Even audio/video geeks cannot escape this decade’s hottest trend in maleness: metrosexuality. It denotes men who devote unusual attention to their appearance and their surroundings. Metrosexuals get stylish haircuts, load their lavatories with skin-care products, and fill their homes with designer furniture. As one who focuses more on technology than on fashion, embracing metrosexuality is a struggle for me, but I have no choice. Otherwise, I’d have to content myself with dating female truckers.

Fortunately, Jamo is helping me in my quest by introducing a line of products styled by a female industrial design team, Birgitte Smedegaard and Sine Weis Damkjær. The latest project from Smedegaard and Weis is A 7, a speaker system comprising mostly long, slim speakers, and designed primarily for use with plasma TVs and slim rear-projection sets.

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The black disk atop the A 7SUB subwoofer (above) is not only a stylish design touch. It doubles as an easily accessible volume control for the sub. A blue halo around the disk makes it easy to find in the dark. (Clcik image to enlarge)

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Each of the speakers on its own is a gem of industrial design, but together they really impress. Design motifs—slim silver stripes bisecting fields of black, black disks ringed in silver, and a plenitude of distinctive convex surfaces instead of the usual flat sides—echo through the entire line. The silver-ringed black circle atop the subwoofer sports a ghostly illuminated blue halo and serves as an easy-to-access volume control. The iPod perhaps excepted, industrial design in the audio world does not get better than this.

Although it may seem tacky and oh-so-1990s to delve into the technical details of A 7, old habits die hard. So suffer. The flagship model of the line is the A 775, a floorstanding speaker with two 4-inch woofers and a tweeter inside one of the woofers. Next is the A 7CEN, a center speaker designed exclusively for wall-mounting; it packs a couple of even smaller woofers and a tweeter that matches the A775’s. Filling out the low end is the A 7SUB, which has a high-excursion 10-inch driver propelled by a 200-watt internal amp. Finally, there’s the A 702, a minispeaker that’s essentially a much shorter version of the A 775, with a single woofer. At my request, Jamo sends me four A 775s, one A 7CEN, and one A 7SUB.

I must confess that initially, my expectations about A 7’s sound quality decline even as my impressions of its visual aesthetics soar. What scares me is the convex front baffles. The pronounced vertical corners of these baffles are likely to radiate high-frequency sounds on their own, smearing the soundwaves emanating from the tweeter. Also, the convex surface should create a slight megaphone effect in the midrange—and you know how unnatural a megaphone sounds.The funny thing is, though, that I hear no trace of these effects when I fire up the speakers. Through the A 775s, voices sound surprisingly natural, even when I play music by singers (Donald Fagen and Ron Sexsmith, to cite a couple) whose voices sound ragged through most speakers. The A 7CEN center speaker, despite its smaller drivers, seems to equal its big brother’s performance; the voices on my favorite Dolby Digital and DTS 5.1-channel concert videos sound satisfyingly smooth.

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The skills of industrial design team Smedegaard and Weis show in the A 7 speakers: Note the recurrence of convex lines in the subwoofer and in the non-removable grilles of the A 775 and the A 7 CEN. (Clcik image to enlarge)

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What’s more, the imaging of the A 775s is world-class—instruments and voices float eerily between the two speakers. When I play my favorite audiophile recordings, instruments that were placed far from the microphone seem to come from dozens of feet behind the A 775s. I expect to hear this effect with large, high-end loudspeakers, but not from style-focused models like these.

The A 7SUB does not look like much, but it easily fills my 14-by-26-foot listening room with bass. Jamo tuned it with a just-right balance between tightness and fullness; it is both sufficiently precise and gratifyingly robust. With the A 775s crossed over to the A 7SUB at 60 hertz (easy to do with most newer receivers), the system sounds shockingly dynamic. Only the most bass-heavy soundtracks tax the sub’s capability—as they would almost any 10-inch subwoofer.

The A 7’s sole idiosyncrasy is an overemphasis in the upper treble region. This does not affect voices, but treble-intensive instruments such as acoustic guitar and cymbals sound bright and occasionally fatiguing. Because this characteristic is dictated almost solely by the choice of tweeter, I assume the effect is intentional on Jamo’s part; bright-sounding speakers tend to win out on the showroom floor. And some people simply like their sound that way. I learned this lesson when the ravishing woman whose attention I have attracted (thanks in part to recent improvements in my wardrobe and hairstyle) surreptitiously cranked up the treble on my car stereo while I was paying the parking attendant. (Click image to enlarge)

It is a real treat to encounter a system in which so much attention has been lavished on the look, yet the engineering has not been neglected. Next time you find a few free minutes between your manicure and your visit to the Armani Exchange, stop by your nearest Jamo dealer and give the A 7 a listen.DESCRIPTION
Speaker system for stereo or home theater applications. Consists of floorstanding speakers, subwoofer, and center speaker; bookshelf speaker also available

COMPONENTS
A 775: 2 4-inch woofers, one with coaxially mounted 0.8-inch tweeter
A 7CEN: 2 3.6-inch woofers, 0.8-inch tweeter
A 7SUB: 10-inch woofer, 260-watt digital amplifier

CONNECTIONS
A 775: spring-loaded binding posts, accepts bare wire or pins
A 7CEN: same as above
A 7SUB: line-level input and output

PRICE/CONTACT
PRICE: A 775 $999 each, A 7CEN $599 each, A 7SUB $699 each, A 702 $359 each
CONTACT: 847.465.0005, www.jamospeakers.com