Recording - March 2016 - 58

B Y M I K E M E T L AY

Vanatoo is a company best known in the "prosumer" and home
audio market, but founders Rick Kernen and Gary Gesellchen
don't want it to stay that way. They feel their desktop monitor, the
Transparent One, deserves a serious listen by audio professionals,
and after a quick audition at the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest last
summer, I agreed with them enough to arrange for a review.

Vanatoo Transparent One Active Monitors
I've been living with the Transparent One monitors for several weeks now, and while they don't look or set up like conventional active studio monitors, I do think that Vanatoo's onto
something here. Let's take a closer look and listen.
Out of the box
The Transparent One is not a self-contained active monitor.
It's a stereo system that includes one active speaker with amplification for both channels, plus a passive satellite speaker that
connects via standard speaker cable (provided). All of the
other connections are located on the back of the active speaker, and a quick look at the rear panel reveals connections both
familiar and uncommon to studio monitor users.
These are DSP-driven digital speakers with up to 24-bit/96
kHz resolution. While they do have the ability to accept analog signals, that's almost an afterthought; the only connection
for an analog input on the back is a stereo minijack. The A/D
is quite transparent and this connection does work perfectly
well, but I did most of my testing with direct digital input to the
speakers. Optical and coaxial S/PDIF inputs are provided on
Toslink and RCA, but the Transparent One really shines in a
pro audio setup when using its built-in USB audio interface.
One cable from your DAW, bang, done!
What's interesting about this plethora of input options is that
you could conceivably have all of them connected at once.
The speaker listens for audio on all inputs and switches to
whichever one is supplying a signal, based on a strict order of
priority: analog first, then optical, then coaxial, then USB.
Vanatoo doesn't recommend having multiple digital sources set
up at once; some of them don't "sleep" in a way that will
release the input and let another digital source take over.
However, the analog input coexists very nicely with any of the
digital inputs... you just have to wait 15 seconds after the analog input goes silent before
the digital input will kick in.
There's also an unbalanced mono RCA
Subwoofer output that automatically senses
when a sub is connected and "automatically
adjusts the crossover for you." There's a digital
crossover network inside the DSP engine that is
activated when the Sub Out is hooked up;
you're told to set the subwoofer's cutoff frequency as high as it will go and set the level
as desired, and the Transparent One will do
the rest. I only had a chance to do limited tests
of this function, and it's something you'll want
to listen to carefully if you plan to add a sub in
your listening room.
58

RECORDING March 2016

Something a little different in a desktop monitor rig
The rear panel also offers a power switch and cable socket,
Volume control pot, center-detented Treble and Bass adjustment
pots, a switch to determine whether the active speaker is Left
or Right, and-interestingly-a 2-prong power outlet. This is
designed so you can attach an Apple Airport Express directly
to the back of the speaker, run a short miniplug-to-miniplug
cable to the Analog In, and stream music directly to the speakers. I tested this capability, since I already happened to have
the appropriate Airport Express in our offices, and found it to
work extremely well. Maybe not something you'd use in standard studio use, but a fun extra nonetheless. (You can pay a
bit extra for a model with built-in Bluetooth as well.)
Also on the rear panel of the Transparent One is something
one doesn't usually see on speakers of this type-a passive
radiator! This long-throw "speaker without a voice coil" allows
the Transparent One, a sealed-cabinet design, to reproduce
lower frequencies without the unpleasant artifacts that some
ported designs can have. The radiator is acoustically coupled
to the 5.25" aluminum-cone woofer on the front of the cabinet,
which is joined by a 1" silk dome tweeter.
The Transparent One's built-in amplifier offers 60W per channel,
and is a Class D design. This is an interesting choice; many analog
purists tend to lean toward Class AB amplification for studio monitors, but the advantages of a Class D amp are easy to quantify in
terms of performance outside the realm of audio quality. They're far
lighter and more efficient than Class AB designs, so the Transparent
One is lighter than you might expect and runs cooler.
The internal DSP is designed to optimize the signal for the
flattest possible performance from the amp and drivers. The
end result is a spec that's an absolute eye-opener for a speaker that's only 6.5 x 10 x 8.1 inches in size: a
frequency response of 49 Hz to 20 kHz ±2
dB. Now we can see why Vanatoo wants to
see more of these speakers in small studios!
Onto the stands
Setup was fairly quick, and will be trivially
simple for anyone who's ever set up passive
speakers with binding posts. I set up the
speakers in the Recording offices, in a fairly
large equilateral triangle (52" on a side), resting on Sorbothane domes with a 30
Durometer stiffness-suitable for speakers
between 8 and 16 pounds each, perfect for
the Transparent Ones. Speaking of weight, by
the way, the vast majority of the weight of

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - March 2016