Teufel Ultima 40 Floorstanding Loudspeakers review

The Teufel Ultima 40 is the latest stereo speaker from German direct-to-the-public manufacturer, Teufel Audio to hit my living room floor. I had assumed (mainly because I was too lazy to check in advance) that it would be a smaller sibling to the Ultima 60 that I reviewed back in November 2009, but it turned out to be a direct evolution of that same model - It's still a fifty litre, four driver, three way speaker, but has somehow manged to shed £17 from it's RRP to arrive at your front door for a paltry £349.

The Ultima 60 left these portals having created a broadly positive impression, so will a small price cut and the passing of two years leave a different impression this time around?

Standing 103cm high, 21cm wide and 30cm deep, with four drive units, the Ultima 40 is rather a lot of speaker for £349. To put in perspective, the £1500 Acoustic Radiance 3s I reviewed recently, are actually 11cm shorter and basically the same width and depth. The Teufels are a large speakers relative to the modern norm, make no mistake. The black option, as reviewed, does little to disguise their size, but the heavy radius applied to the longitudinal edges of the cabinet help soften the look greatly. There is also a less imposing 'Birch' alternative, that trades the gloss black baffle and black grill cloth for silver and looks, in the pictures at least, to be a considerably lighter presence.

The wood effect vinyl wrap applied to the top, sides and rear, is one of the more pleasant looking simulated wood effects I've seen and the gloss black baffle helps to lift the overall impression further. One change from the Ultima 60, is that the baffle is now simply flush to the edges, the surrounding rebate having been dispensed with. It is a cleaner and less fussy look. The final visual change is that the plinth fitted to the 60, has been replaced by four metal feet. Whilst they look smarter they, like the plinth before them, do nothing to extend the footprint of what is a tall, top heavy loudspeaker. The base of the feet is rubberized to protect wooden floors, but doesn't offer the option of fitting spikes, so owners of carpet and rapid moving children/pets beware - these won't be the most stable speaker you have met.

Beneath the twin rear firing reflex ports, placed nice and low down, is the recessed cable terminal tray. Both it and the well fared ports, are nicely flush rebated. The terminals are gold plated and shrouded in clear plastic to help prevent shorting. Bare wire, spades or 4mm 'banana' plugs are all catered for, as is bi-wiring/bi-amping. Now a bi-wiring/bi-amping provision on a three way loudspeaker may seem a little mean, but it actually makes sense. For starters, there's no point in bi-wiring, never mind tri-wiring a speaker at this level. Indeed, anybody willing to shell out on six channels of amplification to tri-amp a £350 loudspeaker could, justifiably, be accused of having lost the plot. What is common enough though, is an unused pair of rear channel surround amplifiers in even the most modest AV receivers.

By allowing the extra pair of terminals, Teufel have allowed you to put them to use which can be of benefit.

Internal inspection reveals an 18mm MDF carcass braced with three horizontal braces. The top one, partitions the mid range driver in it's own sealed cavity, which has a light fill BAF (Bonded Acrylic Fibre) wadding stuck to the rear to help with internal reflections. The lower compartment contains the tweeter, bass drivers, ports and the crossover which is fixed to the rear of the cabinet behind the upper of the two bass drivers. The nine crossover components, whilst modest in number, are of decent size and grade. Nothing from the the 'tweaky' audiophile end of the spectrum, but there are ceramic resistors and air cored inductors all well spaced. Crossover points are 540Hz and 2900Hz. Another light filling of BAF wadding to the sides of the bass cavity complete the internal picture.

The tweeter is a 25mm fabric dome with plastic face plate and ferrite magnet. The face plate is eclipsed by the pressed steel basket of the mid-range driver, in order to make these two, most critical, drivers as coincident as possible.

Contrary to its looks, the mid-range only driver is a cellulose (read paper) cone, dressed to look like a kevlar weave, and is motivated by a moderate sized magnet. The roll surround is quite large for a dedicated mid only driver, perhaps because the same driver is used for mid/bass duties elsewhere in the Ultima range. The aluminium look phase plug, is a plastic extension of the pole piece.

The cellulose coned bass drivers have completely normal convex dust caps and sport the same pressed steel basket as the mid range unit, but have far more massive ferrite magnets, with a deeper motor, promising the greater travel a bass dedicated driver needs.

