1610 Series
What’s New and Why It Matters
A technical breakdown of the advances the 1610 series makes over the 1723.
From 2-Way to 3-Way
A Dedicated Midrange Driver
The 1723 series is a 2-way design — 2.5-way in the tower, where two second woofers are filtered for additional bass support. In both cases, midwoofer(s) handle everything from the deep bass through the upper midrange before handing off to the tweeter. That midwoofer is doing serious double duty: the same cone is asked to faithfully reproduce a 40 Hz kick drum and a 1,5 kHz vocal harmonic simultaneously, with excursion demands from the bass directly competing with the precision required in the midrange.
The 1610 series resolves this fundamental constraint with a true 3-way architecture. A dedicated 5″ midrange driver now owns the midrange band entirely, operating in its own acoustically isolated enclosure section — free from back-wave contamination from the woofer cavity. With no low-frequency excursion demands, the midrange driver works entirely within its pistonic range at all times. Crossover points can be placed more aggressively to keep both woofer and midrange away from their respective breakup regions. The result is a midrange that is cleaner, more dynamic, and uncoloured by the mechanical compromises inherent to a shared-duty midwoofer.
All Three Drivers
Engineered for Their Specific Job
Woofer
Paper → Aluminium
The 1723 uses paper cone midwoofers. Paper is a legitimate material choice — internally damped, with a gradual and diffuse breakup that is relatively benign. But its stiffness-to-mass ratio is modest, and its pistonic bandwidth is limited compared to stiffer alternatives.
The 1610’s 8″ aluminium woofer pushes pistonic behaviour significantly further up the frequency range. Higher cone rigidity translates directly to tighter transient response and better bass definition. The common concern with aluminium — sharp, high-Q breakup modes — is a non-issue here because the woofer is crossed over well below its breakup frequency. In the bass and lower midrange, aluminium’s low internal damping is not a weakness but an advantage: it stores less energy in the cone and releases it more accurately, giving bass and lower-male-voice reproduction a clarity and speed that paper cannot match at equivalent excursion levels.
Midrange
Shared Midwoofer → Dedicated 5″ Carbon Cone
The 1610 series introduce a purpose-built midrange driver that has no equivalent in the 1723 series. Carbon cone construction gives an exceptional stiffness-to-mass ratio, keeping the cone in full pistonic control well past the crossover point with virtually no stored energy to smear transients. The motor is oversized relative to the driver’s physical size, yielding 95 dB sensitivity (1W/1m) and very low dynamic compression even at high SPL. A copper shorting ring keeps distortion low across the operating band. This is not a repurposed midwoofer running higher than ideal — it is a driver designed from the ground up to handle the midrange and nothing else.
Tweeter
Silk → Aluminium-Magnesium
The 1723’s silk dome tweeter is a proven performer — self-damped, smooth, and forgiving of crossover implementation. Its limitations are output, detail retrieval and upper-frequency extension.
The 1610’s 28mm aluminium-magnesium dome addresses all. Aluminium-magnesium alloy is significantly stiffer than silk, extending the tweeter’s pistonic range further into the upper registers, revealing more details as well as ability to play louder due to the domes’ pistonic behaviour. A large copper shorting ring and neodymium motor maintain low distortion and low dynamic compression at high output.
A More Sophisticated
Crossover Network
Going from a 2-way to a 3-way design demands a more sophisticated crossover, and the 1610 delivers one. The network uses 4th order (24 dB/oct) filters on the HF section and 2nd order filters between woofer/midrange and midrange/tweeter. The asymmetric topology is intentional: the steeper HF rolloff aggressively suppresses frequencies below the tweeter’s operating band — protecting the dome at high SPL and reducing intermodulation — while the shallower slopes at the lower crossover points preserve phase coherency in the critical midrange region.
All inductors in the midrange and tweeter circuits are air-core. Ferrous-core inductors saturate under high drive levels, introducing non-linearity at the worst possible moment. Air-core removes that failure mode entirely. Tweeter capacitors are polypropylene — lower dielectric absorption, lower distortion than standard electrolytics. Wire-wound resistors throughout, with aluminium heat-sinked variants where power dissipation demands it.
There are no ferrous parts anywhere in the signal path — no steel nuts, no steel washers — eliminating any possibility of stray magnetic fields interacting with the signal. Terminals are solid copper, rhodium-plated for corrosion resistance and long-term contact integrity.
Baffle Engineering:
Thickness & Time Alignment
Baffle Construction
The 1723 baffle is a flat 50mm thick panel made from two pieces of HDF glued together — a solid and rigid construction, but homogeneous in nature. A single thick slab of the same material concentrates its resonant modes rather than distributing them.
The 1610 takes a different approach: 46mm of laminated HDF composite, built from multiple thin layers bonded with glue in a curved shape. The laminated structure distributes resonant modes across layer boundaries, avoiding the concentrated resonances of a homogeneous thick panel. The result is not just a stiff baffle, but a more inert one.
Time Alignment
This is where the difference between the two series is most pronounced across the lineup. The 1723 tower has a slanted baffle that provides a degree of time alignment for some of its drivers — a meaningful improvement over a flat baffle, but not a systematic solution. The rest of the 1723 range — Bookshelf, Center, and Slim equivalents — use a standard flat baffle with no time alignment at all. Electrical delay compensation in the crossover can partially address arrival time differences, but it cannot replicate the phase coherency of physical alignment across the full frequency range.
Every 1610 model features a passively time-aligned baffle with drivers physically angled toward the listening position. On the tower this is particularly impactful: the woofers sharing a common frequency band benefit directly from time alignment, reducing comb filtering artefacts at the crossover transition. Correct time alignment also improves impulse response and stereo imaging precision in ways that crossover compensation alone cannot fully replicate. Critically, this is not a tower-only feature in the 1610 — the Bookshelf, Center, and Slim all receive the same treatment.
Port Resonance Suppression
All ported 1610 models (every model except the sealed Slim) use large-diameter, low-tuned ports for bass extension and low port noise at high output. A port tuned deep enough to be useful requires significant length, and that length creates a secondary problem: pipe resonances. Standing waves within the port tube generate colouration and output anomalies at multiples of the tube’s fundamental resonance — typically audible as a tonal character overlaid on the low-frequency output.
The 1610 addresses this with strategically placed holes in the port tube, covered in damping material tuned to introduce a cancelling airflow at the resonance frequency. This is a precision acoustic solution — not foam stuffing, not a port restriction — that phases out the resonance at the source without meaningfully affecting port efficiency or bass output.
Summary of Advances
| Attribute | 1723 Series | 1610 Series |
|---|---|---|
| Topology | 2-way / 2.5-way (tower) | 3-way |
| Woofer cone | Paper | Aluminium (8″) |
| Midrange | Shared midwoofer | Dedicated 5″ carbon cone |
| Tweeter | 28mm Silk dome | 28mm aluminium-magnesium dome |
| Baffle design | Straight HDF | Curved laminated HDF |
| Crossover quality | Great | Exceptional |
| Time alignment | — | Passive, curved baffle |
| Port resonance control | — | Damped cancelling-airflow holes |