WHATMoUgH SIgnATURE pRogEny LoUdSpEAkERS

Loudspeakers

The Progeny was Colin Whatmough’s last design, and is certainly one of his greatest, yet there’s one that is even better…

When I reviewed Whatmough’s then-new Paragon loudspeakers ‘way back in 2005, I posited that they were Australia’s best, and my reviewer cohort at the time agreed. I still think they’re Australia’s best loudspeakers, but in the almost ten years the Paragons have been available, they’ve not exactly been running out the doors. One reason might be their price, which at $50,000 is certainly a hurdle, but another is almost cer- tainly their size and weight. Not many music lovers are prepared to have a pair of 1.57 metre tall, 250kg behemoths in their room… no matter how good they might sound!

Which is where the very-aptly named Progeny loudspeakers come in. As the name infers, the Whatmough Progeny is a direct lineal descendant of the flagship Paragon that, in according to Kee Whatmough: ‘ was the result of an intense research and development project to create a speaker that shared the same DNA as the flagship Paragon but packaged it into a more compact form to cater to a wider variety of listening rooms.’

The Progeny is not only ‘more compact’— it’s also considerably more economical and, even better, sounds very nearly as good…

The Equipment

It’s very easy to see the Progeny ‘shares the DNA’ of the Paragon because, like its forbear, it is a full three-way passive bass reflex

loudspeaker augmented by an active sub-bass enclosure. However unlike the Paragon, whose enormous size necessitated the use of two completely separate cabinets for the passive enclosure and the active sub-bass enclosure, the somewhat smaller stature of the Progeny means that Whatmough has been able to deliver each channel completely self-contained in its own cabinet. And what a cabinet it is! Our review sample came in a stunning, super-glossy Ferrari red lacquer finish, but the finish you choose is limited only by your imagination because, for the Progeny, Whatmough offers you your choice of any painted finish, any real timber veneer finish—or even a part-painted/part-veneered cabinet—in an enormous variety of colours and veneers. But make careful note that being close to half the size of the Paragons doesn’t make the Progenies small! In fact, each one stands 1,190mm high, 530mm deep and 570mm wide… and each one weighs 86kg.

The three drivers visible on the upper part of the enclosure comprise the threeway passive section of the Progeny. At the bottom is a 165mm bass driver, above it is a 100mm polyglass midrange driver and above that a 35mm dual concentric tweeter with a waveguide centre plug. The driver you can’t see (from wherever you look!) is the 250mmdiameter sub-bass driver that is powered by a Class A/B amplifier Whatmough rates with an output of 240-watts. You can’t see it because this sub-bass driver is completely enclosed within the lower section of the Progeny’s cabinetry, which is divided into internal chambers in such a way that the sub-bass driver operates in a band-pass mode, effectively maximising the lowest bass, while simultaneously filtering out the unwanted infrasonic and ultrasonic components. Since I was unable to open the cabinet, I was unable to determine whether Whatmough’s implementation of this design in the Progeny is a 4th-order bandpass or a 6th-order bandpass. Either way, the proof would be in the pudding… as you will discover for yourself in a few paragraphs.

Anyone who subscribes to the ‘world’s best tweeter’ forum will have already recognised the tweeter used in the Signature Progeny as a ScanSpeak ‘Revelator’ ring radiator tweeter, but in this case Whatmough has incorporated some of its own ‘tweaks’ to reduce distortion and eliminate power compression. It has a large-ringed neodymium magnet driving a 35mm diaphragm via a ‘symmetrical drive’ motor system. The rear chamber has a non-resonant aluminium housing, and the front plate is made from machined aluminium that is coated in black anodising. (ScanSpeak Revelators are made in Denmark, and their most visually most obvious feature is their pointy ‘Madonna bra’ anodised aluminium phase plug. Regrettably, the cost of this tweeter—ten times that of standard highquality tweeters—means that there are many Chinese manufacturers making low-cost imitations that are finding their way onto markets right around the world. Whatmough makes sure it’s getting the real thing by buying its tweeters direct from Denmark.)

On the rear of the Progeny you’ll find the upper section of the cabinet has three pairs of speaker binding posts, enabling the speaker to be tri-amplified (or tri-wired) if desired. Providing three pairs was not an inexpensive exercise for Whatmough either, because they’re made in the USA by Cardas from solid copper that’s first silverplated then Rhodium-coated for maximum conductivity. In the event you don’t wish to tri-amp, remember that the Progeny can also be bi-amped, and you can choose whether you want to have one amp driving the bass and midrange drivers and the other amp the tweeter, or one amp driving the bass driver and the other for the midrange and tweeter. (If you do bi-amp, I’d recommend the latter).

Because they’re built entirely in Australia by Whatmough, you have a choice of a wide variety of finishes, indeed you can pretty much specify what you like (within reason!)… as I mentioned earlier, but you should note that the price published in the information panel of this review is for a standard single-colour gloss painted finish. Special-order finishes attract a premium.

