Audience ClairAudient 1+1 mini-monitors Review & Interview

This is a story about evolution: How I became a better listener, how the product I’ve been listening to improved, and how my experience improved as I got to know the product. The product central to this story is the Audience ClairAudient 1+1, an eight-inch tall, eight-pound dual full-range driver monitors from a southern California company called Audience.

About Audience

Audience has been around for over 25 years and is the brainchild of John McDonald (CEO), the late Richard Smith, and designer, Roger Sheker. According to Audience, “The number one compromise in most speakers is the ubiquitous crossover.” The laws of physics have frustrated many designers’ attempts to build a full-range loudspeaker using wideband drivers with no crossovers, but that did not stop Sheker.

His breakthrough came in 2009 with the Audience “A3” driver. Think of it like a high-powered subwoofer driver shrunk to less than three inches in diameter. Its linear excursion and power handling are on par with drivers more than twice its size. The current A3S2-16 model covers the range from 40 Hz to 22 kHz with impressive linearity.

The first loudspeaker system from Audience to use A3 drivers was the ClairAudient 16+16. As the name suggests, it was a massive line array consisting of two columns of sixteen A3 drivers per side. It covered the range from 80 Hz to 20 kHz. The 16 + 16 Mark II later added eight 6 x 9-inch passive radiators, extending its range down to 30 Hz. This behemoth was over six feet tall, fifteen inches wide, and a foot deep. It sold for $72,000.

About Me

My first exposure to full-range sound reproduction came from a pair of 200-watt Pioneer HPM-100 speakers. They belonged to a high school friend’s father, an engineer at Ampex and my mentor at that time for audio, computers, and woodworking. I’ve since spent my audiophile career chasing an experience to match that seminal aural encounter. So far, nothing has lived up to it, and, likely, nothing ever will. Such is the way of first-times.

The HPM-100 was a 4-way design with a twelve-inch woofer (closer to 13 inches as drivers are measured today). It was complex and beautiful and set me on a path and preference for multi-way loudspeakers with large drivers. Eight years after I graduated from college, I could finally afford my dream loudspeaker system, the Legacy Audio FOCUS. The original model had three (3) twelve-inch woofers, a pair of seven-inch Kevlar midbass drivers, a large dome tweeter, and a LEAF ribbon tweeter. I enjoyed my FOCUS for a decade before upgrading to the SE model. I’ve owned some version of these massive towers for over twenty-two years.

Given my decades-long preference for large, 4-way systems, you would conclude that I’m not the ideal candidate for a 1-way speaker system with only a pair of 3-inch drivers, but stay with me. A few years ago, Phil Jackson from Parasound suggested I try the Fritz Carrera 7 BE monitors. This is a seven-inch 2-way design with a series crossover and beryllium tweeter. Designer John (Fritz) Heiler personally delivered a pair for me to audition. It did not take long for me to hear the difference in coherency between the two systems.

The problem with coherency is that once you hear it, you can never “unhear” it. In my 15.5 x 10.1 ft listening room, the farthest I could sit from the speakers was eight feet from ear to tweeter. Although the FOCUS SE is an excellent loudspeaker, that’s too close for the six drivers to integrate. Compared to the Fritz, the big towers now sounded like stadium speakers in that room. So, I boxed up the Legacy Audio towers, moved them to storage, and I’ve not listened to them since.

In all my years as a listener, I never imagined that I would prefer a 2-way stand-mounted system to my large 4-way towers, but there I was. While I could not be happier with the Carrera 7 BE monitors, the “ah ha” experience left me wondering if there are a few more unexplored miles on this road to coherency nirvana. If my listening habits were forever changed by moving from 4-way designs to 2-way, what could I learn by spending some time with 1-way speakers?