A rundown on the Finnish speaker manufacturer.
The year is 1998, and Anssi Hyvönen started a small audio company in Finland named Amphion, with the hopes of recreating how we hear sound naturally. Over twenty years later, they’re still here, offering extremely professional monitoring solutions for studios and audio engineers the world over.
“Our job as a speaker manufacturer is to open a large, clean window to music and allow the customer to experience music in an intimate, touching way regardless of his or her surroundings. The goal is to come up with [a] pure, highly transparent loudspeaker that will vanish leaving just the music” says Anssi Hyvönen on his brand of loudspeakers.
Read up on all the latest interviews, features and columns here.
Amphion Argon 1
With an audiophile range of speakers that takes its size names from the periodic table—Helium, Argon and Krypton—there’s something very scientific about Amphion. Their approach to speaker design is holistic, with everything they sell being hand assembled in-house from high quality components.
The look of an Amphion speaker is sleek and Scandinavian in its minimalism, but the enclosure appearance doesn’t seem to take priority over the sound design process, which is very strongly aimed at delivering quality, transparent audio.
One thing that sets this brand apart is all their speakers feature time-adjusted drivers and a 1600Hz crossover point for their tweeters—which is just under the start of a sensitive point of human hearing above 2000Hz. Their products possess an incredible “phantom” centre with a wide sweet spot for listening, which is a bonus for anyone using these speakers.
Amphion utilises Uniformly Directive Dispersion (U/D/D) in all their designs which allows a predictable and acoustically-stable result, no matter where you’re listening. Up to their fifth generation of waveguide, cabinet diffractions are minimised and they produce an even response throughout their frequency responses.
All speakers are created and assembled at their warehouse in Finland by audio professionals, enabling them to have the utmost control over quality and design. This attention to detail has pushed Amphion into the next echelon of speaker design which has been used in studios by Jack Joseph Puig and Dave Pensado to name a few.
Corian
Amphion’s professional studio monitoring solutions, named One and Two—which is a phrase sound engineers know too much about—are beautifully crafted nearfield passive speakers with titanium dome tweeters and aluminium woofers. Their time aligned HF drivers are set in Corian waveguides to ensure total phase coherence between the drivers.
Aluminium passive radiators oppose the LF woofer to provide low-end management and avoids the use of a bass port enabling flexible placement of them within a room. Due to all these thoughtful technological enhancements, these speakers are open and provide what can be described as doing what monitors are meant to do, be transparent.
Combining with their One and Two loudspeakers, there’s a range of subs to fill in the low end for full range audio which is necessary within mastering and mixing studios. Not only that, these woofers feature an adjustable crossover that adds more than just a sub to the mix, but allows the system to function as a 3-way full range monitoring setup.
Take into account that people are mixing bass in stereo nowadays and their BaseTwo system makes complete sense. It’s a stereo subwoofer unit with two 10” aluminium woofers per side, extending all the way down to the bottom depths of our hearing (20Hz). Not only does it enable a true full range sound, through the flexible crossover point, it also frees up the woofers on paired Amphion One or Two units, providing extra headroom and a clearer representation of what’s happening in the mix.
Being passive, Amphion loudspeakers can be paired with other amplifiers, but for a complete Amphion experience, there is a range of stunning stereo amps that match perfectly with their studio monitors. Specific to their amplifiers is a buffer-stage that adds a touch of Class A sound characteristics to Class D topology which performs top of their class (pun intended) in regards to driving clean audio through the signal chain.
In a market full of active speakers, Amphion is pushing against the current, separating the analog and the digital. Utilising separate systems allows you to upgrade your amplifier when newer and better technology comes out while keeping your physical loudspeaker away from the amplifier components which can introduce electromagnetic interference.
Putting it all together, Amphion studio monitors promise that you’ll make better, more informed decisions in your mix/master using their loudspeakers. With their extremely meticulous hand assembled construction and unique technology, there’s no doubt Amphion are up there with the best of the best.
The Finnish loudspeaker manufacturer is on a path to become one of the more sought after near field monitor manufacturers with some saying they are like NS-10s on steroids—which after the NS-10 being one of the most successful studio monitors of all time—is a comparison I’m sure they’d love to hear.
For more info, or to shop Amphion, visit them here.