EgglestonWorks Andra III SE (Silver)

My primary motivation for wanting to review the EgglestonWorks Andra III loudspeaker was my positive experiences with the company’s entry-level floorstanding model, the Dianne. When I reviewed the Dianne last year, it retailed for $2500 USD per pair, and today costs a still very reasonable $3250. I was impressed with the Diannes’ ability to cast a mesmerizing soundstage while virtually disappearing from my room. It was one of the pleasant audio surprises of 2009.

What I hoped for from the Andra III was a speaker that built on the Dianne’s strengths — great soundstaging and imaging, and a convincing “disappearing” act — but with greater overall authority and bass extension, and even better resolution of fine detail. And at $23,500/pair, I thought, it had better deliver a lot more than the Dianne to be anywhere near as exciting as that reasonably priced model.

A classic renewed

EgglestonWorks’ Andra platform is a classic of high-end audio. In the late 1990s, the original Andra burst on the loudspeaker scene to win favorable reviews from many sources. Like such speakers as the B&W 801 before it, the Andra was a compact yet highly potent floorstander that followed a simple formula: a big, full-range sound from a pair of cabinets that wouldn’t dominate a listening room. Its striking sound, particularly with strings and acoustic instruments, made it impossible for the audiophile community to ignore.

The original Andra was built to the nines, and still is, as can be seen in my “Searching for the Extreme: Building the EgglestonWorks Andra III.” The basic form of the Andra III has changed little in the years since. It still uses Dynaudio’s 1” Esotar tweeter up top, two 6” Morel midrange drivers below that, and a pair of isobarically loaded 12” Dynaudio woofers on the bottom. That last feature requires some explanation: In isobaric loading (isobaric meaning “characterized by constant or equal pressure”), one woofer is mounted internally, directly behind and facing the back of an exposed forward-firing woofer. The idea, developed by Harry Olson in the 1950s, is not to produce greater output, as some may think, but other theoretical benefits: a lower resonant frequency than would be the case with a single drive-unit, promising lower bass without a larger cabinet; lower distortion due to ideal air-compression parameters in the front woofer’s operating chamber; greater sensitivity due to a halving of impedance (with a competent amplifier, the user should see a 3dB increase in sensitivity because the amplifier is doubling its power output into the load). The disadvantages are a doubling of cost for the woofers, and a more complex cabinet geometry. So consider the Andra III a three-way, ported design with a few twists.

At 46″H by 15″W by 18″D, the Andra’s basic shape remains relatively unchanged: The III is still fairly squat and raked back. Fellow reviewer Randall Smith, who helped me unpack the speakers and move them into my room, was amazed that the Andra III was so small. He’d seen the speaker’s weight — a stout 225 pounds — listed on the EgglestonWorks website, and had assumed we’d be moving a much larger speaker. Suffice it to say that the Andra III is a densely constructed speaker, but not huge in overall dimensions.

What has changed in the Andra III is important. The most obvious are the 6” Morel midrange drivers. The older drive-units had polypropylene cones; the new cones are of carbon fiber, for a greater ratio of stiffness to mass, with new motor structures that promise lower distortion. The midrange drivers are still run without a crossover, the intent being to keep crossover components out of the critical range of the human voice. The tweeter is now mounted on an aluminum skin attached to the front baffle, an arrangement that allows for better coupling of driver to baffle, and gives the speaker a cosmetic flair it previously lacked. The midranges and woofers are still mounted on the MDF baffles — in their case, the aluminum is purely cosmetic. The granite side panels of the Andras I and II have been replaced with panels of aluminum.

For biwiring, which is how I used them, the Andra IIIs come equipped with two sets of rhodium binding posts by Cardas. The standard finish is gray with natural aluminum side panels; other colors are available for an upcharge, including piano black with black-anodized aluminum hardware. Another change from the older Andras is that the finishes are now automotive-grade paints instead of gloss-black laminate. The grille is a sleek affair of fabric stretched over a thin metal frame that attaches to the speaker with magnets embedded in the cabinet’s front face.

