PATHOS Frontiers Prime

The Frontiers Prime are bipolar speakers. Let me spend few words on it as people often mistaken bipoles with dipoles. Both concepts do have transducers firing both to the front (towards a listener) and to the rear (towards a wall). Both concepts share the same idea – in real conditions music instruments are not directional in how they radiate a sound. Pianos, violins, guitars, saxophones or drums have omni or semi directional characteristics and the resulting harmonies of their sound are quite complex structures of both the direct and reflected sounds. The reflections are not harmful, rather complementar to the final experience. Unlike this, the home audio is based on directivity with focus on damping any but the direct sound. That is also why our HiFi can never compete with a live performance: reverbs are not only the part of the interaction of a speaker and a room but they double with (usually different) reverbs that are already encoded on a recording. Idea of suppressing anything apart from the direct sound is therefore basically right because we already have the ambience recorded on the media. It is not that simple, though. The human ear likes deception so through the concepts of multidirectional radiation, if done cleverly, we can significantly enhance our listening enjoyment.

Typical dipole speakers (often planar speakers) does have front and back radiation out of phase, meaning that when the front radiators move forward, the back radiators move backward. The parallel movements yield a significant issue – generated sound waves are of an inverted amplitude and are cancelling at the sides of a speaker resulting in a drop of efficiency especially at low frequencies. The bipolar speaker´s cones are moving out on both sides of the speakers so there is no cancellation. The Pathos Frontiers go a bit further with few interesting tweaks that I will be discussing in a minute.

The Pathos Frontiers Prime´s are big enough to be respected and elegant enough to be livable with. The baffle is 137cm tall and the base measures 33x68cm. Into the spiked base there are three (!) sets of speaker terminals integrated to wire all the three modules separately.

The Frontiers Prime are an assembly of 3 dedicated modules. The bass compartment hosts two 210mm woofers with in-house developed cones plus doubled front-firing reflex port. The mid-woofer and tweeter compartment takes from the bass at 200Hz (4000Hz respectively) with 165mm mid-woofer and neodymium tweeter) and radiates into the back of the speaker, on top of that not horizontally but in an upward firing angled plane. The same set (mid-woofer plus tweeter) is used for front radiation and is housed in a module that can be rotated horizontally. By toeing in and out the module a listener can adjust upper frequencies to his or her taste or to number of listeners.

The front baffle of the speaker is matt black, the rest of the Frontiers Prime cabinet is either white gloss or rosewood or cherry. On paper the Pathos speakers are specified as 8-ohm speakers with 92dB sensitivity, covering 27Hz to 30.000Hz. I see no reason why they should not be partnered with any stable amplifier, valve triodes inclusive.