Review: Event Opal
An impressive new active nearfield from the company that invented 20/20 sound…
22 June 2009
Review: Andy Stewart
A lot of hype has surrounded the release of the Event Opal nearfield monitors. Since their spectacular launch in Las Vegas last year, online video presentations and print media ad campaigns have exposed the Opals to a market well beyond the walls of the Hard Rock Casino. The face of the campaign has been none other than Event’s enigmatic owner, Peter Freedman, more familiar to the Australian pro audio community as the man behind (and familiar face of) Rode Microphones. It’s been a marketing push worthy of a World Cup rugby scrum, where Mr Freedman has repeatedly dared anyone to “prove (him) wrong,” while staring menacingly from the page. Indeed, someone at an international tradeshow recently remarked that they got quite a start when faced with a 10-foot high cardboard cut-out of Peter Freedman staring out at them, resplendent in his James Bond cuff links and suit. The Opal ads have boasted a confidence that borders on intimidation, and I dare say anyone publicly contending that they ‘sound like bollocks’ should prepare themselves for a bare-fisted showdown worthy of Fight Club.
Having already spoken with Peter Freedman and the Opal’s head designer, Marcelo Vercelli (formerly of Mackie, RCF and KV2 Audio) about the product back in 2006, I knew the original aim had been to produce ‘the best nearfield monitor ever made, bar none’ – no harm in aiming high, I figured. Several years later, with the product released and the marketing machine in full swing, it seems the mantra hasn’t changed… the claims are still extraordinary and the risks to reputations and the physical wellbeing of reviewers, high.
I’d already listened to the Opals once prior to their arrival for review. Back then I’d been very impressed, so I knew what I was in for to some degree. Nevertheless, I’d been pumping iron for six months and training with a local boxing champion just in case things went awry…
EVENT HORIZON
I’ve done a lot of listening to the Opals in recent weeks (between sparring sessions) and to cut to the chase, they’re one of the most revealing two-way reference speakers I’ve ever heard – and I’ve heard countless nearfields over the years. Whether it be a fret squeak, a miss-hit drum or a subtle overdub tucked away in the corner, the Opals bring out the detail in mixes and the tracking of single instruments with great finesse and brutal detail simultaneously. Their tonal balance is excellent and their bottom-end extension very impressive.
The stereo image presented by these powerful speakers creates the perfect illusion: the monitors themselves seem to vanish from view, leaving you with nothing but a big, glorious soundstage in which to work. Very few speakers have ever tricked my brain to this extent before. In the dark, and with the Opals’ backlit ‘Event’ logos switched off, it’s as if the whole control room is the speaker. They don’t just make you look left and right, but somehow up and down, near and far as well. Good mixes hang uncannily in the air like a giant sphere rather than a horizontal plane.
The placement of sounds inside this three-dimensional space is quite incredible; asymmetrical reverbs stay localised to where they’ve been panned, acoustic instruments draw you to their position with startling resolve, and the air around individual elements can be heard breathing, rising and falling with the music. Upright pianos reveal their imperfections and tuning issues, vocal edits demand greater scrutiny and kick drums sound like they’re being played right between the monitors. Spurious electrical noises and hums are also exposed in all their infamy – if you’re tracking with a pair of these babies and you fail to notice the buzz in that vocal mic, the earth issue in that electric guitar, you’d better give the game away, I reckon.
The Opals also make light work of uncompressed, highly dynamic instruments like drums and pianos etc that studio tracking sessions invariably dish out. This is one of their great strengths, in fact. Good studio monitors must be able to do the hard work of representing loud and highly transient dynamic signals without falling on their arse or distorting the signal. Most studio monitors do a reasonable job of playing mastered CDs, but many come up short during the setting up of a kick drum’s signal chain, for instance. Here, the Opals shine, handling a typical tracking session with nonchalant ease. Again, their clarity creates the illusion that you could actually step forward onto the soundstage. If my console hadn’t been in the way I reckon I’d have given it a go.