EgglestonWorks rates the Andra III’s frequency response at 18Hz-24kHz, and its efficiency at 88dB. The impedance is said to be 8 ohms nominal, with a minimum of 6.3 ohms. The warranty is a generous six years for parts and labor.

Sound

It took me a weekend to get the Andra IIIs set up to my liking in my Music Vault listening room. I began by having them fill the footprints of the Dynaudio Focus 360s, which I review this month for SoundStage! In these spots, the back of each Andra was about 5’ from the wall behind it. The speakers ultimately ended up closer to the front wall — about 3’ away from it. These positions gave the Andras more boundary reinforcement in the bass, and something else as well. In fact, these speaker placements in my room are a recent revelation. Perhaps it’s because of the ample room treatments (five polycylindrical diffusers) I’ve affixed to the front wall, but now, setting speakers deeper into the corners of my room does absolutely nothing to diminish the soundstage depth, as conventional wisdom suggests it might. In fact, I’ve found that, in addition to the expected bass reinforcement, it makes for even wider soundstages. And that’s what happened with the Andra IIIs.

I began my listening as I had with the Dianne — with “Tall Trees in Georgia,” from Eva Cassidy’s Live at Blues Alley (CD, Blix Street 10046). The EgglestonWorks Diannes had captivated me with this track due to their amazing ability to create a deep soundstage in my room. Well, soundstaging turned out to be one of the Andra IIIs’ strong points as well. The larger speakers were able to re-create all the depth that the Diannes got so right, while also producing wall-to-wall width — some of the widest I’ve heard in my room.

The Andras’ bass response was able to fully energize my room so that the acoustic space — in the case of the Cassidy album, a jazz club — was even more palpable: I could literally feel the dimensions of the physical space. With the Diannes, I was able to only imagine it. This is a clear example of why low-bass capability isn’t just important for reproducing bass instruments. You need deep bass to pressurize a room, something that’s absolutely critical when playing live recordings because the acoustic signature of the venue, be it club or concert hall or opera house, has so often been captured on the recording. The Andra III did deep bass, if perhaps not quite down to EgglestonWorks’ specification of 18Hz. In my room, the Andra III was 3dB down at 20Hz, which is very respectable. The bass was more round than ultratight, though this might depend somewhat on the room in which it’s used.

The ability of the Andra IIIs to position images on the soundstage was impressive in its specificity: aural images of instruments and voices were precisely spaced and placed between room center and right speaker, and room center and left speaker. Performing “These Bones,” from I Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray (CD, Warner Bros. 46698), the singers of the Fairfield Four were positioned in a wide arc across the stage. In terms of dimension of soundstage, the Andra IIIs were as adept as any pair of speakers ever deposited in the Music Vault.

All audiophiles agree that the inability to reproduce voices correctly sounds the death knell for any loudspeaker. It’s surprising, then, that so many come up short in this regard. Although from the lowest lows to the highest highs the Andra III was not the most neutral speaker I’ve ever had in my room, it was exceptionally neutral where it mattered most: in the midband, the range of the human voice. There, I heard no tonal colorations with any of the music I listened to. Male singers such as the Fairfield Four sounded deep and resonant, as they should, with enough texture and body to each voice to create a believable sense of the person in the room.

The midrange wasn’t just good with vocals. Jim Brickman’s “Generations,” from Songs Without Words: A Windham Hill Collection (CD, Windham Hill 11212), was smooth and continuous — his acoustic piano was reproduced with excellent clarity and tonal neutrality. It wasn’t ultradetailed or spotlit at any particular frequency that I could detect, but it was simply beautiful in the naturalness of its sound.

The upper frequencies were mildly subdued in my room, lacking that last iota of energy and crispness that many of today’s speakers possess. I didn’t consider this a liability in my listening, as the effect was just a slight bit of warmth in the highs. The Andra III reproduced most of the high-frequency detail in recordings, blatantly omitting nothing, but from about 8kHz up the highs were recessed by just a couple of dB. This voicing was a conscious choice, I think, made to create a loudspeaker that will sound good with most recordings — especially those balanced to be a bit hot on the top end. My listening notes indicate that the Andra III allowed me to enjoy a number of albums that would be less listenable through many other speakers I’ve heard. Pop and rock recordings from the likes of Audioslave to country from Lee Ann Womack sounded fuller and less grating than they have through speakers with more energy higher in the audioband.