Whatmough specifies the Progeny with a frequency response of 25Hz to 40kHz ±3dB, an efficiency of 89dBSPL (2.83V/1 metre) and a nominal impedance of 8Ω.

In Use and Listening Sessions

I’d recommend getting some assistance when positioning the Progenies in your listening room, because their size, weight and, most significantly, shape, mean they are difficult to manhandle. I would also strongly recommend you use banana or spade connectors on the ends of your speaker cables, because although I didn’t doubt the electrical qualities of the Cardas connectors, I found they didn’t grip onto bare wire strands—especially the exotic ‘soft’ copper types—firmly enough for my liking. Take a look at the base of the Progenies and you’ll have no doubt they’ll be securely anchored to your floor: Whatmough provides the largest spikes I have ever seen and these, in turn, screw into massive girders that run underneath the speakers. Not only are these spikes rock-solid, they’re also super-easy to adjust, because it’s all done from above the girders, rather than below them, and there’s a huge locking nut to keep everything aligned after you’ve finished.

I needed some assistance to ‘tune’ the active bass section of the Progeny, because Whatmough did not provide me with any calibration information that could give me a starting point, but this information is

apparently now included in the instruction manuals supplied with the Progenies that are now in-store at retailers around Australia. When I was calibrating the infra-bass section (there are adjustments for phase, crossover frequency and level), I found I needed to be extremely careful because the volume control was very sensitive. I discovered that moving it more than a few a hairs’ breadths was the difference between there being ‘too little bass’ and ‘too much’, so I felt rather like a surgeon performing a delicate operation. It’s my personal opinion that the volume control was too adjustable, in that it offered ‘way much more adjustment than anyone will ever need. Although the control goes from around ‘7-o’clock’ to ‘5-o’clock’, I found the tiny region between 9-o’clock and 10-o’clock covered all the volume settings you’re ever practically likely to use (unless you’re a real bass-head, in which case even 11-o’clock’ would be overkill!). When I brought this issue up with Whatmough, I was told they were already on top of it, and the volume controls on the models that will be available when this issue of the magazine goes on sale will have been ‘de-sensitised’ to make them more user-friendly.

During the process of setting the bass to my liking, I fell in love with it! First, the Whatmough Progenies’ bass is truly subterranean in nature: very real, very satisfying and very definitely deep… so deep, in fact, that you will never— ever— feel the need to cough up for a subwoofer! Second, you can tune the bass individually for each speaker, which enables you to very easily compensate for the vagaries of your room’s acoustics if you have the speakers in nonsymmetrical positions in your room, or if the

The Whatmough Progenies’ bass is truly subterranean in nature: very real, very satisfying and very definitely deep…

surface near the left speaker is different from the surface near the right speaker (a window on the left and a wall on the right, for example). Third, you can dial in exactly the level of deep bass you need, depending on your personal preference and whatever level works best with whatever musical genres you most enjoy. Last, but most importantly, the musical quality of the deep bass is better than any speaker I’ve heard since I auditioned Whatmough’s own Paragons. I played the Guillou/Dorian recording of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor over and over again, at very high volume, absolutely revelling in the lowest notes, which literally shook the walls. It was as if the Great Organ of St Eustache was in my listening room. All I can say is: Wow!

At the risk of repeating myself—as in saying ‘wow’ again—that’s also exactly what I said about the totality of the performance from the Whatmough Signature Progeny, because as a complete speaker system, it didn’t have a weakness anywhere. The upper bass segued impeccably with the sub-bass module, imparting speed and enthusiasm to any rhythm section, before handing over equally seamlessly to the midrange driver. As you’d expect of any high-quality midrange driver, the one in the Progeny delivered detailed, superbly linear and unrestrainedly dynamic sound… as it very well should, given that it’s able to operate on its own, totally freed of the constraints of having to do anything other that what it does best! I had great fun auditioning an entire CD rich in midrange—‘Jumping on the Highwire’ by The Perch Creek Family Jugband. Despite the huge amount of midrange information on this album, the Progeny individualised the multiple strands… most significantly the unison singing, but also the different sounds of the motley assortment of musical instruments (it is a jug band, after all).

As for that famous Revelator tweeter, I have to say that despite its reputation, I have heard it sound less than fabulous in the wrong designer’s hands. However, it was obviously in safe hands in this ultimate design from Colin Whatmough, who designed it when he was at the peak of his powers. I was amazed in particular listening to ‘Let Me Love You’, from LA artist Raj, whose sonic landscapes are so confronting and confusing—particularly what he’s doing in the high frequency areas— that I’ve never really understood them until I heard them revealed by the Progenies… so now I’m a fan of both.

My only real caution about auditioning the Progenies (other than to watch out, because if you listen to them, you’ll want to buy them!) is that you should be certain to use a powerful amplifier, because I found that the more powerful the amplifier I used to drive them, the more open and realistic they sounded.

