This is a review written by Terry Ellis December 2024.

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Art or Science?

There is an age old HiFi debate we are all familiar with of whether HiFi speakers are more of an art or more science. I think sometimes they can be both.

The Estelon AURA are the perfect example of this, they are very high end HiFi speakers that very much resemble a piece of art, some might say a work of art. They are very different to a traditional, what we might call a box speaker. Estelon has been a bucket list speaker manufacturer for me so to get the chance to spend time with some Estelon speakers at home has been very cool for me.

Entry level lifestyle. 

The AURA is the entry level speaker from Estelon, but this far from entry level priced HiFi I will warn of you that now.  Its also one of the most difficult speakers for me to make look nice on camera as curves are hard to focus the camera lens on and this speaker is very curvaceous, from every angle. Even the speaker plinth is curvaceous and straight away you can see the art in this, but also the science as we know curved speaker cabinets have less internal standing waves.

This goes for the top too, the AURA seem to have a “crown” type of design and you have stop a think for a second, how is the overall shape created and from what material? When you look at photos or video you cannot appreciate the cabinet material at all. Estelon say its a thermoformed proprietary mineral-filled composite, but that doesn’t really tell us much. To appreciate it you have to commit the cardinal sin and touch the speaker with your hands, or better yet pick the speaker up to get really close and personal with it. The cabinet material used has a slight texture to it visually, but it feels smooth, hard and ultra dense totally different to an MDF built cabinet. Even the best built MDF cabinet’s during the tap test you can feel some sense of give to the material or a sense of hollow in places. The AURA feels totally different, its like tapping concrete, no give at all. This is again a real mixture of art and science as the AURA is lovely to look at and touch but we know an inert cabinet is better for reducing any sonic colouration from the cabinet itself.

I think the danger of designing a speaker with this type of form factor is the inevitable audiophile assumption that this is a lifestyle designed speaker, and that implies it cannot possibly be any good.  What does lifestyle mean and why might an audiophile see it as a dirty word, because the speaker that fits into your life and your home is the best speaker for you regardless of what anyone else says. I think there is a deliberate intended element of that here, the AURA I think are speakers designed with real world living in mind, for people who live in very nice apartments or smaller homes where space is limited and where someone doesn’t want a traditional looking speaker.

Interestingly the floor foot print is about the same as most of the larger tower speakers I have had in my room, but the AURA are very tall speakers  and yet they actually feel the least intrusive in my room from any of the speakers I mentioned before, this is a clever trick to pull off. I think this must be the main visual benefit of their curved design and they are wine glass like slender looking speakers that don’t dominate your eye like big chunky traditional speakers do. I put them side by side with my SVS Titan speakers and the AURA make the curved Titans look boxy.

They also sound very sprightly and lively at medium to lower volumes, they don’t need you to crank the volume to wake them up. Their bass is super smooth and extended and relatively modest in its output, so less likely to bass out your up, down and side neighbours, a very important factor for a lot of people, yet they still can a do some crazy high end speaker things like ultra precise 3D imaging. The Aura can create a fantastic sense of depth and width to a sound stage with ultra precise localisation of each individual aspect of the music, so if you are a sound stage loving audiophile these will tick that box for you.

Design industrial 

I think its likely that the AURA’s design was of led by its overall industrial design, by that I mean Estelon likely wanted the speaker to be a certain size with a certain aesthetic. From a driver point of view I think its all been led by the tweeter which is a 1 inch Scan-Speak ‘Illuminator’ Textile Dome, there is a wave guide set into into the cabinet that you can only just about see as its very slight.

This tweeter is a little bit special in that its lightning fast, clear and very lively, what some would call “a lit up” treble. This makes the AURA sound fast and precise but importantly the tweeter doesn’t have the hard metallic edge of some metal domes, instead there is just a little sprinkle of sweetness or softer edge to to its delivery. You get a nice balance of detail and clarity and authenticity without aggression, however I found the lively treble to always be at the forefront of the presentation which means the Aura is trying to be a crisp sounding high resolution speaker at all times and never mushy sounding.

Above and below in a D’Apollito or MTM driver array are two 5 inch Satori Egyptian Papyrus mid woofers. I had to look up Papyrus and it’s a plant used to make a lot of things for over 3000 years and it’s a type of paper, used here for the cones.  Normally paper driver cones can have a softer and slightly slower more lush sound for vocals that is very pleasing, the AURA do not sound like this. Instead they are fast, ultra clear and very focused sounding, so vocals don’t have an obvious bloomy warmth they sound clear. I liked the speed and clarity as it allowed more subtle details in the middle regions of the music to come though, such as note trails or decays. I heard some backing information in tracks I had never heard before, and I appreciate that is a review cliche that I never normally mention as its so rare, however it was the case so its right to mention it. The mid band clarity on offer from the AURA is extremely impressive, however a part of me also favours a tomally full sounding vocal and this not really what you get here.

In a way the most interesting driver is the one you cannot see, the down firing 10 inch Italian made Faital bass driver, with a crossover at around 80Hz. Meaning there is a built in sealed 10 inch subwoofer in a crazy inert sealed cabinet and what’s not to like about that. I think Estelon have gone as big as they can with the driver to fit the speakers industrial design but they also needed a bass driver that is as fast as the tweeter. I do think this is a big part of the speakers overall sound, because again this is a very fast and clear sounding speaker.

Setup and balance

Setting up the AURA in my room I started with the speaker positioned on the blue masking tape “T” I have on the floor, this is the mark of the perfect spot in my room for the best compromise of bass response and sound stage.  Not all speakers work optimally here it depends on their bass output capability and this was not the perfect spot for the AURA but straight away the treble clarity and speed of the AURA stood out, as did the speakers transparency, their ability to allow you to see through them on to the music was very impressive. I could also hear where how the AURA was trying to spread their sound from a width point of view but in my room which is a longer and narrower in shape, meant I had to think about their toe in.