To sum up the Andra III in a phrase, it was wholly listenable. The Andra III didn’t sound like a product designed to win awards for technical precision; it sounded like a speaker that music lovers can kick back with and enjoy over the long haul. I found I could listen to my best recordings and get a healthy dose of overall high fidelity, along with extension at the frequency extremes, but that I could also enjoy most any album, regardless of engineering pedigree. The midrange was the most neutral aspect of the Andra III’s sound, and with good recordings, that’s where it shone. When I put on something recorded by David Chesky or the folks at 2L, I heard a palpable, richly figured midband that delivered the magic we all want to experience from our audio systems.

What also set the Andra III apart from other systems I’ve recently heard in my room was its ability to throw a magnificent soundstage. Some folks over the years have dismissed this trait when compared with such significant areas of sound reproduction as tonality and dynamic range, but when I heard the Andra IIIs cast a soundstage that gave me the breadth and scale of a live performance in my listening room, I just couldn’t ignore how simply enjoyable that experience is. I’m not really sure what in the speaker’s design accounts for this ability, but I sure did appreciate it in the listening.

Should you buy them?

Investing in a pair of EgglestonWorks Andra III loudspeakers is no inconsiderable proposition: $23,500 is a lot of money, and in any economic environment, let alone the current one, the plunking down of such a sum on a luxury item should be carefully considered. I’d be remiss if I didn’t remind you of what I wrote in March, in “How Close Can I Get for Half the Price or Less?”: You can get truly stupendous sound for a lot less money than you’d spend on a pair of Andra IIIs — sound that, in many areas, will easily compete with them.

What you won’t get is precisely the sound that EgglestonWorks has designed into the Andra III: that massive soundstage, or the neutral midband bookended by sweet highs and extended, well-integrated lows, or what it’s all housed in — a dense cabinet that’s relatively compact and beautifully built. The Andra has been so successful for so many years not because of what it doesn’t do, but because of what it does so well, and the third iteration of this classic design brought me tons of enjoyment in the two months I spent with it. Putting a price on that isn’t so easy, but I figure it amounts to . . . oh, about $23,500/pair.

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Bill Eggleston builds speakers because his father did. “My dad always told me that when he started, the only way you could get really good speakers was to build them yourself. We always had drivers and parts around, and I just began building my own so early I can’t even remember. Much more important, my father passed on his wide-ranging approach to music. He listened to everything, and he taught me to be open-minded about music.”

You could call the EgglestonWorks Andra loudspeaker Bill’s love-letter to his dad. Maybe even to the whole family—the name honors Eggleston’s sister. Recently, this $15,000/pair compact speaker system has been garnering a lot of praise from the press and, judging from the response at HI-FI ’97, the public as well. The word is out: The Andra is no longer a family secret.

The child is father to the man
EgglestonWorks was incorporated in 1992. Before that, Bill pursued speaker building as a hobby while he restored houses in Memphis, among other things. His decision to manufacture loudspeakers was based on his lifelong observation of the impact his father’s hobby had on the household. “It seemed like there was always a war between having a pile of equipment in the living-room and having a neat, normal room, so I thought there might be a market for loudspeakers with fine furniture cabinetry—we had a model called the Heppelwhite, for instance. They weren’t that well received by the industry, but a few people liked them when we showed them at a WCES. That’s where I first met Peter [McGrath, now Bill’s associate in EgglestonWorks].

“We learned a lot building those speakers. I used the same Morel midrange driver I voiced the Andra around, and I learned to never subcontract important elements such as the cabinetwork. The only way to maintain strict quality control is to build them in-house.”

Eggleston embarked upon an ambitious project: to design a loudspeaker without constraint. “Actually, we had one constraint. The speaker was designed to be as small as possible, physically. It’s very, very important to make the speakers as unobtrusive as possible. We weren’t trying to make a design statement—we wanted a speaker that would fade out of your consciousness, leaving you free to concentrate on the music.”

