Bookshelf Speakers — Venture Audio La Vie

La Vie is the smallest loudspeaker in the Ultimate Series from Venture Audio, a passive design that runs a single full-range driver with no second unit and no conventional crossover. Venture presents it as a point source intended for desktops and bookshelves. The brand, set up in 1986 and now run from Singapore with a second office in Brasschaat, Belgium, lists La Vie next to the stand-mounted Charm and five floorstanding models in the same range.

Key specs that matter

Sound comes from one 2 inch AGC unit that Venture calls a full-range tweeter. Venture rates the complete speaker from 100 Hz to 60,000 Hz, while the driver alone is quoted from 85 Hz upward. Sensitivity is 86 dB and impedance is given as 5 ohm, give or take 1 ohm. Each enclosure measures 20 cm in height, 15 cm in width and 17 cm in depth, and weighs 4 kg. Venture asks for at least 24 hours of playing time before the speaker settles.

Engineering and use context

Instead of wood, the enclosure is cast from a high-density solid acrylic composite, chosen for rigidity and low resonance, and shaped as a V so that the narrow front leaves little flat area to cause diffraction. A bass port machined from copper vents the cabinet, and the input terminals are WBT binding posts made of brass with a high copper content. With one driver there is nothing to divide, but the signal still passes a correction filter that Venture designs for a linear impedance and zero phase shift. Venture hand-picks each part of this filter, solders the joins directly between parts without a board and pours polyurethane over the finished assembly to stop microphonic vibration. Internal runs use cable of Venture's own making. The driver has a magnetically shielded motor, and each unit is measured across all of its parameters so that the two drivers of a pair are matched. AGC stands for abaca graphite composite - the cone matrix is formed with pulp from the abaca plant grown in the Philippines, whose long fibres keep the cone stiff and light.

Pairing

The limited bass extension leaves the bottom octaves to a subwoofer when the La Vie is used for anything beyond near-field listening. The impedance poses no problem for most amplifiers, and the sensitivity is moderate, so a compact integrated amplifier is a sensible starting point for typical desk distances.

Alternatives

The Venture Audio Charm is the other stand-mounted model of the Ultimate Series, a two-way speaker with a 7 inch CFGC woofer and a 2 inch AGC tweeter rated from 40 Hz.