This was interesting to mess around with, I preferred a bit more toe in than usual for a more resolved top end clarity of instruments like piano where every key stroke could sound clear to the finger that was pressing them.  However at the same time vocals were a little too present for me in the upper frequency sibilance region that I am very sensitive to. In the end I settled for a more toed out speaker setup sacrificing some of the excellent leading edge clarity for a slightly softer sweeter vocal. I think with more patience and some system changes I could have found the sweet spot of the best both and that would have been fantastic of course.

I did really like the scale or the sense of height from both the vocals and high frequencies the AURA could deliver, this was very stand out about them. The overall sound stage felt nicely extended in height and I also liked the overall liveliness and energy of the mids and highs as it felt like music was being communicated to me in a more direct, less filtered fashion. This was a clear step up compared to my SVS Titan speakers, they are more slow and laboured sounding by comparison, but warmer and more relaxed too, factoring in these are chalk and cheese designed speakers in every way.

But perfect sound is all about balance and I did struggle a little to balance the speed and clarity of the mids and highs with the amount of bass the AURA was producing. This meant their sound could be a little too clinical and not full and warm enough for my taste. I listen to some bass heavy music and this might not be a typical audiophile test genre, however it shows you pretty quickly what a speakers bass is all about. In my fully acoustically treated listening room it wants the speaker to deliver a good amount of bass as its a very tight sounding room with fast decaying bass. My room actually handles crazy amounts of bass for its size because of the extensive treatment and I knew coming into this review a sealed 10 inch bass driver speaker would probably not be enough output for the room and my taste, I am more of a dual 12 / 15 inch per speaker kind of crazy guy.  That is not because I want my teeth to rattle, its because of how I like to setup speakers following suggested equal loudness contour principles.

However with some careful placement, moving the speaker closer to the room boundaries I got a very neutrally balanced bass from the AURA which would be very pleasing and very desirable to lot of audiophiles. Their bass is very fast and very smooth not just in the details but more importantly in the transitions of notes or up and down in frequencies, especially down into the deepest notes which they do very well. Listening to stand up bass you hear lots of transient detail with fantastic sound stage placement with an authentic size of the instrument in the room, I liked all of this a lot. Then switching to some heavy hitting electronic music and the bass pressurised the room very smooth and in an evenly balanced way, so all good. The bass from the AURA is quite “delicate” or some might call very refined, more this than brute force heavy hitting pressure like the SVS Titan deliver. If I could have dialled up the bass amount by about +3db I would have been a lot happier with the overall sound balance from the AURA.

But I think this type of bass delivery will make it possible to have the AURA placed close to the walls in a more normal “living room” type of setup without causing the same bass problems some larger ported speakers might give you. Personally, I would still want to pull them out into my room to give me as much front wall separation from the speaker as possible, for the best sound stage and I would use a pair of subwoofers to control the bass balance, a pair of REL T9X RED I had here a month ago would have been perfect and looked very cool at the same time.

Demanding in two ways

There is more to think about here in regards to balance. Firstly is amplifiers, the AURA are a very demanding speakers for an amplifier. The spec sheet says they drop to 2 ohms at 58Hz so ideally you need an amplifier comfortable at driving 2 ohm loads with a good amount of power if you want to play them loud. Combined with this I feel you will also need a HiFi system of very high quality that is balanced just right for your taste as a very lively and clear speaker doesn’t filter the sound at all, it gives it to you very honestly. I think you will want a system that is balanced slightly “thick” and definitely on the warm side of neutral, or that is bigger on tonality to flesh out the sound some and add some character or charm to music. Of course that is just my preference but I am sure your choice of system components will be very important with speakers like this.

In my system I was using the Chord Hugo TT2 DAC set to its filter mode 4 to ease off the highs and flesh out the sound with the slight bass lift. I tested and compared two exceptionally good integrated amplifiers the famous Gryphon Diablo 300 and the new king integrated on the block the Diablo 333, the AURA showed me super clearly the big differences in these amplifiers. The Diablo 333 was the much better sounding amplifier of the two as it showed me more of what the AURA can deliver in terms of their sound stage expansiveness and what I am going to call the development of the sound stage, all with more ease, more subtle details and ambience coming through. The Diablo 333 showed how the AURA can deliver music with great energy and great finesse but also how demanding they are as the excellent Diablo 300 could not do the same, again these speakers are very resolving of the upstream equipment and demanding of it too.

Final Thoughts

The AURA might look like a lifestyle speaker but in fact they are a highly tuned, highly resolving, very high end but demanding HiFi speaker where some audiophile magic is possible from a gorgeous looking form factor. But there might be a fair bit of work involved to get there with the setup and by selecting the right equipment, and that equipment could be costly. My advice is to make a good relationship with your dealer so you can test different options to find the right system for you with them.

The price of the white finish I had here is £16,500, in other colours the cost is higher. This is of course a lot of money for HiFi speakers but for a price comparison in 2024 its only a small amount more than Bowers 804 D4, the smallest Bowers 800 tower speaker or about the same cost as KEF Reference 5 Meta speakers.  Factoring in the very unique design, the materials used for the cabinet and sound quality capability in the ways the AURA stand out certainly makes them a pretty spectacular HiFi speaker in their own right. The AURA have been a very interesting introduction to Estelon speakers for me and I hope to look at the bigger brothers in the future.

For the full specification of the Estelon AURA speakers see their website linked here