I’m not entirely sure he succeeded. The speakers are compact, but I find them striking. They have slender baffles that flare slightly to just over 15″ wide at the base, in order to accommodate the 12″ woofers. This gives the Andra a wide-shouldered, slightly anthropomorphic mien—somewhat reminiscent of the icons that danced across the bottom of the screen in Space Invaders. Front, sides, and rear of the cabinet are finished in a seriously glossy black acrylic coating that seems to draw the light into it rather than throw it back. Above the “shoulders” and beneath the cambered top, the side panels are covered in 1¼” slabs of Italian granite whose speckled surface serves as a subtle contrast to the piano finish.

Grilles are provided, but Eggleston expects most of his customers will decline to use them. The grilles are well designed and are even nice-looking—no extruded foam air-conditioner filters on the fronts of these babies! The grilles are stretched across steel frames; magnets buried beneath the laminate support the grille in use. This means that the baffle’s finish remains unsullied by mounting hardware or Velcro strips—which may encourage even more Andra owners to play their speakers nude.

Overall, the Andra has a squat form-follows-function, no-nonsense appearance, combined with an understated elegance. Does it disappear into a room? Not hardly. But, I hasten to add, neither does it dominate its environment. I’d count that a success.

But don’t assume for a moment that the cabinet is all glamor. This is one seriously solid speaker box. Assembly begins when two 4′ by 8′, 5/8″-thick sheets of MDF are hand-laminated together using a viscoelastic-damping industrial adhesive called Swedac. Swedac has a measured effect upon the absorption of vibration—Eggleston claims a solid 1.25″ sheet of MDF has merely 1/10 the vibration loss of the two laminated sheets incorporating the adhesive. The laminated MDF is then milled on CNC machinery before the hand joinery commences. This, Eggleston points out, allows the company to set tolerances to within several thousandths of an inch. Driver chambers are connected using dado, rabbet, and biscuit joinery for great rigidity, with screws reinforcing the joints every 2″.

Laminating the acrylic finish to the cabinet adds another 1/8″ of thickness to each wall, as well as another layer of dissimilar material for control of resonances. The granite, mitered to a “knife”-edge to minimize sidewall diffraction, attaches to what Eggleston refers to as “the upper torso” of the cabinet. Two different adhesive compounds are used, these chosen to combine strength and dissimilar resonant characteristics.

After the cabinet is assembled, T-nuts are driven through its base. These attach to plastic cups that serve as feet. Milled cones fit into the cups, so that once the speaker is properly placed, it can be spiked firmly to the floor.

Final finish involves the 12-step polishing process that gives the Andra its deep luster.

A wise son maketh a glad father
The Andra is such a completely personal design statement that it would be futile to try to describe it using the typically reductive drivers/loading/crossover model. Better to eavesdrop on its designer as he muses upon its evolution and construction . . .

“My father taught me that if the midrange isn’t right, the speaker isn’t right; so our first decision in designing the Andra was the choice of the midrange driver—everything evolves from that. It’s a custom version of a 6″ polypropylene midbass driver from Morel that incorporates a 3” voice-coil and a double-center magnet.

“I first heard an early version of this driver about 15 years ago, when my father designed a speaker that used four of them. That speaker had about the best midrange I’d ever heard. From that point on, pretty much everything I designed utilized one incarnation or another of this driver.

“Its strengths are threefold. Because it uses a 6″ cone and a 3” coil, all the motive force is coming from a point equidistant from the center and the circumference of the cone. This balance results in a more pistonlike action with great rigidity.

“It uses a very large winding out of heavier-gauge wire than would be used in a smaller coil. Obviously, this makes for a stronger motor and, assuming you have the right current, much greater control—greater ability to stop the cone from moving in the opposite direction. The stronger the motor, the more control you have over the extremes of excursion.

“And because the coil’s so big, it can handle extremely high current output. Without that, we’d never be able to connect 6″ drivers directly to the output of a power amplifier. Not even two of them—our use of two 6″ drivers for the midrange was integral to achieving the midrange characteristics I demanded. I find that most speakers can clip on raucous solo piano if they use a single 6″ speaker. I wanted no limit on the dynamic capabilities of the midrange, so I knew I needed to use two drivers.”

