ELAC Elegant BS 305 Review: Small but loud

Design

• 208 x 123 x 270mm (HWD)
• Aluminium cabinet
• Choice of (cost-option) grilles

Two things are competing for the title of ‘most obvious’ where the design of the Elegant BS 305 is concerned. One is the slightly unusual, and unarguably compact, dimensions: at 208 x 123 x 270mm (HWD), they’re unarguably striking in a small-scale kind of way.

The other is the use of aluminium for the cabinet – no matter if you choose the black or white option of finish, it makes for a speaker that looks distinct and is an unusual proposition where tactility is concerned, too.

ELAC will tell you it’s selected aluminium for the cabinet here because it means the front of the speaker has a minimal amount of baffle. Which means the front of the speaker is almost entirely filled by a couple of drivers, and which also means the BS 305 will sound notably spacious and airy for a speaker of this sort of size. That’s the theory, anyway.

The monochrome choice of finishes can be alleviated somewhat if you decide to spend a little more on the bespoke selection of grilles ELAC offers. Black, blue, red, yellow or white are all available, with either black or white surrounds.

Specification

• 25mm fabric dome tweeter, 115mm aluminium sandwich mid/bass driver
• Rear-firing bass reflex port
• Single pair of speaker binding posts

At the rear of that disproportionately deep cabinet you’ll find speaker binding posts for use with banana plugs, spades or bare wire. Above them there’s a fairly large bass reflex port, which needs to be considered when it comes to positioning – this cabinet is longer than it is tall or wide, and so is not quite the no-brainer for positioning on a shelf as you might at first imagine.

If you can accommodate the speaker on a shelf, though, ELAC is happy to sell you the ‘arulastic base’ it’s developed to help decouple it from the surface it’s sitting on. It’s an aluminium plate, inlaid with elastic rubber – and it can also be fitted between the speaker and the top plate of the bespoke LS 60 speaker stand ELAC has developed for the Elegant range.

Up front, the slim cabinet walls mean the face of the speaker is basically all driver. There’s a 25mm fabric dome tweeter in the upper section, above a 115mm mid/bass driver. This driver is aluminium too, in a ‘sandwich’ arrangement and sitting ahead of an optimised magnet system.

ELAC reckons this pairing, along with the contributions from the reflex port, is capable of a frequency response of 42Hz – 23kHz – which, by the standards of compact standmounting loudspeakers, is some going if it’s anything near accurate.

Sound Quality

• Open, airy and direct sound
• Detail and dynamism to spare
• Can occasionally sound rather unyielding

Some speakers almost have to be coaxed into revealing their character and giving a flavour of their overriding sound. The ELAC Elegant BS 305, it seems fair to say, are not those speakers – they lay it all out for you the very moment you fire them up. Character? Attitude? Oh yes indeed.

That’s not to say these speakers are feral or even ill-controlled performers, though – in fact, when the material calls for it they’re capable of a fair degree of refinement. But fundamentally, the BS 305 are a direct, positive, energetic and entertaining listen – and it’s difficult not to get swept up in their unequivocal nature.

Amplified by an equally diminutive Cambridge Audio MXW70 and in receipt of a 24-bit/48kHz FLAC file of Call a Doctor by Girl and Girl, the ELAC combine balance with attack in the most agreeable manner. They’re able to dish even the most fleeting, transient details confidently, putting them all into convincing context – but at the same time they absolute power through the recording with something approaching relish.

The claims for extension down to 42Hz seem, quite honestly, fanciful – but the low frequencies the BS 305 generate are unarguably deep, properly shaped, carefully controlled and loaded with information regarding tone and texture.

They’re sure-footed when it comes to rhythmic expression thanks to the straight-edge approach to the attack of bass sounds, and momentum is never in doubt. And at the opposite end of the frequency range, treble sounds are substantial and bright – and just as detailed as the bottom end.

In the midrange, the ELAC are among the most straightforwardly communicative little speakers this sort of money can buy. They’re at their most direct and positive when describing a voice, and they allow a vocal to project well without it ever sounding remote or in any way estranged from everything that might be going on around it.

Listen to the ELAC serving up Horace Andy’s voice during Skylarking and the details of his technique are just as available as the sense of his commitment and emotional state.

The frequency range is produced evenly, with no sense of over- or understatement at any point. And the tonal balance of the BS 305 is just as judicious – they take note of the heat in the Horace Andy recording, just as surely as they observe the chill in Kraftwerk’s Trans Europe Express.

Dynamic headroom is more than adequate to track the changes in attack or intensity in each of these recordings, and the minor-but-critical harmonic variations are equally well attended to.

And when it comes to soundstaging, all ELAC’s claims for the openness and airiness of presentation the design of the cabinet offers seem perfectly justified. The BS 305 are a spacious, well-defined listen, able to give every participant in a recording the elbow-room they need to express themselves even if the stage is packed with contributors.

And they open up a stage and give everyone some breathing space without losing the singularity, the sense of performance, in a recording.

In fact, the only note of caution worth sounding concerns the attitude of these ELAC speakers rather than any shortcoming in the technical aspects of what they’re doing. As I mentioned, they’re a gregarious and energetic listen – and there can be a mild downside to this.

Something quiet and contemplative (like Cate Le Bon’s Mug Museum, say) doesn’t really float the boat of the BS 305 – they’re less at home describing small-scale, hushed recordings and they can be almost audibly impatient. Everything about their performance where detail retrieval, tonal fidelity and so on is concerned is still in place, you understand… they just sound a bit as if they’re waiting for the next opportunity to get on down.      

Should you buy it?