Buchardt Audio A500
Contents
The first experience in the house with the Buchardt’s was immediately their calling card. To get used to the sound, I let the speakers play music before sitting down to listen to it properly. The first random choice as play-in music is Dvorzak’s “Slavonic Dances” by the Budapest Festival Orchestra. The first dance ends abruptly and fiercely, and that rolled into the room like an avalanche. The ears were instantly perked.
Speed!
The Buchardt A500 is fast and that comes out in two ways. In piano parts there is space between keystrokes, even if it is a very fast passage. Melody lines can be followed without effort. They are also fast in the sense of processing dynamics. Huge pulses they handle effortlessly. Despite the hefty sound pressure, it remains transparent and controlled, as in the aforementioned “Slavic Dances”.
Buchardt opted for a closed cabinet with a lot of power in the three amplifiers and this results in a dynamic, forward-projected sound with a present, tight, deep and tangible bass.
Tunings
Which tuning you choose certainly matters with the Buchardt A500, which makes reviewing a bit trickier; these speakers actually have multiple characters. The standard tuning is very detail-oriented and plays very forward. The sound is ‘in your face’ and presents some risk of saturation to the listener.
The ‘warm’ tuning rounds out the high a bit, making it sound a little less bright. Not that there’s no high-range anymore, but it’s like instead of looking directly into a light you put a filter in front of it that scatters the light a bit, making it a little friendlier.
In “Three Good Things” by Mammal Hands, a tabla is used. At one point this is taken over by a drum kit, with the tabla gently sinking into the sound of the drum. With the standard tuning, you hear the tabla playing on for much longer and the sound lies like a thin layer on top of the sound of the drum kit. With the warm tuning, you lose that distinction, but you do hear that the sound of the drum kit is enriched. These are finicky details, but they make the listening experience different. Those aren’t the only differences:
- Standard plays forward. Warm takes a step back.
- With dynamics in the music, for example sound swells, with the standard tuning it’s like you hear the speakers shift up. With warm it is much smoother.
- Reverb is much longer with warm.
Despite the difference in tunings, the character of the sound is the same: bright and neutral. I chose warm for the review period.
On to music
Singer-songwriter Laura Marlin is in the room. She and her musicians sound clear, but intimate. There is a wonderful dynamic with lots of space around the instruments.
The Buchardt A500 does not always move nicely with movement in the music though. Vaughan William’s piece for string orchestra loses homogeneity. The different instrument groups are easily audible, but the first violins dominate. It’s too emphatic navigating between the instrument groups and too little the whole, so you don’t drift along and the magic isn’t there.
The speakers magnify, pulling out the details and making what you’re listening to transparent. Sometimes this works out well, as in the Mendelssohn recording by Ronald Brautigam where the sound of the fortepiano is unmistakable. You can hear very clearly that it is a different instrument than a modern piano. The result is insightful without losing the musical line.
Large orchestral works the Buchardt can handle effortlessly. The whisper-quiet passages in the Budapest Festival Orchestra’s Mahler 3, the placement and distance of the sound, the distinction in the individual notes of the double basses, it is convincing. Despite the grand and rich sound, you hear a lot of acoustic information from the concert hall.
In the price-performance ratio, the A500 speakers shoot through the performance ceiling here, this is an overwhelming listening experience. Rock lovers will be in for a treat. The inimitable timing of Jimmy Page’s guitar part in Led Zeppelin’s “I can’t quit you baby” is spot-on, while John Bonham hurls his massive drumbeats into the room with energy and swing, John Paul Jones’ heftily emitted bass can be followed note for note, and Robert Plant screams out his heartache.
A big grin cannot be suppressed. For dance lovers: the electronics of Underworld pound on.
Noise!
Is everything sunshine and happyness then? What starts to annoy after a while is the clearly perceptible noise of the amplifiers when the speakers are on, audible even in soft music passages. In standby it is gone. In addition, the Buchardt speakers do need some volume to show their quality, at low volume they lose their luster a bit.
The design is sleek and follows the design language we know from Scandinavian countries. The speakers are heavy and somehow they also radiate that they sound ‘muscular’. Form and function are nicely balanced. They are clearly present in the room, despite their compact size. There is much to argue about taste, but I think that with their sleek lines they fit well in many a modern living room.