SILENT LABORATORIES Melodee
Floorstanding loudspeakers
Uncompromising in every detail. The slogan of the Czech manufacturer is not just an empty phrase, as we are used to with many high-end brands. Here, attention has been paid to everything - the selection of the transducers, the design of the cabinets, the design of the crossovers, the selecyion of the crossover parts, and even the wiring used to connect everything. I would say Melodee received care that was almost disproportionate for their price category. Has it paid off?
Function and form
I'll answer right away: It is audible, and the Melodee loudspeakers manifest themselves in three areas that, to my ears, define what high-fidelity is all about: (a) you enjoy listening to your favourite music through the speakers, (b) you can listen to them all day long without fatigue, and (c) the sound seems not to come from the speakers. In the case of Silent Laboratories Melodee, all of this is nicely heard on Muller's live version of Srdce jako kníže Rohan, which is a sort of showcase for big band instrumentation and vocals, and which can make the reproduction system quite a pain. Moreover, it's a live recording with a minimum of studio wizardry, so it has a certain immediacy and dynamic rawness. I probably can't count the number of times I've heard it on different occasions, but it's exactly the kind of material where after a few minutes of enthusiasm I usually start to get a bit annoyed. System by system, the sound usually features various colorations, heard mostly on the vocals, accented sibilants, bass inconsistencies, matte brass sound, various frequency disproportions, or it just sounds too muffled or too bright and thin. Very rarely the track is just right. With Silent Laboratories, it sounded just right, and the speakers didn't really care how far in its travel the volume knob was turned up.
Bass management
At this place, I won’t spend time explaining who Silent Laboratories are and how they work - I described their ultimate approach in the TAD Revolution One series. There I mentioned that, apart from custom projects, they also had a couple of ‘stock’ models. The Melodee is the bigger one of them.
The Melodees are 56kg each, 2.5-way design, and are running on ScanSpeak drivers. Their two 18cm woofers use paper cones, aluminum baskets, and neodymium magnets. The manufacturer claims superb linearity of their excursion and minimal reflections of sound waves from the motor structures back to the cones. The silk-domed Ellipticor tweeter has elliptical footprint, where the larger of diameters has 38mm. It works into its own hermetically sealed chamber to achieve less harmonic distortion, faster transient response (up to 30kHz) and higher sensitivity. Similarly, the speaker’s crossover is isolated in its own hermetically sealed chamber too. Silent Laboratories are using their own software to optimize it in a similar way like YG Acoustics does with their dual-coherent topologies. The crossover parts are of the quality that most so-called high-end speakers can only dream of: pure copper foil (2mm) wax coils from Jantzen, non-induction resistors from Mundorf, capacitors from Duelund and Jantzen, no PCBs, elastically decoupled from the mounting base, soldered component-to-component with silver solder. The crossover connects to the drivers with Krautwire solid core silver/copper fractal geometry wires covered in Teflon. The cable runs to the tweeter are physically separated from the cable runs to the woofers to eliminate any cross-contamination.
Clarity & delicacy
The base of the cabinets is a plywood composite. It is not assembled from boards, but from individual milled ribs that are glued and pegged together (there are several hundred of the pegs in each cabinet) in a high pressure press. The front baffle is 44mm thick (!), the side walls are about 30mm thick. The cabinets have no parallel surfaces and, together with strategically placed internal bracing, form a monolithic unit that, when varnished with 20 layers of automotive coating, in terms of resonances feels like Wilson Audio composites. A pair of bass-reflex ports is recessed into the rear section of the cabinet. The shape and curvature of the ports is based on computer simulation of airflow dynamics. The ports are 3D printed and doubling them proved to be a better solution (vs one port only) in terms of the structural strength of the cabinet.
With the height of 113cm (119cm with feet), the width of 35cm and the depth of 52cm, the Melodee is reasonably dimensioned speaker for any common living space. Especially the height at which the tweeter is placed makes aligning with listener´s ears much easier is smaller and mid-sized rooms. This is not to say these are speakers for small rooms – read further.