But just because Eggleston knew in advance which driver he was going to employ, don’t assume that amounted to a design shortcut. “Once we’d chosen that driver, we spent nine months just developing the crossover and the midrange loading. I didn’t even look at woofers or tweeters until I had assured myself that I was getting everything out of the midrange that I could.

“The simplest, purest, most uncolored approach is free-air. Any dynamic speaker with a cabinet has to manipulate the back-wave. In a sealed-box design, you’re tuning against a certain air-pressure to obtain a certain response characteristic. In a vented-box, you employ tuning to eliminate certain resonances. The only box where you have the same air pressure behind the driver as in front is the transmission line. In a transmission-line design, the line is equal to a quarter-wavelength of the resonant frequency of the driver. Usually you wrap the line so that the output comes out the front, in-phase with the output of the driver, which reinforces the bass output of the driver. We weren’t interested in this characteristic—all we wanted was a free-air characteristic. And we didn’t have room for two 5′ transmission lines in the small cabinet we intended to build.

“So I re-evaluated the whole approach to transmission lines. I worked with the guy who subcontracts our stuffing material and we came up with “Acousta-Stuff,” a polyester strand which is crimped every millimeter. This makes each strand a complex shape, capable of providing greater diffraction to the soundwaves traveling through it. The strands interlock, so it won’t settle at all, either. This material seems to slow lower frequencies while attenuating the HFs. After a ton of trial-and-error experiments, I determined the equation of cabinet length to stuffing weight we needed for a quasi-transmission-line loading. I’m not aware of any other speaker that shares this loading system.”

After all the work that went into the midrange, you’d be forgiven for thinking things would get easier. You’d be half-right. “I was familiar with the [Dynaudio] Esotar tweeter and I wanted to use it. The Esotar has its own aperiodic damping chamber. It has the biggest vent on its pole-piece I’ve ever seen on a tweeter—with that vent and its large chamber, the tweeter doesn’t see any back air-pressure to speak of, so it fit readily into my driver philosophy. The tweeter’s crossover is as simple as could be, consisting of one MIT capacitor and two Vishay resistors and an L-pad. The tweeter crossover is mounted in its own separate chamber directly behind the tweeter in the cabinet.”

But arriving at a bass response that matched the free-air characteristic of the other drivers was no easy task. Finally, Eggleston settled on using two 12″ Dynaudio drivers in a configuration he dubbed “pressure-driven.” There are two parallel chambers, with one 12″ driver mounted in front of the other. The inner driver, which is in a heavily ported box, acts as a servo behind the outer driver—when the outer driver moves back, it doesn’t have to compress the air in the cabinet because the inner driver moves in concert with it. The driver, even though its enclosure is sealed, gets the benefits of free-air-like operation (footnote 1).

The woofer’s crossover consists of a heavy-gauge inductor in series with the two drivers, and there’s also an RLC network in parallel with the drivers. Like any loudspeaker, the Andra has a resonance peak that manifests itself electrically as impedance magnitude. The RLC network serves as a nullifying circuit, cancelling the cabinet tuning so that the 6dB per octave crossover can do its job.

“It’s funny,” Eggleston commented, “but while 90% of the Andra’s midrange tuning was done by ear, 90% of the woofer tuning was done with nearfield measurement. Bass is so room-dependent that the only way you can standardize performance is through measurement.”

Eggleston’s crossover is certainly unusual—the midrange drivers are run full-range, while the networks on the woofer and tweeter are vestigial. This makes it somewhat difficult to specify the precise crossover points. “Actually,” Eggleston explained, “there’s quite a bit of overlap. The rolloff on the high end of the midrange is very, very gradual—it begins around 3500Hz. The crossover point to the tweeter is about 3000Hz. We could make it tighter, but every time we’ve tried that we’ve compromised airiness and openness. The woofers run totally flat from about 20Hz up to 120Hz. The midrange is active from about 55-60Hz and up. Again, there’s overlap, but we chose to do it this way for musical reasons—and after a lot of listening. This configuration is almost like an active system. Certainly on the midrange, you’re connected straight into the amplifier.”

