The Metronome floorstander is a mass loaded quadratic tapered quarter wave resonator loudspeaker specifically designed to work in a small room, against a wall  with help at the bottom end from a quality subwoofer. It uses the excellent Fostex FE108 Sigma 4” full-range driver.  After construction and finishing the speakers were installed against the wall as they were designed for boundary placement which is really a prerequisite if a speaker this tall (44”) is not to dominate a small room.

 

On first fire-up, the Metronomes exhibited a distinct fizz in the treble and a nasality to female vocals  which was not exactly encouraging. However this settled down after a couple of hours of playing to reveal a beautifully delicate and surprisingly extended high end. The nasality had been caused by my overstuffing of the cabinets. Removing most of the wadding I had put in cured it completely and gave a big increase in dynamics and immediacy. So the moral with these particular speakers is go easy on the damping. The lack of any parallel surfaces negates the need for elaborate  stuffing regimes.

 

I had been a rather dubious about so called full-range drivers, mainly I’m ashamed to say because of preconceptions built up over years of using multiple driver speakers. Full range units cannot possibly work properly can they? Well they certainly can! I take it all back!

 

There is something about these outwardly simple Fostex drivers that takes you right to the heart of the performance. Instrumental detail and texture are laid out before you like nothing else I have heard barring electrostatics. Vocalists have an unnerving presence in the room particularly on old Capitol recordings by Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Peggy Lee et al. If you are a jazz fan these drivers are brilliant. Saxophones have a reach out and touch quality that is beautiful to witness and the best thing  about these speakers is the way they let you hear the human behind the instrument. Sax players and trumpeters breathe before they blow, chairs creak. The whole studio comes alive before you given the right recording.

 

At the top, cymbals have just the right amount of strike, shimmer  and decay without the fizz of lesser speakers and when the going gets frenetic they hang in there without losing it or becoming splashy or congested.

 

At the bass end, the sharp cut off at around 80Hz means that the Metronomes are very easy to match to a subwoofer. It took me about five minutes to get my MJ Acoustics Pro 50 active sub working beautifully with them. Together they were able to produce deep clean bass in a small room environment, which is exactly what the Metronome/sub combination was designed to do.

 

It could certainly be argued that these are not the most accurate of transducers and that they simply produce a rose-tinted version of what is on the record. In these enclosures they have a  certain romantic richness to their presentation that will not suit everyone but they are just my cup of tea. They play music like few other speakers I have heard and that for me is what it is all about when it comes down to it.

 

If you have to listen in a small room, possess a good subwoofer (essential) and like the sound of music then you could do a lot worse than the Fostex FE108 Sigma driver in a tapered quarter wave tube cabinet. These drivers really are special. You owe it to yourself to hear them.

 

Thanks to Dave Dlugos of Planet10 and Scott Lindgren for their invaluable help with optimizing the speaker. Without their contributions the Metronomes  would not have sounded nearly as good