The room that disappeared
For a few moments, I was no longer in a hi-fi store in Cascais.
Al Di Meola, John McLaughlin and Paco de Lucía were there, spinning on the Avid Acutus platter. Playing only for me. Not as a recorded document, not as sound reproduction — as an almost physical presence, occupying the same space I was in.
The illusion broke when the audience applauded. At that instant, the room came back. Consciousness returned to where my body was.
And I noticed something unsettling: I wasn’t only surrounded by the people present at the demonstration. I was also, paradoxically and in imagination, surrounded by those who had been at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco on that night in 1980.
A temporal short circuit. An overlap of realities — and I write this fully aware that it invites ridicule.
What happened there was not “good stereo imaging” or even “an excellent soundstage.” It was something harder to name: the temporary suspension of the idea of reproduction. A kind of table dance by the three brides of Dracula as imagined by Francis Ford Coppola — except that instead of Monica Bellucci’s languid eroticism, I got the absolute virtuosity of three guitars. The three interpreters, there, only for me.
This illusion has a history. And very precise conditions.
The starting point — TAD ME1TX
My first truly striking experience with TAD loudspeakers happened with the ME1TX, a model below the CE1TX in the Japanese manufacturer’s hierarchy, at the first Hi-Fi Show at Estoril. Later, a second dedicated session in-store completed the picture. That material gave rise to a first article on the TAD ME1TX — including an exclusive interview with the brand’s president, which I recommend revisiting not as archive, but as the emotional and technical context for what follows.
It was not a neutral experience. There was physical impact — goosebumps not as a figure of speech, but as involuntary response to the realism of it.
The ME1TX has immediate energy, speed, attack. A presence that doesn’t come from analytical detail alone but above all from structural coherence. It was there that I began to understand the philosophy of this Japanese manufacturer. It doesn’t live in technical discourse — it lives in an intention that is audible.
What these loudspeakers offer is not artificial scale or sonic drama. It’s focus. The music didn’t seem reproduced — it seemed to already be there, waiting to be found.
The natural evolution — TAD CE1TX
The ME1TX opened the window onto the TAD philosophy.
The CE1TX revealed another dimension: maturity — which here does not mean softness or retreat. It means the absence of any need to prove something. Two different states of the same conviction.
The system
João Pina, the name behind Exaudio, built the context for this demonstration at his store in Cascais: AVID Acutus turntable with Altus tonearm and Shelter Harmony cartridge, EMT 128 phono stage, TAD-D1000-TX SACD player and Lumin U2X streamer with conversion handled by the Japanese player’s internal DAC, TAD C1000 preamplifier and M1000 power-amp, Plixir power conditioning, ZenSati cabling.
The list matters less than what was felt: there were no components. There was a single organism. And it was that absence of seams that made everything else possible.
What is different about the CE1TX
Where the ME1TX arrives with immediate impact, the CE1TX is made of different material.
Any comparison drawn from here carries the appropriate discount of months between listening sessions, and everything that implies. Even so: the difference between these siblings is not tonal. It runs deeper. It is structural.
What I experienced with the CE1TX was a temporal alignment that prevents the music from separating into attributes. Not just resolution, not just detail — the music arriving whole, with no single element asserting itself at the expense of another. I’m not referring to the familiar liquid fluidity associated with valve-driven systems. Everything was precisely delineated, but every instrument, every sound, working together. There were no soloists here.
TAD has an evident obsession with the absence of artificiality: don’t add, don’t subtract, don’t decorate. And that is precisely what explains how effortlessly the system simply disappears.
I have experienced immersion in other contexts — usually through the spatial scale of large loudspeakers or an expansive soundstage. This was different. The CE1TX does not create an impressive space. It creates the condition for forgetting that reproduction exists at all. That night at the Warfield Theatre in San Francisco, experienced on a Saturday afternoon in a store in Cascais, was real for as long as it lasted.
Sweet spot — the truth and the rest of the room
But this magic has a centre.
In the sweet spot, the realism is absolute — unsettlingly stable. The image is solid, with a presence that feels revealed rather than constructed.
Half a metre to the side and the picture changes: the bass thickens, likely due to the design of the lateral ports and the demands they place on positioning relative to the front wall. The image remains wide, but loses that almost tactile quality that exists only at the centre.
Outside that ideal position, the system remains extraordinary. But it stops being hypnotic.
This is not a criticism. It is a description of what these loudspeakers are: precision instruments built for deliberate listening, not musical background consumption. Made for those who choose to stop. For those who choose to stay.
The illusion exists. But it requires complicity.
Listening to these loudspeakers is like driving a single-seater. For those watching from the grandstands, it is also a spectacle worth the price of a ticket. But the real experience — whole and complete — belongs only to whoever sits in the sweet spot.
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