After a little experimentation, measurement and listening I settled on the following - 60cm out from the front wall, 2m apart, 2.5m from the listening position and firing straight ahead. I tried plugging one and both of the ports and positions closer to the wall. In my room, the bass was too anemic with the ports plugged and more even with the distance to the wall increased. As ever, your room is different and you will have to reach your own blend of preference and/or compromise. Firing the speakers straight ahead gave the best balance between treble quality and a spacious stereo image. People with closer sidewalls may find crossing the speakers in front of the listening position works better, but again, experiment.

Settling in for a concerted listening session, the similarity to the Ultima 60s of a couple of years previous, was immediately obvious. What the Ultima 40s lack in detail, they try to make up for in a big, bouncy, full scale reproduction that suits mainstream material off modest sources. They will happily sit playing at highish volumes, delivering a weighty bottom end that suits pop/dance material and they will do so off relatively modest power.

Breaking it down from the bottom up - Bass is powerful and tuneful, although not especially deep for a speaker of this size. My larger listening room is less helpful (than my old one) at boosting bottom end weight and presents more of a challenge. I still don't think you'll find yourself craving a subwoofer as there's useful output available, even at high levels, down into the low 40Hz region in room. Bass texture is a little on the soft side, but the pitfall of peaking up the bass to provide more kick has been avoided and so bass tunes play quite nicely. Teufel have engineered a sensible balance here.

The bass through to the lower mid, is still handled by the bottom pair of bass drivers that run in parallel up to their 500Hz roll off. In the upper end of this range, significant vocal information is handled by this pair of drivers and I find the output to be excessive, with vocal and speech clarity impacted - It tends to make male voices in particular, sound overly deep, resonant and therefore a bit chesty. This is to the detriment of intelligibility in either busy musical passages, or softly spoken on screen dialogue. It is more normal that where two drivers handle bass information, one will tend to roll off as the baffle step frequency approaches. This removes it's output from the region where the speaker's efficiency increases and the extra output isn't needed, or wanted. This extra overlap, only really affects a 2-300Hz wide range, but as that range is at the bottom of the mid range, the range in which the human ear is most critical, I found it pretty obvious.

This is thrown into sharper relief as the 500Hz crossover to the dedicated mid driver, also heralds a change in tonality as the leaner, cleaner output of this unit takes over. The mid unit isn't an explicit window on detail, but it's generally a reasonably smooth sounding device, that handles it's job in a pleasant fashion, without getting too shouty. Female vocals are handled quite nicely and benefit from the wide bandwidth a dedicated mid range driver offers. Simple acoustic material is actually rather good, with a well conveyed sense of the vocalists range of expression and the leading edges of mid range dynamics are punchy without sounding overly emphasized. The only slight complaint is the way the mid range can start to get a bit crowded as complexity increases, although I would be tempted to point the finger at the lack of absorbing material in the mid range housing. Preventing reflected sound from within the cabinet, re-radiating out through the speaker cone is pretty fundamental and in this, the Ultima 40 betrays it's budget origins.

Topping this all off is the treble, which follows the mid-range lead of being pretty civilized, with only a slight zing added to the top end of cymbals and string instruments. The sibilance zone (circa 7kHz) is pretty well handled and as a balance trade off, I'd again say that Teufel have judged this well. There isn't the detail to let you know whether the percussionist has polished his brass (okay, I am kidding on this one), but at least all of the cymbals and crashes sound distinct rather than just a series of undifferentiated metallic splashes.

The extra zing, whilst not accurate, isn't overbearing and helps add an impression of top end air and is ameliorated by firing the speakers dead ahead, which worked best for stereo imaging anyway. This is one area where I found the Teufel Ultima 40s did rather well, probably because of the wide, coherent range handled by the mid range driver and the close proximity of the tweeter. Although I won't claim there was any real depth to the sound stage, the lack of excessive mid emphasis stopped vocalists from sounding like they were overly large and performing in your lap, the solid image sitting nicely between the speakers. Other images were restricted to much the same plane between the speakers, but were well defined in position and even sounds biased heavily toward one side (as opposed to only coming from one side) didn't trip up and simply collapse into sounding like they were a left/right mono sound.

Teufel Ultima 40 Floorstanding Loudspeakers review