These are the most accurate speakers I’ve heard. Listening to them, especially for extended periods of time, is truly a revelation. I was lucky enough to host the public unveiling of this model during the opening party for my new home studio in Nashville. Earlier in the week, Roger Roschnik and Fabrice Del-Prete of PSI Audio, along with Jason Davies of Eleven Dimensions Media, their US Distributor, drove down from Illinois, where they had just showcased their other products at AXPONA (Audio Expo North America), the largest hi-fi show in North America. Meanwhile, the first A226-MAIN production pair had been shipped directly to me from the manufacturing facility in Switzerland, but got stuck in Customs due to all the tariff uncertainties. Thankfully, two giant crates finally landed on my porch, just a couple of hours before guests arrived. A hundred engineers, musicians, and fellow studio owners attended the event, and throughout the afternoon and evening, many of them listened intently to the PSI Audio speakers. Some of the guests remained seated for over an hour to audition music that they and others in the room had produced, and I heard the following words when I asked them to describe their experience with the speakers: Detailed, natural, revealing, believable, and comfortable. Surprisingly, a few listeners expected overblown bass – not unreasonable, given the A226-MAIN’s imposing stance – but walked away impressed that the low end was balanced and controlled.
Here’s the perfect place for me to interject my thoughts on speaker design philosophy and our collective obsession over frequency response. More specifically, we’ve been led to believe that the most important measurement of a speaker’s accuracy is its magnitude response, which is the all too familiar graph of amplitude (dB) across the frequency spectrum (Hz). But that only tells half the story, because the other half is phase response, a similar plot that specifies delay (usually in degrees) across the same spectrum – how different frequencies line up in time when they reach your ear. Sadly, most speaker designers ignore phase response in order to maximize the range and linearity of magnitude response (and in the process, they mislabel it frequency response). For example, tuned ports, transmission lines, passive radiators, EQ, DSP, and other approaches are often used to extend the low end, in lieu of increasing the size or number of bass drivers (and correspondingly, the volume of the speaker enclosure). These bass-extension tactics can wreak havoc on the phase response. Moreover, crossovers also introduce phase shift, with steeper filter slopes contributing to greater delay. In other words, a speaker might be capable of reproducing frequencies across its range evenly, but if those frequencies reach your ears at different times, transients will blur, and imaging will suffer.
In the case of the A226-MAIN, to optimize both magnitude and phase response, PSI Audio elected to use two 10-inch woofers flanking a rotatable high mid module with a 4-inch extended-dome midrange and a brand-new aluminum-coil tweeter, all powered by four proprietary amplifiers, and housed in a multi-chambered, ported enclosure. In my room, magnitude response was essentially flat, only dropping below -5 dB at 19 Hz and 23 kHz. Meanwhile, a holistic strategy that PSI Audio calls Compensated Phase Response (CPR), whereby all-pass filters are employed alongside subsystems and individual components meticulously designed and matched to complement each other, ensures that phase response is nearly flat from 100 Hz to 21 kHz, according to my own measurements. Phase shift doesn’t go beyond 60° until 36 Hz in the low end and 22.5 kHz up top, which is exemplary for any speaker, let alone an all-analog one with zero latency! Furthermore, their Adaptive Output Impedance (AOI) tech, which tracks driver movement and adjusts amplifier output in real-time for better damping, reduces resonance and further tightens transients.
That’s a long way of saying that the A226-MAIN speakers are incredibly precise. The adjectives people used at the party were spot-on – detailed, natural, revealing, etc. Just as importantly, in the weeks that followed, I learned that these speakers are non-fatiguing, even after many hours of critical listening and mixing. AOI and CPR ensure that transients are reproduced without overhang, and the component frequencies of sounds arrive at the ear aligned in time. Therefore, the brain doesn't have to reconstruct a sonic image that’s been smeared across time – a mentally exhausting task.
Yes, the A226-MAIN speakers are the best I’ve heard. They’re also the biggest and most expensive I’ve had on loan. If these are out of your budget due to price or sheer size, check out PSI Audio’s smaller models, all of which incorporate CPR and AOI. In my control room, a pair of A23-M monitors [Tape Op #149] serve as my midfield mains, and A14-M Studios are on the meter bridge. I also spent many hours listening to (and measuring) the A17-M [#142] and A21-M models in my studio. Therefore, I can confidently say that PSI Audio succeeded in creating a whole line of speakers that embodies the same design ethos evident in their flagship A226-MAIN. Still, even the smaller PSI monitors aren’t cheap, but consider that these speakers will help you make better informed recording, mixing, and mastering decisions. If you can work more efficiently with less fatigue – and therefore get more done in less time – isn't that money well spent?