Напольная акустика — Closer Acoustics Vigo

The Vigo is a single-driver floorstander from Closer Acoustics, a boutique maker founded in 2013 in Katowice, Poland. It follows the company's single-driver philosophy, using one large full-range unit without a crossover, and buyers choose between a permanent magnet driver and a field coil version when ordering.

Key specs that matter

The Vigo is built around the EMS LB12, a full-range unit of 31 cm diameter developed by Michel Fertin and hand-built at the French EMS Speaker workshop run by Katy Fertin. Closer Acoustics quotes an efficiency of 97 dB, a power handling of 40 W, a frequency response of 40 Hz to 16 kHz and an impedance of 8 ohm. The enclosure is 34 cm wide, 51 cm deep and 120 cm tall, making it noticeably broader and deeper than the Allegra or Forlane. Like the other Closer Acoustics speakers, every pair is finished and put together manually in Katowice, and the company says it is voiced for many genres of music rather than one style.

Engineering and use context

Two driver variants are offered. The classic build uses the EMS LB12 MKII with a permanent magnet, while the EX build uses the EMS LB12EX with a field coil, which needs its own power supply to energise the magnet. The cabinet is made from Baltic birch plywood and contains no damping material. Instead, the maker relies on a complex internal structure of carefully shaped channels to stiffen the enclosure and guide the rear wave, part of the distributed resonance approach that the brand also applies to its smaller models. Without a crossover, the signal from the amplifier goes straight to the single driver's voice coil, so there are no filter capacitors, coils or resistors in the path. A cone of this diameter moves a large amount of air for a single-driver design, which is why the Vigo needs no separate woofer to reach its rated lower limit. The large front baffle suits a dedicated listening room of 20 m2 or more.

Pairing

Closer Acoustics states that the Vigo works particularly well with low-power single-ended triode amplifiers such as 300B designs, and it also names refined solid-state amplifiers as suitable partners. The brand's own 300B Provocateur integrated, with 8 W per channel in Class A, is designed for speakers of this efficiency and gives a matched source for the system.

Alternatives

Below it sits the Closer Acoustics Allegra, the smaller floorstander in the range, using an 8-inch EMS LB8 MKII driver in a 117 cm tall cabinet with Corian side panels.