The Melodee is offered in an unusually wide range of paint finishes, so it shouldn't be a problem to accommodate preferences of even the most discerning partner. There's still the option of a bespoke finish if required. The cabinets are stabilized by a solid metal base ready to accept spikes or feet. The manufacturer had the Melodee tuned with IsoAcoustics Gaia I; I tried them with Stillpoints Ultra 6. Both worked great, each providing a slightly different voicing. The speakers are not bi-wireable and they use top WBT Nextgen terminals.
Tonal accuracy
Everyone likes loudspeakers that know how to throw a big and spacious soundstage within which the instruments and voices can be located with high precision. But this is not an easy goal to achieve, especially if the speakers should disappear from your auditory vision. Each single parameter in how the loudspeakers is designed plays a role in it and, of course, the listening space acoustics too. Phase relationships between the drivers and phase relationships between the two speakers in the stereo triangle are crucial here; the drivers must be perfectly aligned so must be the speakers. The 2.5-way design of the Melodee represented a challenge as all three drivers meet at 2450Hz, which is the area where human ear is very sensitive for imperfections. I know that because I was a guinea pig during the voicing phase of the Melodee, as well as I started to understand how important this area was in my own TAD Revolution One project. The mission has been accomplished, and the Melodee throw super stable and precise images with superb 3D rendering, including the vertical axis. At the same time, the sweet spot of the Melodee is comfortably wide so I do not sit frozen in the central spot and still can enjoy the natural soundstage.
As mentioned, the fact that the Melodee is 2.5-way and that it is not big may lead to a conclusion that this is a speaker for small to mid-sized rooms. It sort of is, because placing a big speaker in a small room is not the best idea. However, the Silent Laboratories Melodee work great in any room. In fact I listened to them in quite a large listening space and the Melodee could fill it with the same ease as big semi-active Legacy Audio Whisper XDS, and with more authority then Perlisten S7t did (the Perlisten uses 18cm woofers too and are taller by 20 centimetres). If a double bass is half a meter to the left from the centre of the soundstage, the Melodee places it there and makes it palpable and real. A brass section through the Melodee is a brass section, left to right and front to back, with each trombone clearly delineated and realistic in size. Some speakers tend to miniaturize, others project images bigger than life. The Melodee’s imaging is true to life and these speakers are the living proof that even rather compact floorstander can successfully re-create the scale and dynamics of a brass band.
Spatial resolution
Leaving aside how the Melodee is made, where a small boutique producer has no access to manufacturing technologies of say Sonus Faber, Focal, Wilson Audio or YG Acoustics, sonically there is absolutely nothing to worry about. For the same price, there is a little chance that you could get similar sounding speakers from somewhere else. On top of that, Silent Laboratories can customize your Melodee to your specific listening conditions and preferences if required. Not for free, of course, but the very existence of such a service is something you can hardly get from most established brands.
With the Melodee, one finds oneself in the company of acts like Tidal Piano, Rockport Atria, Estelon YB, Audio Physic Cardeas, Vivid Gyia G3, and Magico A5; all these double or triple the Melodee cost. Of course, it is a bit unfair to compare complex distribution models vs the Silent Laboratories’ direct to customer sales, but looking at it from consumer’s perspective, it is your money, isn’t it? Then the loudspeakers like the Melodee help us realise where the real value of high-end audio lies, and how far we can get for our money if we don’t get blinded by the big names.
That was a bit of a philosophical conclusion, which fortunately can be summed up in a single sentence: the Silent Laboratories Melodee is quite possibly one of the best price to performance ratio floorstanding loudspeakers out there.
Recommended resellers
Mareka Audio, Horoměřice, +420 604 161 122
Silent Laboratories, Praha, +420 777 772 642
Associated components
- Sources: Ayon CD-35 HF Edition
- Amplifiers: Audia Flight Strumento No.8 monobloky
- Interconnects and speaker cables: Synergistic Research SRX XL IC, SRX XL SC, Stealth Audio Metacarbon / Sakra V16, Nordost Odin 2, AAI Estremo, Krautwire SuperSymmetric
- Power conditioning: Synergistic Research PowerCell SX / Active Ground Block SX, Synergistic Research SRX XL, Nordost QPoint, RD Acoustic RD EMI Neutralizer Power Filter, RD Acoustic RD EMI Neutralizer Power Filter 4,6 kW, AAI Power Block, GMG Power X-Blocker Limited Edition, GMG Power microUNIT
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