Elac's Adante could be the only hi-fi speaker you ever need, at CES 2017

At CES last year, out of the dozens of products I saw at the show, the one thing that blew me away was the Elac Uni-Fi UF5. It's a crazy-good $500 bookshelf speaker that easily worries models three times its price. It's my favorite speaker of 2016.

When I heard that Elac of America's Andrew Jones had designed a new set of "cost no object" speakers as a follow-up I was intrigued. Given his alliance with Elac in Germany, would he be incorporating some of its designs? A super tweeter? Or a concentric driver with a ribbon tweeter?

The resulting Adante, which the inventor demonstrated here at CES 2017, wasn't some sort of compromise between the two divisions, this was steadfastly an Andrew Jones speaker. And of course it borrowed from Jones' extensive history in the audio trade.

he Adante range has three speakers: the $2,500 stand mount, the $2,000 AC-61GV center speaker, and a $5,000 AF-61GW floorstander. All will be shipping in the US in the second quarter of 2017.

Firstly, the finish of the speakers is like nothing we've seen from Elac America before. Aesthetically it brings to mind the work Jones did with TAD, specifically the Compact Evolution One. The unit Jones demonstrated here in Vegas had a brushed aluminum faceplate with aluminum drivers, and while the cabinet was finished in gloss black, the final version will also be available in gloss white or walnut.

One thing you notice when you look at the cabinet is there aren't any ports, just a pair of binding posts on the back. In addition to the concentric/midrange tweeter setup the bass woofer is actually a pretty ingenious system of drivers (which Jones says he borrowed from Kef). He's put a traditional 6-inch driver inside a ported box, and then tucked that inside the closed speaker cabinet. This system then drives an 8-inch passive driver on the outside. Translation? Smoother, more extended bass and better efficiency.

The demonstration units differ from the final design, which was also on display but not auditioned, as he said he had been tossing up between using titanium and aluminum for the drivers. The final design will be the contrasting titanium. Jones says the speaker he demonstrated is about 70 to 80 per cent of where it should be in terms of performance.

Listening to the Adante speakers reminded me of the Uni-Fis that had made me grin so uncontrollably the year before. The Adante has the same effortless imaging, voices are incredibly present and yet it has an even broader soundstage than before. And, the one thing Uni-Fi had missing: that bass!

I was a big fan of the Bowers and Wilkins 805 D3, and CNET's Audiophiliac even more so. It is a crazily transparent speaker, and it breathes life into quality recordings. What it can't do is bass. While the Adante didn't seem as transparent -- though I am dying to hear them against each other -- it could do deep bass. The gentle synth "BOM" in the middle of "Yulunga" by Dead Can Dance shook the Elac listening room. I haven't heard another stand mount speaker that sounds like this.