NEED TO KNOW
In the dark, and with the Opals’ backlit ‘Event’ logos switched off, it’s as if the whole control room is the speaker. They don’t just make you look left and right, but somehow up and down, near and far as well.
MINING A NEW SOUND
So where do these speakers come from and how has this detail been achieved? Well, for starters, they’re made in Australia at Rode’s Silverwater factory, which is good news worth disseminating. The generously proportioned, heavily set Opals have been born out of a determination to make something ‘better’, and subjectively this seems to have been achieved. ‘Detail’ and ‘power’ are the two core concepts at play here. Actually, the speakers feel powerful enough to double as a small PA, and this should perhaps come as no surprise. As previously mentioned, head designer Marcelo Vercelli has a background in PA design and the Opals clearly reflect this in their power handling (the EX8 driver can reportedly cope with up to 1000W of peak power). They even have a sturdy handle on the top rear of the speaker – just like a portable PA – to help with lifting duties, and believe me, the curved metal cabinets are slippery and heavy so you need all the help you can get in this regard. The handles are a well-conceived yet unusual addition to the external design of the nearfield. They prevent your hands from ‘eye-gouging’ the tweeters as you attempt to lift them out of their packaging and onto a stand, although, in the case of the Opal, this would be a futile exercise anyway since the waveguides are too smooth and curved to act as handles. It’s also worth noting that the handles aren’t visible unless you’re looking directly down onto the cabinet from above.
And for those who don’t read manuals, Event also rightly warns against hearing damage when listening to the Opals at high SPLs. These monitors can blow your tie back like a mid-80s video clip, so extreme care must be taken if you’re to avoid doing yourself an injury.
Like my Quested VS2108As, the Event Opals don’t try and defy the laws of physics by attempting to wring a huge sound out of a small cabinet. The enclosures are extremely well constructed from heavy-grade injection-moulded aluminium (their overall weight is over 21kg). The curved cabinet design, like many modern nearfields, is constructed to minimise diffraction and internal cabinet resonances, with the added bonus of providing extra rigidity and strength, and therefore clarity. The patented front-facing slotted bass reflex ports unusually wrap themselves down each side of the cabinet, looking like goal posts through a fish-eye lens, and these emit effortless bottom-end that’s very low in distortion and nicely balanced.
RAW POWER WELL CONTROLLED
The main eight-inch driver can produce a raw signal that stretches from an impressively low 30Hz to a high 10kHz, with its published 1000W power handling not something I was really prepared to test the boundaries of. Suffice it to say, these speakers go louder than any level I’d be prepared to endure at close range. Distortion seems effectively non-existent at reasonable listening levels, which gives rise to the extraordinary clarity of the soundstage. Other respectable speaker brands seem decidedly tired and mediocre by comparison.
The cone itself is made from a lightweight long-strand carbon fibre composite that’s incredibly stiff to the touch and very resistant to physical distortion as it pushes a broad range of frequencies out into the world with apparent ease. Its sharp external outer edge makes the driver look every bit as tough as the material from which it’s constructed and the overall package seems bullet-proof and ready for action, even if the aesthetic seems almost too aggressive to my eye.
The ULD1 high-frequency driver is made up of a one-inch beryllium copper dome, which emits low-distortion top-end out past 22kHz, again partly due to its extreme strength and rigidity. This super-lightweight high-frequency metal driver offers a fidelity and dynamic response that’s not for the feint of heart: sibilance during tracking and mixdown can be strong enough to tear your shirt, but similarly, this capacity offers a representation of the ‘air’ and ‘light’ in a mix that very few other monitors can match. It’s supported well by a defined midrange; the combination of the two never coming across as overly bright or harsh. (Many so-called ‘bright’ speakers aren’t in fact bright at all. They’re often simply distorted in the midrange.) Some may find the metal dome aspect of the Opal lacking that characteristic soft-dome feathery delicacy, but I actually quite preferred it, despite being ‘soft-domed’ in my speaker bias.