CONCLUSION

It’s a simple choice really. If you’re in the market for a pair of state-of-the-art loudspeakers, forget the overpriced imports. If you have space for a pair of Whatmough’s Paragons in your room, buy them. Otherwise, the Progenies should be your first choice. They sound amazing. Once again, Wow!

greg borrowman

Laboratory test results

Newport Test Labs first measured the in-room frequency response of the Whatmough Signature Progeny, using a pink noise test signal, and averaging the results of nine different microphone positions, the result of which is shown in Graph 1. You can see the Progeny’s response is exceptionally flat and linear, and particularly extended in the bass. As graphed the response extends from around 28Hz right up to the graphing limit within ±2.5dB, and between 70Hz and 10kHz it’s better than ±2dB. The very bass rolls off only very slowly, such that it’s only 5dB down at 20Hz, which means the Progeny’s low-frequency response is superior to that of a great many high-end subwoofers.

Graph 2 shows the Whatmough Progeny’s high-frequency response, measured using a gating technique that gives the same result that would be obtained in an anechoic chamber. You can see that the ±2dB frequency response ‘window’ shown in Graph 1 actually extends out to 20kHz, after which the tweeter rolls off very slowly to end up 3dB down at 40kHz (this time, that high figure is the reliable calibrated measurement limit of the measuring equipment… not the limit of the tweeter’s high-frequency response). This means that between Graphs 1 and 2, the overall frequency response of the Whatmough Progeny was measured by Newport Test Labs as being 25Hz to 40kHz ±3dB, exactly as specified by Whatmough.

In order to show the low-frequency frequency response of the Whatmough Progeny in detail, Newport Test Labs used the well-known nearfield measurement technique developed by Don Keele when he

was working at Electro-Voice. You can see that the output of the active bandpass section (delivered to the room through the slot at the bottom of the Progeny) is very wellbehaved, with an actual response that’s ±3dB between 25Hz and 92Hz (red trace on the graph). Below and above these frequencies, the slot’s output drops off extremely quickly, just as bandpass speaker theory predicts. At the point the slot’s output starts dropping, the response of the bass driver in the passive section (black trace) starts coming into the picture, but starts rolling off above 200Hz to allow the midrange driver (blue trace) to take over. The output of the port in the passive section of the Progeny peaks at 45Hz, to compensate for the bass driver’s roll-off, but there’s some unwanted energy from the port up at 160Hz. However, because the traces on this graph had not been compensated for radiating area I couldn’t determine the relativity of the outputs, but the port output does seem to have a minor effect on the overall response, as you can see from the irregularity in the trace of the nearfield plot of the bass driver, and from the very slight lift at this frequency in the in-room response.

As you can see for yourself, the Whatmough Signature Progeny performed phenomenally well in all Newport Test Labs’ testing...

Graph 4 shows the impedance of the passive section of the Progeny which shows evidence of considerable ‘fine-tuning’ of the design, by means of the crossover and cabinet layout, particularly in the low-frequency and high-frequency areas. Despite this—or perhaps because of it—the design will be an easy load for any amplifier, but I would advise using an amplifier that is comfortable driving 4Ω loads, because the impedance of the Progeny remains almost entirely below 8Ω between 75Hz and 4kHz, which is where most musical energy is going to appear, and dips below 4Ω between around 120Hz and 140Hz (and is below 5Ω from 90Hz to 180Hz). According to the International Electrotechnical Committee’s regulations (specifically IEC 268-5-16.1) this modulus means the nominal impedance of the Progeny should be stated at 4Ω. On the same graph you can see the absolute phase of the design, and it’s excellent, being within ±15° from 160Hz to beyond 40kHz. Below this frequency, it swings to just +39° and –75°. This is a marvellous result.

Graph 5 shows the totality of the Whatmough Signature Progeny’s frequency response on a single graph, via the technique of splicing (using post-processing) the averaged unsmoothed in-room response (from Graph 1) to the unsmoothed gated high-frequency response (From Graph 2). Graph 6 shows another post-processed view of the Progeny’s response, showing how the various drivers interact and the various measurement techniques correlate. Note that in this graph, the high-frequency response of the midrange driver has been manually cutoff at 1.4kHz as part of the post-processing process, and the gated response (the pink trace) has here been third-octave smoothed (the unsmoothed response is that shown in Graph 2 and in Graph 5 above 2kHz.)

The sensitivity of the Whatmough Signature Progeny was measured as being 87dBSPL using Newport Test Labs’ usual stringent testing technique (that is, measured at one metre using a 2.83Veq wideband pink noise signal). The measurement was made with the Progeny’s active bass section adjusted to give the flattest in-room response. Although this result is 3dB lower than Whatmough’s specification, Whatmough could have set the level of the active bass module slightly higher when making its measurement, and or used a different test signal and/or level. As regular readers will know, the result of 87dBSPL returned by the Progeny is right on the statistical ‘average’ for all loudspeakers. Because of this result, I’d recommend using an amplifier with a power rating of at least 80–100-watts per channel to achieve best results.

As you can see for yourself, the Whatmough Signature Progeny performed phenomenally well in all Newport Test Labs’ tests, returning a superbly flat and extended frequency responses, a well-controlled and manageable impedance modulus and regulation efficiency. A superb design.