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When five months passed to quelch any remote contact high, Chris apologized: "We've had setbacks in the finishing process to where production will be in natural blonde only. Every stain we tried was simply not working out. They all looked sub par. It was hard to part with the idea of providing several colors while maintaining the beauty of the highly figured maple. Jim has worked crazy long hours since Christmas trying to perfect the process to no avail. We finally had a pow wow and decided that the speaker will be available in natural blonde only. However, we are going to be providing either bookmatched quilted maple or bookmatched tiger/flame maple. Also, we recently tried some Duelund capacitors and resistors in the crossover. Stunning - but extremely expensive. So, we're considering an SE version but that's still in the debate phase. It's been a bit of a frustrating journey given what our own expectations were for this project. But we're a bunch of unreasonably salty bastards unwilling to say uncle. And, being unreasonable is not all it's cracked up to be."


About setup, he advised to, "as a starting point, create the standard equilateral triangle referenced to the listening position. Then toe the speakers in 40 degrees so that you are seeing a substantial portion of the outside panel from the listening position. Tuning should then be in increments of toe-out. The reason for this is because the speaker has a fairly wide dispersion. Extreme toe-in puts your ears on the outer arc of the tweeter axis, hopefully dialing the first reflections out of the equation without attenuating the high frequencies. The speaker is actually designed to be listened to slightly off axis (thus the tweeter height being lower than ear height). This setup also allows you to place the speakers a little closer the to side walls than you otherwise might, although I recommend keeping them at least 4 feet from the front wall.


"These speakers are intended for use in average listening rooms, which seem to be under 200 square feet in general. Thus placement can be crucial for low frequency balance, using the side walls for proximity loading instead of the front wall. When set up correctly, they will completely disappear and lay bare a very expansive soundstage while rendering very lifelike images within. Scale and dynamics are all there, try them with tubes and solid state for changes in flavor. I'm not sure how they will react with PWM amps, though."

In stature like a DeVore Fidelity Gibbon 8 or Super 8 but in attribute more slanty because both heavily figured front and rear baffles lean backwards, Angelus cuts a diminutive but rakish profile.

The Seas tweeter is stationary and embedded in a thin-walled cylinder with a flared edge that acts as a miniature wave guide and, presumably, prevents intermolduation from the moving midrange cone. Chris further had mentioned crossover tricks to address "issues with dual-concentrics in general and this one in particular".
Juxtaposed against the heavily figured baffles, the sides and tops contrast nicely with their relative plainness. The latter, truth be told, can't help but look just a wee bit ordinary by comparison and in this gussied up context.


Final packaging wasn't quite done by the time my first samples were shipped. Consequently, the men in brown hadn't been sensitive males and the speakers suffered sad corner damages to distract from their highly manicured cosmetics. The first pair evidenced further finish blemishes independent of shipping abuses and Chris Sommovigo decided to recall the pair and submit a new one with the proper footers, finalized manual and the bona fide wooden crates with inner cartons cradled in foam and the speakers proper ensconced in their own foam cradles.


Opening up the Angelus by unbolting the dual-concentric single driver proved easier than usual since there was no mounting gasket to overcome to pry the driver from the cabinet. The insides show a fully foam-lined cavity with the crossover bolted to the front wall right below the driver. A fully formed port tube vents into a second chamber which then couples to the room through the front-firing port.
Because the main cone with its inverted surround is translucent and because there is no grill, a listener facing the speaker will see the two silver leads to the tweeter's voice coil draping below the tweeter. The binding post terminal plate sits slightly above the back panel's midpoint so speaker cables will remain visible leading up. And that about covers the physical and functional aspects of this modestly sized, finely appointed luxury 2-way tower. More when the second pair has landed...
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