Friday, January 16, 2015

Review - Courbe Elle High End Handmade Solid Wood 2Way Loud Speaker with Stand


Why do people make audios? There are common things between owners of numbers of audio producing companies and designers. They like music and naturally get interested in audios then make audios to get their own sound. There are 3 steps to get to make audios.

Certainly, some people get another occupation on the way like they get to work in professional sound area instead of hi-fi. This is the typical way to eventually make consumer products.


Courbe which is recently attracting public attentions is the similar case. Mr. Park, Seongje, the owner of this company, has been interested in music since he was young and purchased turn table and amplifier for the first time when he was a university student. After getting a job, he kept investing most of his salary in replacing sound equipment. So to speak, he spent a lot of time in step 1 and 2. Especially, he was interested in speaker so he purchased 50 kinds of speaker over 20 years. If you keep listening to music at home in this way, it might eventually make you a master.



In 2006, he happened to know one person who was doing DIY in Daejeon. He ordered the speaker which applied Accuton unit for fun but its sound was unexpectedly outstanding. Its quality of sound was almost the same as original one but with only one tenth of the price. It was pleasant surprise to Mr. Park since he had been using only famous labels and it made him think of making one for himself. In other words, he finally got to step 3.

Maybe he was fortunate or maybe not, he left his company and naturally had more spare time. At this point, his idea fermented inside his head started to wriggle which was to apply different theories pursued by many speaker makers. It is the sound which is purely made by driver with removing resonance as much as possible. He put lots of thoughts on removing all disturbances to speaker such as noise or resonance.

Finally, he came up with this idea to divide drivers by range and make cylinder shaped encloser for each driver then connect them. This is how beginning was made and he held a small recital to introduce it to speaker lovers. The recital was successful with total of 60 participants. Two orders for set were made at the recital and he decided to officially start up a small company.


Of course, Mr. Park didn’t do all the designs for newly introduced products. He was introduced to professional engineer and actualized his dream with the engineer’s help. You can say he put his passions built up inside to the product to have the balance and quality which are acceptable to everybody.


Let’s look at the meaning of company name “Courbe”. In Korean, it has the same pronunciation as French painter Courbet but it is spelled differently. Actually he was looking for the same meaning “curve” in different language and finally found “couved” in French. That is how the name “Courbe” was made. It means “curved” and it suits the design policy so you can say the name fits perfectly to his company.


Encloser was made of pure hardwood instead of MDF or HDF which is more common. MDF or HDF is made by mixing chemical with sawdust to improve strength. Pure hardwood is strong as it is but it is hard to change its shape. But he chose pure hardwood for several reasons. 


Firstly, you can use its natural wood grain instead of attaching veneer to it. You can get natural beauty by doing this.

Secondly, he chose to use birch because it is used to make musical instruments along with maple tree. It has natural resonance as musical instrument so it is loved by the company seeking for this kind of encloser. For example, Sonus Faber uses it for part of its products and PenAudio uses it for making entire cabinet.

However, making process is extremely difficult. You need to use Finnish hardwood to get the best quality. Then you make it into a ring shape and stack them. You need to attach it one by one and press them for a day to get a stable shape.


After that, you need to smooth the surface but it is not doable with machine as it is a round shape which means you need to do it by using hands. Then, you need to paint English furniture oil over it for several times. You need to paint furniture oil and leave it dry for a day then paint it over. You can get a rich color and it will become highly resistant to outside humidity and temperature in this way.

It’s not finished here. Natural varnish is used at the last step. It is to give a shine and high quality varnish for furniture is used.


Because they put this much efforts on making enclosers, you don’t have to worry about wood grain being curved or damaged. You can have my words on this. 


Let’s find out the structure of driver. Advanced Courbe looks like it takes 3-way but actually it takes 2.5-way. Technically, they just add a woofer to it after improving entire part of mid-range. Tweeter and mid are from Norwegian brand SEAS. He picked the mid from one of XL series made by the same company because of its importance.

However, he used the woofer made by American company called Dayton. He had originally picked one from SEAS but it was way too expensive and it didn’t even make much difference as it was just an addition according to his design. Recently released product called Elle is designed without a woofer but it just works fine. It is because of the fact that the real concept of Croube is to be completed with 2-way. Junior and Snowman are on the same line in terms of 2-way concept. If you have a reasonably small listening room without being obsessed with low range, you can enjoy the original sound of Croube with this equipment.



However, arranging these round shaped units horizontally can cause a phase issue. The arrangement was not precisely suggested by the company but you can push tweeter part slightly to inside of mid-base part because the deviation is not different so much. One electronic company performed actual measurement for this. If you are a very sensitive person, you can adjust the arrangement by yourself. Companies like Wilson Audio or Ascendo also strongly recommend it.


To test the sound of this equipment, we used pre and power made by Krell and also utilized phantom and 402e. In addition, K-01 by Esoteric was used together with clock generator, G-02.


was the first song which was composed by Sarasate and played by Anne Sophie Mutter. In the beginning of the song, orchestra made quite an entrance then vivid sound of violin was joined. You can feel that power and technique of Mutter which were their highest points when the song was recorded. Sound was reasonably deep and had a consistency in the points of strong sound and gentle sound. Speaker can take the highest note of sound without problems. In overall, combination of 2 units was very good so it felt like the sound was coming from one unit.



Next song was third movement of composed by Dvorak and played by Boaux Arts Trio. It started with simple piano playing which is quite tantalizing. Then combination of violin and cello made their entrance which is very attractive. Especially, deep and long sound of cello from high quality low range was very pleasant. Generally, the sound was very sophisticated and sound of each instrument was accurate. The strongest attraction of this equipment was its strong and deep mid-range.


Next song was sung by Jewel. It started with clear accompaniment of acoustic guitar. The echo of guitar playing sounded very nice and you can obviously feel the strong strumming. Then it was vocal’s turn to join the music. Jewel’s twangy voice sounded very attractive. It started with gentle sound and got gradually stronger. You can hear the beautiful backup sound of piano and natural sound of drum beating the floor. It was a very clearly and sensitively tuned sound. 



Last song was by Wishbone Ash. It started with acoustic guitar playing then drum, base, piano and organ were joined in an orderly manner. The content of the song was quite complicated but it sounded just fine. You can imagine pleasantly waving shape while listening to the rhythm of sound. Regarding vocal, it was slightly high tone of voice which expressed deep sorrow but not in an exaggerated way. You will be sucked inside of the music. It was 2-way design and technically low-range was stopped at 40Hz but it sounds perfectly when you listen to classic or rock. You can feel the strong professionalism of designer at this point. 

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