Yet he remains modest about his unique design philosophy: “We haven’t made any technological breakthroughs. All we’ve done is put together a speaker the best way I can think of. I want to strike an emotional chord with this speaker—that’s it, basically.”

A son faithful and true
Bill Eggleston has certainly struck an emotional chord with this listener. Let me just come out and say it: I love the Andra. Of all the speakers I’ve had in my current listening room, none has sounded better over a wide range of musical material.

To begin with, it played loud. I don’t know if this is important to you. Hell, I didn’t even know it was important to me until I began listening to Peter McGrath’s wonderful four-channel digital recordings using EgglestonWorks’ smaller Rosas as rear-channel speakers. You see, Peter likes to play stuff loud. Really LOUD. He claims he’s merely listening at a realistic playback level, but I think he’s trying to achieve that sense of there being no dynamic limit that is implicit in live music-making and almost completely lacking in reproduced music.

Playing the Andras at high volume did give me some of that exciting U-R-There sensation, but unlike a lot of loudspeakers, I didn’t have to crank ’em to get the music out of ’em. In fact, the Andras reminded me of the Quad ESL-63 in that I was required to attempt to match the output of the speaker to what an instrument or band would produce live, or ruin the sense of reality. Is this a glitch or a feature?

Neither, really. I think it’s a sign of how uncolored the speaker was. An acoustic guitar recording such as Enrique Coria’s Latin Touch (Acoustic Disc ACD-23), played at a realistic volume, sounded amazingly like an acoustic guitar playing in a real space. But when I played it significantly louder than an acoustic guitar, it started to sound out of kilter—overtones were no longer in proportion to fundamentals, and the instrument took on an aggressive character.

You might be tempted to assume that the speaker got hard at high volumes, but a rock recording, such as Warren Haynes’ searing cover of “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” from The Memphis Horns (Telarc CD-83344), simply has to be played louder to sound real. But outside of that envelope of loudness that might be considered accurate, this recording too lost life if played too softly; or ease, if played really offensively loudly.

However, when I matched the output to a believable re-creation of the original event, I could begin to appreciate the results of Eggleston’s midrange obsession. To quote Goldilocks, it was “juuuuust right.” Acoustic instruments such as Coria’s guitar, Rostropovich’s cello (Bach’s Cello Suites, EMI ZDCB 55370 2), or John Coltrane’s tenor sax (Lush Life, DCC GZS-1108) were reproduced with an immediacy and coherence that I’ve seldom heard from any speaker. Could this have been because almost all of an instrument’s range was being reproduced by the same driver? I don’t know for sure, but how could it have hurt?

If you love piano, you simply have to hear your favorite keyboard discs on the Andra. This shouldn’t have surprised me—once again, Bill Eggleston’s father was responsible. “My father always said you had to use the sound of the piano as the final arbiter of tonal accuracy. He was a really good pianist, and I play some too, but we always had a lot of piano music in our house, and that’s what I use to evaluate a speaker.”

When Duke Ellington’s alter-ego, close friend, and lifelong collaborator Billy Strayhorn died in 1967, Ellington paid tribute to their friendship with the album And His Mother Called Him Bill (French RCA NL 89166, LP). Closing the album, Ellington played “Lotus Blossom” as a piano solo. “Lotus Blossom” is a waltz, here played with elegant sorrow, but lifted also by that sense of grace always present in first-tier Ellington. The piano sound is muted, but rich, vibrant, and large as life. I’ve heard this song hundreds of times—through the Andras, it was my first time all over again.