The Opal is crystal clear, and any distortion is most certainly at the source, not in the components. The large waveguide surrounding the high-frequency driver is also rotatable (after removing four screws), which allows the speakers to be placed on their side, if that’s your requirement. Although, in this position it must be said, they look quite odd, their asymmetrical curves making them appear a little unstable and ‘wonky’. To ensure this issue is only a visual one, the speakers also come supplied with rubberised feet that sit underneath the monitors equally well in either position. To top it all off, the backlit Event logo is also rotatable should you prefer them lying prostrate.
SONIC BOOM
On the rear of the cabinet, hidden beneath the ultramarine blue heat sink, lies the engine that drives these machines. It’s a Class AB all-analogue amplifier design – no digital amps here – providing 750 watts of peak power… enough wallop to plaster most engineers against the rear-wall diffuser. The marriage between these powerful amps and the lightweight and highly rigid components makes for Ferrari-like acceleration in the transient response and a dangerous overall top speed (volume). So again, it’s wise to be careful when driving these cabinets in the studio.
There’s another particular detail I’d like to mention here: when the speakers are first switched on, they enter a self-diagnostic mode (evidenced by a solid white glow from an LED on the front right-hand side of each cabinet). This mode lasts for around 22 seconds all up – just long enough to have you reaching for the volume control as you puzzle over the lack of any meaningful signal. I made this mistake on day one… and by the time the speakers finally kicked into life I’d cranked my Neve’s monitor pot. The resulting sound was that of a freight train crashing through the front wall of the studio. I only made this mistake once.
FRONT PANEL CONTROLS
The Opals have quite a few tricks up their sleeves beyond their impressive performance specs and power ratings. To begin with, on the front panel, hidden beneath a curiously removable rubber lid, lies an array of rotary stepped controls that appears, at first glance, as a comprehensive parametric EQ. But it’s not. On the far left is a five-position stepped level control, where zero is marked at 12 o’clock and the two steps either side cut or boost the signal by three or six dB. The next dial along is a three-position ‘Space’ control, which provides bass compensation for speakers should they be positioned in a half space (against a wall) or a quarter space (in a corner), where extra bass is inadvertently derived from the proximity of the speaker to the wall. The next three controls relate to the ‘Q’, frequency and cut (labelled ‘depth’) of a bass EQ filter that works (again in steps) between 40 and 280Hz. This is offered as a means of roughly adjusting the voice of the speaker to interface better with a room that might be suffering from an uneven or lumpy bottom-end response. It’s not the best solution to a quirky room, of course, but it goes some way towards improving the balance. The next two controls are also five-position switches that manipulate the high and low shelving filters up and down in 0.75dB increments, centred at 5kHz and 200Hz respectively. The final switch on the far right controls the intensity of the illuminated ‘Event’ logo on the front panel. This can be anything from ‘bright’ to ‘off’ (which was my preference for sure).
Overall, I found these controls well placed – better on the front than hidden away in crevices behind XLRs, to be manipulated via microscope – the more commonly used toggle switches are usually impossible to adjust in low light. The controls themselves were still pretty fiddly, however, and slightly ambiguous – some of the pots seemed to point somewhere in between the calibration marks rather than right at them. But they’re pretty set-and-forget so this quibble doesn’t constitute a deal breaker by any means.
There are two curiosities on the rear panel. The first is a power socket that doesn’t accept an earth pin. And sure enough, when I first discovered this and immediately went searching for the supplied cables, these didn’t possess any either. Suffice it to say, you need to use the supplied power cables or, failing that, another speaker! The second curiosity is a ‘Module Dock’, which currently serves no purpose whatsoever, but will presumably allow for further Opal development that’s yet to be determined.
The Event Opals are one of the surprise packets of 2009. They’re incredibly well realised speakers with virtually no flaws I could determine. If you’re in the market for nearfields they’re definitely a compelling option worthy of serious consideration.
RESPONSES