Aretai Contra 100S loudspeakers pair (base model)

Aretai believes a speaker should trustfully perform music in a style agnostic manner – whether classic, jazz or electronic music. This approach comes with several challenges.

Firstly, good classical music recordings will ask for the speaker's ability to correctly translate the large venue's 'live sound' character into a typically much smaller acoustic space at the listener's home. Secondly, speakers must have the ability to handle dynamic peaks in a very clean manner. Thirdly, lots of electronic music, as well as classical organ music, and even the 6-string bass guitar have bass notes that are very deep, so a response that goes to at least 30Hz and below is required for perceived truthfulness of reproduction.

Several have described but often neglected that any music will sound the most natural when the indirect (reflected) spectrum of the speakers closely follows the direct one. Parameter depicting this ability, aka directivity index, rarely gets into the specs - achieving nearly constant directivity is a task that is among the hardest to solve.

To achieve good room translation and smooth directivity issues and provide truthful far- and near-field soundstage experience, we spent several years of experimentation resulting in our custom waveguides for the Contra collection speakers.

In Aretai products, the indirect response at the 45 degrees angle follows the direct one up to 16kHz in a slightly attenuated yet consistent way. The second goal, clarity at higher levels, was achieved by researching ways to reduce the distortion and designing a beyond-textbook filter topology as a result. The third challenge - extended bass is addressed by implementing a bass shelf in the response that extends down to 30Hz while working against the typical 'booming' caused by the resonances coming from the room dimensions. As a result, the bass character of Aretai speakers is different from the typical - it is rather dry and dynamic, yet it also goes low enough to cover the lower bass range. These principles are implemented along with the whole Contra collection of Aretai speakers and form part of our Northern Sound philosophy.

Aretai Contra speaker enclosures are precisely machined and hand-assembled by layering different materials to control resonances. The enclosures are also fully treated with moistureproof sealant and glue. The Asian market where blackouts can occur because of shutdown air-cons can lead to excessive humidity levels and permanently damage cabinets and drivers with no treatment against moisture. The moistureproofing will contribute to the extended longevity of Aretai products in any climate.

The Contra 100S is designed to be complementary to smaller rooms. Innovative viscoelastic D3O material is used as the vibration de-coupler at the base plate, providing very effective damping of vibrations towards the base plate. The base plate can be attached to a stand or placed directly on your desk, so you can also use the speaker as a desktop speaker.

The Aretai Contra 100S is the perfect speaker if you are serious about clarity and convincing soundstage experience despite its small size.

Technical specification

• Passive stand / desktop speaker

• Height: 40cm

• Weight: 15kg

• Sensitivity: 85dB/2.83V/1m

• Nominal impedance: 4 Ohms

• Nominal power: 100 Watts

• Frequency range: 32Hz-30kHz

• High-precision filter components

• 24 carat gold-plated speaker terminals

• Vibration decoupling pad

• Black matt cabinet finish with white waveguide as standard

• Other colour/finish options available at extra cost - please call or email for pricing

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