If you value bass heft and swing, these speakers will seduce you with their rump-thump. When an orchestral bass section really dug in, as the NYP’s does in the final movement of Mahler’s Third under Bernstein (DG 427 328-2), it had an impact and organic solidity that very few speakers I’ve heard can match. In fact, after years of listening to the disc, I heard something I’ve never noticed on it before:

I used to attend Avery Fisher Hall regularly, the way a sports fan supports the home team. (I think of the Mehta years as a long slump—I’d go mostly in the hopes that my team wasn’t going to embarrass themselves.) In Fisher, you can hear the stage floorboards flex in a deep moan that you’d feel more than hear. I was never able to predict when it would happen, but some nights it could startle you out of your chair, while other nights you’d never hear it at all. It happens during the Ruhevoll near the end of the disc, and it transported me back to New York most evocatively.

The Andra’s Esotar tweeter was no slouch when it came to producing strong, pure highs either, as Phil Smith’s posthorn solo clearly revealed in the Mahler. It was so filled with atmosphere, so bright and clean, that it almost belied the force with which it punched through the orchestral texture.

No love to a father’s
But it would be wrong to dismiss the Andra as the latest contender in the accuracy-at-any-price sweepstakes. As uncolored as it sounds, that wasn’t the only trump it had to play. The speaker was incredibly sensitive to dynamic nuance as well. Its sensitivity to tonal shading and color was matched by its ability to re-create even the most subtle variations in loudness. We usually think of dynamic change as manifesting itself sequentially, as in crescendos or diminuendos. In fact, it goes on constantly, as in the balance between the notes in a chord, or of instruments and voices in combination. The Andra clearly revealed the constant balance being achieved during, or rather that went into creating, the musical flow. This was revelatory in a very different way from the usual “analytic” accuracy that garners most of our attention, and it went a long way toward putting flesh and blood onto the skeleton of the score.

Perhaps it also accounts for what I consider to be the speaker’s greatest strength: its ability to make me experience music as communication of complex emotional information. Let’s face it, we hear music as tones in time, but that’s not why we love music. We love music because it connects us to a place within ourselves where we know beyond knowing, where we experience things directly that we cannot otherwise experience. It is the communication of one soul directly to another—to many others—and it releases us from the tyranny of conscious thought. Yet we discuss music reproduction as though all of that is reducible to frequency response and crossover points.

I can’t point to the place on JA’s charts that will show you where the Andra’s ability to communicate the emotional portion of a performance lies, but when I listened to Duke Ellington play “Lotus Blossom,” I didn’t just hear a real-sounding piano—I heard Duke wondering how to reconstruct a life that didn’t have Billy Strayhorn in it any more.

I can point to the descending motif in Mahler’s Third that symbolizes sobbing, but that doesn’t explain why we hear those sobs as so heartfelt. But through the EgglestonWorks I experienced them as though they were torn from my own chest. I could go on all night with other examples culled from my audition.

It figures. I asked Bill Eggleston what his design brief was when he conceived this speaker. He thought for a minute, then quietly said, “I get this from my father, but I believe that there is no greater joy than discovering new music, and then coming home and listening to it in the most emotionally evocative way possible. Passion has always been my driving force—to give the life and breath of music over to the listener.”

Mission most definitely accomplished.

Patris est filius
I’m besotted by the EgglestonWorks Andra. It is an ambitious speaker, and it succeeds brilliantly at reproducing music’s sound, fury, and ineffable spirit. I’ve seldom heard its equal when it comes to conveying the pure tonal range or the magnificent dynamics of a recorded performance. But beyond that, I can think of no speaker I’ve heard that gets nearer to the emotional nub of a performance. Dismiss this last as quasi-mystical mumbo-jumbo at your peril—music is far greater than the nuts and bolts that define it. As superb as the Andra is at presenting those nuts and bolts, it’s even better at portraying the greater truth of music’s magic and wonder.

There is no question that the Andra belongs in Class A of Stereophile‘s Full-Range Loudspeaker category of “Recommended Components.” In fact, I’m requesting that we purchase this pair to use as a long-term reference.

There’s an inscription incised in the wall of the Loyd-Paxton Gallery in Dallas: “love instilled into solid materials by loving craftsmanship is the only creation of mankind to defeat time.” That sounds about right—and “love instilled into solid materials by loving craftsmanship” seems like a better description of the Andra than any I could come up with.

Bill Eggleston’s father ought to feel mighty proud of himself.