395 and D 295 mm, ie. the cabinet is fairly deep relative to its height. The twin flared bass port fires rear. Because of the size the speaker looks heavier than it is (12 kg). It looks quite serious too, and in its own way stylish, even when the black cloth grill is on. The cherry wood enclosure is piano finished. The varnish is not of Sonus Faber quality but in an industrial way immaculate.
As to the crossover, here's NOLA: "Equipped with a shock-isolation system the crossover is a shallow slope design. The construction employs only point-to-point hand wiring. Capacitors are 630-volt high purity polypropylene types. Only air core inductors are used. Resistors are close tolerance 2% metal types. Wiring is proprietary low-loss oxygen-free copper." I take it that the "shallow slope" means first order, but I couldn’t find info on the crossover frequency in order to calculate the frequency where the tweeter is -6 dB down an octave lower.
For the amps BOXER offers 8 ohms of nominal impedance, and 90 dB sensitivity. Not a bad load on paper, and tube amps are not excluded from the pool of suitable amps. At one point I drove the BOXERs with a 40W Octave V40 PP integrated, and it turned out to be a happy match! In addition the BOXER got lubricated with solid-state power by Sugden A21 SE and Hegel pre-/power combo.
But despite the drivers used, despite the details of the crossover and other technical finenesses, a two-way box speaker - BOXER - is a two-way box-speaker is a two-way box speaker. The concept possesses certain well known advantages but also a number of limitations. Where's the beef then? They all have a ...
Sound
They certainly do, and although the concept itself is a gnawed bone, the sound tastes different each time, from one box to another. When people make the claim that all 2-way box speakers are the same they hardly mean that the sound were always identical. The sound is never identical but I guess it could be argued that it is more or less similar, roughly of the same level of quality.
Let me first take some degrees of freedom and state in general terms my overall impression of the BOXER's sound, not as the sound in isolation but more as a means for a wide range music reproduction, from Chinese instrumental music to Western formal and less formal music. In this capacity I found BOXER as a free and open and vivid sounding, well-balanced compact speaker that doesn't stop to ponder and analyze every whim of the composer nor contemplate the inner meaning of the composition. Instead it rushes forward with a happy pace and rhythm making itself fun and enjoyable to listen to, relaxed and easy-going. I'd say that BOXER is at its best with non-classical material but does not spit on more artistic endeavors either.
The bass response is said to reach the -3dB point at 44 Hz. Based on real life listening in two rooms, I'd say the figure is within the speaker's possibilities. BOXER can produce quite an appealing bass making it sound like a full-range speaker but the effect is mostly achieved by operating on first harmonics of the bass notes (80 Hz instead of 40 Hz and so on). This is not always a bad thing: if the first bass harmonics are well defined and stated, the bass section may sound quite delicious.
To be honest, I had a strange two-fold experience of the BOXER's bass performance. In an acoustically well treated but smallish room, the bass was noticeably uneven giving rise to unnecessarily lively and ambiguous performance, ambiguous in how the sound was staged. In a less optimal but larger room the said problems largely and mysteriously disappeared, indicating that the placement in the first mentioned room was far from optimal. In the larger space the sound was decently balanced, and the bass supported properly many different type of music with no obvious coloring ups and downs or other frequency anomalies. I'm not saying the BOXER could not provoke bass problems in small rooms but the risk is clearly not as obvious as I first thought it could be.
Seen through magnifying classes I think the BOXER has a tendency to add a little extra energy eg. to the low strings of an acoustic guitar with selected program material, and that therefore careful control both of the placement of the speakers and the volume level is required in order to lessen the risk of empty hollow sound, and to obtain a better definition overall. Here I encountered a small conflict of interests as the BOXER also the appears to like volume to open up and deliver its best performance. My conclusion thus is that it may need some skill to make best use of the BOXER's sensitivity and sense of presence. But if one succeeds, the end result can be truly rewarding.
The treble didn't impress me, nor was I disappointed with it. It didn’t make fuss about itself, and the only occasional moments I paid attention to it was when I discerned sharp sibilants or hardening of violin timbre. Timbral accuracy over the highest frequencies may not be of the world record level but in the bigger picture BOXER gave not much to worry about. And the less one cares about classic music, the less this matters.
Becoming an owner of a pair of NOLA BOXER you’ll have to have 1500 euros extra. In this price category, competition is dead tight. Not only are markets packed with many fine sounding similar priced speakers (the Finnish Penaudio, Amphion, Aurelia, Gradient etc. all have models in this category, as have dozens and dozens of other manufacturers) but great sound is also available for 2/3 of the price, sometimes even less.
BOXER is not unique in how it sounds. Nor does it sound like a 4000 euro box speaker; Marchisotto could have designed a more mature sounding box speaker for the 4000 euro category had he wanted to do so. But there is something special about the BOXER's sound, something - a delightful combination of outgoingness and balanced tonality perhaps - that in a right context makes it easy to fall in love with; not in a deep, unrepeatable way but in a light and fresh and young way.