Lateral lossiness. The phrasing was deliberate. It tweaks our reflexive association of loss with bad. Now flip it to good to drive the point home: when our bass machine loses 10-12dB of output on its sides versus the front, there are fewer room interactions. If a neighbour shares your sidewall, that's a very happy thing. Ditto if all your walls are your own. Bass reflections depressed in amplitude are terrific. They clean up the low end and reduce interferences higher up. Semi directional bass from asymmetrical dipole cancellation is really a most useful quality to have. Others less fortunate must install unsightly bass traps to achieve something similar. It makes one nearly forgive the DiSub X15's central hulking presence.
It's mighty rare to come across bass this lucid and stripped of non-belonging resonance, overhang and sundry detractors of the pure music signal. Imagine the speed and transient articulation of a ribbon or magnetostatic tweeter. Then transpose that quality ten octaves lower. It removes the usual box sound. The Kaiser Chiara achieves a similar quality with its auxiliary bass radiator but doesn't reach as low. Its overall voicing is also deliberately warmer to be a Burson or Pass Labs XA.8 amp to the Bakoon or nCore 1200 sound of the Cygnus. The EnigmAcoustics M1's combination of larger dome tweeter with monopole electrostatic super tweeter outshines either on air, performer halos and effervescent decays. But to fully compete with the German trio especially in a larger space of lesser room gain, those super monitors still require their own 20Hz to ~40Hz assistance. Managaging that as continuous for a perfect textural progression without detectable transition as the DiSub X15 does it for its Quasar partners is nearly impossible. Another notable bass qualifier for Chris Brückner's sub solution is lack of overdamping. Overdamped bass blisters and jackhammers as only drum machines and techno synths do. Hifi beginners are taken in by it because it seems impressive even on acoustic bass.


But it's unnatural; like watching a movie with 3D glasses. And it's irrelevant when bass already stops on a dime. Now one needn't fake articulation by exaggerating attacks so that at least they stand out of subsequent mud. Avoid mud in the first place and articulation reveals itself without the hyper striations of a bodybuilder who is dehydrated for competition rippedness. The next takeaway is scale. Whilst all well-designed stand-mounted monitors tend to stage like bandits, they lack material scale or fully incarnated conviction. Their exploration of virtual space exceeds an equal and matching scope of physical embodiment. There's no infra bass; and the bass which they do squeeze from small mid/woofers moves insufficient air. Once added with a subwoofer, the very lowest bass register provides a literal grounding function. It also deepens the black value of the colour palette to oppose the whitening dither action of an expanded treble. Finally and to address purely theoretical concerns, any losses of A/D and D/A conversion inside the DiSub X15 are 0.05% issues compared to the 15% problems of boomy un-DSP'd bass which they eliminate. Entertaining such problematic notions is purely for the armchair engineers who lack any proper grasp on the difference between high-order and low-order effects.


Lateral gain. With the narrow but tall Expolinear tweeters having better horizontal dispersion than spot-light dome tweeters, the Quasar did well with less than face-on toe-in. I didn't need to move our second seat out of the way to park the other one smack on the center line. Even in a more casual two-up seating arrangement, I had proper stereo effects. I wasn't listening to quasi mono. Too many performance reviews skip over such real-life benefits. They happily perpetuate the outdated notion of the lone listener who acts anxiously protective over his sacred sweet spot. The Cygnus Quasar is a rather more social animal.

With its sealed loading and compact dimensions, the Quasar obviously scales up internal pressures as you open the throttle. Delegating the crossover into its own box on the floor avoids filter microphonics. Perhaps it explain why this system plays very happily loud without any suggestions of strain. It also helps that this box isn't forced into maximal bass reach as is the ported majority competition which gets promoted as being sufficient on its own. Only subwoofer users can fully appreciate what those are missing. By now our narrative segues very unavoidably into one very obvious conclusion. The Cygnus Audio Quasar/DiSub X15 system combines all the traditional virtues of a hifi-trained studio monitor with the bandwidth of full-range towers. Then it goes well beyond the latter's passive rigidity with amplitude, phase and placement adjustments, effective room-mode compensation and unusual bass directivity which naturally minimizes room interaction. It's thus a very practical solution to common issues of playback in the home.

The debit side of this equation contains zero performance marks. There's simply the practical demand—ability and willingness—to accommodate a very large subwoofer which is ideally placed centrally and in line with the monitors. And there's the socioeconomic limitation of one-up custom manufacture and pure direct sales. It means that you won't audition this system anywhere but in the designer's residence a bit south of Hannover; or on a house call which limits his reach to a one-day driving distance and means financial compensation if you don't buy. On the upside are extensive customization options. On the associated downside, there are wait times since there's zero inventory. On pure performance, the system price is competitive with today's top equivalents. That this tiny scale of operations implies build costs which are far higher than they'd be if 100s of these sold per year is part of the package. It's directly responsible for why this product won't sell through dealers. At €35'000 with a bog-standard markup, Cygnus would no longer be competitive or sellable.


For a final sonic takeaway and because there's sufficient user commentary to make it relevant, I'll invoke Bruno Putzeys' nCore 1200 amps plus Laurence Dickie's Giya speakers. If you've heard a Mola Mola show demo with Vivid speakers, you have the general flavour or sonic school. If you've heard how a big nCore amp removes bass boom from big ported speakers because it asserts complete control over an underdamped alignment, you have previewed the Cygnus system's bass. One might even invoke a big full-range electrostat for equivalent seamless speed, intense transparency and minor coolness but would have to add greater dynamics. Lastly, with the Cygnus trio Christian Brückner previews what, for reasons already given, I think ought be the future of high-performance home audio speakers: purpose-designed 2.1 systems. That Cygnus Audio arrived at this realization prematurely and practices it merely demonstrates foresight. For its designer, it also shows sporting rebelliousness. He won't kowtow to prevailing wisdom aka market trends. He built what he believes is the most effective speaker solution for the ubiquitous issues of domestic situations. It gives the Johnny Cash salute to commercial considerations. In my book, he deserves applause just for the stiff finger. That it won't win him any popularity contests or big sales is his price to pay even though he deserves much better...
 

Cygnus Audio website