Floorstanding loudspeakers — Brodmann F1

Within the Festival Series, the F1 is the smallest tower from Brodmann, the Austrian loudspeaker maker, and sits in that line below the larger F2 and alongside the FW wall speaker intended for surround duty. It is a slim two-way design that places its bass driver on a side panel of the cabinet instead of the baffle, so the front can stay only a little wider than the tweeter. Units are built to order, usually taking four to six weeks to arrive.

Key specs that matter

Response is specified as 40 Hz to 25,000 Hz within 3 dB and a nominal impedance of 8 ohm. The rating for nominal load is 55 W, with a music load of 110 W. Instead of the usual 1 W figure, the maker gives the operating output as 2.1 W for 91 dB at one metre. Each cabinet measures 929 mm high, 170 mm wide and 228 mm deep and weighs 13 kg.

Engineering and use context

A single 130 mm mid-bass driver works in each enclosure, mounted on alternating sides so that a pair can be set up as mirror images. Its diaphragm is paper pulp blended with carbon fibre and Alaskan flax, driven by a six-layer voice coil on a Kapton former and held in a stainless steel basket. For the treble Brodmann fits a silk dome coated in acrylic, a voice coil wound in four layers and a minimised magnetic gap. The electrical crossover is a first-order network at 1.45 kHz with a slope of 6 dB per octave, and Brodmann also specifies an acoustic crossover at 130 Hz with a 4.5 dB per octave slope. The cabinet is sealed, without a bass-reflex port, and carries no internal damping material. A wave-shaped piano soundboard with narrow openings covers the side-firing driver, and Brodmann adds its Acoustic SoundRods soundboard element outside the driver. Four brass cone feet with matching pads come with each speaker. Moving the woofer off the front panel is what keeps the baffle narrow, which the maker says limits re-emission and diffraction along the edges of the enclosure.

Pairing

The benign nominal load and modest power rating make an ordinary stereo integrated amplifier of moderate output a sensible partner, and the fairly high efficiency means a very powerful amplifier brings little benefit here. Because the bass unit fires sideways, the orientation of left and right cabinets should be decided with the side walls in mind, which suits a 20 m2 living space.

Alternatives

In the same Festival Series the Brodmann F2 is a bigger floorstanding model, measuring 1112 x 216 x 275 mm and weighing 19 kg.