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Review: Okay, for those of you who don't know how these Pure auxiliary speakers work, this is what they're about. The Evoke 1XT and Sonus 1XT (the latter of which is the clock radio version, which I proudly own) are very good sounding radios but they don't provide stereo, just sat there on the table top, except via their output sockets (line out, optical out and headphones). Wouldn't it be nice if you could make it into a stereo radio? Well this is the very thing. When you buy the 1XT speaker, you plug it into a special socket in the back of the radio which then resets itself to be the speaker for the right channel. The 1XT auxiliary speaker becomes the left channel. You get a really generous length of cable (I estimate mine to be 3m) so you can make a separation big enough to fill any room. The speaker is properly bass ported and produces the same resonant sound of the mother unit. It also has the new rounded look to match the XT units. Pure warn you that the exact colour of the veneer may not match precisely, but if you are separating the units by more than a few feet, then who is going to know? Mine happen to match quite well. Pure also make a cherry version to match the cherry 1XT sets, and I think the same goes for any particular finish they produce.
Anyone wondering whether the extra thirty quid will be worth it should take note: The transformation is remarkable. A radio that already has a warm balanced sound becomes a room filling piece of hi-fi. I already owned an original Evoke -1 and ST-1 speaker combo for day-to-day use and was aware of what an amazing product I owned. Note this... if you have bought an earlier DAB Radio, the first generation Pure Evoke-1 or Temppus-1 you need the ST-1 Speaker. This speaker I'm reviewing here is for the second generation XT radios. Two caveats: Be warned that some stations on the DAB dial only broadcast in mono, most notably BBC7 and Kerrang, so they don't benefit to any degree. The other thing is that you don't get a "clean" stereo image from the radio-and-aux-speaker combination. It is like a "wide angle" stereo image projected by a good quality ghetto blaster. Although this can fill a room, and is good for all-day casual listening, the hi-fi purist would be better to hook their mother unit up to their main hi-fi unit via the optical or line-out jacks on the back of the radio itself. Now the Sonus 1XT-1XT combo surrounds my bed providing the best wake up I could wish for. |
Audio HiFi
