New Acoustic Energy 309 Floor Standing Speakers Punch Well Above Their Weight

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Acoustic Energy have been purveyors of top quality loudspeakers for over thirty years now and have got pretty good at the dark art of making pretty boxes that will make your music sound wonderful and lovely! The latest 300 series builds on the fabness that is the 100 series and the floor standing AE309 raises the performance bar for a £1000 speaker by a significant margin.

The Acoustic Energy AE309 build quality is up there with the best. With mass loading in the cabinet making a very heavy and inert cabinet which is just perfect for housing a 28mm aluminium dome tweeter featuring what AE have trademarked Wide Dispersion Technology or WDT for short. The bass/mid driver is a new design too and uses a ceramic aluminium sandwich cone and long throw motor system. The cabinet itself is seamless (so you cannot see the joins) and boasts a very chunky 18mm thick high density MDF material designed to control cabinet vibrations and reduce colouration in the music.

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Before listening properly to the AE309's we ran them in for about a hundred hours and yes this really does make a big difference. For the purposes of this blog we listened to them on the very lovely new Arcam CDS50 SACD/CD streamer and SA20 integrated amplifier (see last blog from the Swindon store for more info). The results are quite simply astonishing. Rarely have I heard a system costing this little sound this good! It is a real giant killer!

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They sounded sooooooo good that I decided to put them through their paces good and proper! I brought in my CD copy of Natural Selection by Land's End. Now to say this is nicely recorded is a bit of an understatement. It is quite possibly the best recording of a rock band (of the progressive variety) that there has ever been! Plenty of so called top quality recording studios and their engineers and producers should be made to sit down and listen to this .... they would be thoroughly ashamed of their miserable efforts! Why does the word Oasis spring to mind here I wonder(wall)! None of that compression rubbish on this one and it's all the more lovely for it! 

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Anyway ...... rant over ...... back to the task in hand. I started track five which is called My Home and was immediately struck by how accurate Acoustic Energy's marketing blurb was! Wide dispersion is bang on the button here. The soundstage created on the AE309's was huge. There was a real and tangible sense of width depth and height with the guitar on left coming from so far out of the box I had to open my eyes to see if he was actually there!! Then a drum rolls across the back all the way to the opposite side and a synthesiser explodes in the background - it is just WOW!! 

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In fact whatever this system was given to play always sounded clean open and superbly detailed. You get a proper insight into the mix and it becomes totally absorbing and engaging. They produce a sound that I don't believe I have ever heard from a floorstanding loudspeaker at this price before. I think that they could become a bit of a Hi-Fi classic. Leave them off your shortlist of speakers to demo at your peril 

To sum up .... I have heard systems costing way more than this sound a fraction this good. The Acoustic Energy AE309's are game changers and if you would like to arrange a no obligation demonstration to hear for yourself we would be more than happy for you to bring in some of your own favourite music we can supply the tea coffee and biscuits! 

Acoustic Energy loudspeakers are available from the following branches of Audio T:
Brentwood, Bristol, Cheltenham, Online, Portsmouth, Preston, Reading, Swindon