Cambridge Audio Evo One Review

Pricing

In the UK, the Evo One is available for £1,299, both from Cambridge Audio directly and via the Richer Sounds nationwide chain of stores.  In the USA it is available for $1,499 USD via a direct sales model. In Australia it can be had for $2,499 AUD.

This is a price that puts the Cambridge in the midst of a few rivals. Naim’s venerable but capable Mu-So 2^nd Generation is now no less than £500 cheaper but rival offerings from Ruark and Sonus faber are more expensive. When you consider that the Evo One has no need of any other equipment to be a fully functional audio system, it feels decent value.

Design

• It’s big… really big.
• Drivers are placed on three sides
• Large display and great interface
• Wood effect won’t be for everyone

The Evo One is no less than 675mm wide. In abstract, 67 cms doesn’t sound that big but I can assure you that it’s going to need a bit of room – something that will be rammed home when the even bigger box shows up on your doorstep. I would strongly suggest getting a tape measure and noting what the effect of parking an object this wide on it will be before you take the plunge.

Something else to consider is that the Evo One has functioning drivers on both the front and sides of the chassis. This is for solid sonic reasons that I’ll come to but it does mean that the Evo One really does like a bit of space around it and putting it in an alcove is likely to sound a bit weird. Not only is this a larger speaker than most of its rivals but it is more demanding about where it needs to go.

From here though, the Evo One starts to do a better job of winning you over. Like other Cambridge Audio network audio devices, it uses the company’s StreamMagic app and this is A Good Thing. Control apps are very personal and subjective but… I really like Stream Magic.

As a means of browsing a locally stored library, it delivers on both phone and tablet in a way that I still don’t find reliably replicated on some other offerings. Little details like the horseshoe shaped volume (that allows for excellent fine adjustment and can’t be accidentally wound to max with a slip of a finger) show an attention to detail that I like a great deal. Other than a slightly clunky first connection to a network, it’s great.

This is helped by the decision to fit the Evo One with a display and a selection of physical controls, backed up by an IR remote handset. Some of these devices feel that they will only do something useful with a phone or tablet out and the Cambridge neatly avoids that. The supplied remote isn’t terribly pretty but it’s easy to use and you never feel you ‘have’ to fire the app up to make the Cambridge do something minor. The screen legibility is superb and the different display options should cover off most requirements people are likely to have and it makes this an easy device to live with.

The general design of the Evo One is decent too. The foot arrangement underneath (slightly) reduces the sense of mass and it’s very well screwed together. The wood effect top panel is going to divide opinion a little though. The effect is to make the Evo One look slightly old fashioned and trad in a way that some competitors don’t.

The related Evo streaming amps have interchangeable side plates to do away with the wood should you choose. Realistically this panel was too large to do the same but it does reduce the appeal slightly.

Features

• 14 amps and drivers
• Streaming module with AirPlay 2 and Google Cast
• Additional inputs
• Some on board EQ

Ever since the wide wireless speaker appeared, they’ve been responsible for some of the more…unusual…written specifications in the industry. Even allowing for this, the Evo One is particularly notable.

There are no less than 14 (fourteen) drivers at work in the chassis; 4 x 1-inch silk dome tweeters, 4 x 2.25-inch aluminium cone mid-range, 6 x 2.75-inch long-throw woofers. Each one of these drivers has its own 50 class D amplifier making the Cambridge one of the most populated devices I can recall testing.

Key to understanding how the Evo One works is that, while some of the drivers fire forward as you might expect, plenty of them also operate on either end of the chassis (with the potential positioning issues we’ve already noted). These drivers are intended to boost the width and space of the presentation from the single chassis. Something that is also worth noting is that the use of multiple small drivers for bass response is different to many rivals who sum the low frequency signal to mono and send it to a single larger driver. Cambridge can’t be accused of derivative thinking here.

The streaming module will undertake the bulk of work for most owners and can read local network files to 24/384 and DSD128 supported by access to Qobuz, Tidal, Amazon, Deezer and Spotify with relevant Connect support for all the services so equipped. AirPlay 2 and Google Cast support this alongside a really very good internet radio implementation. There isn’t much streaming content that the Evo One can’t access.

This is supported by a selection of additional inputs, the most important of which is a HDMI eARC connection that allows a TV to power the Evo One up and control the level via the TV remote. This is joined by a USB connection for local storage, a single optical input and a pair of RCA analogue inputs, one a line input and one a moving magnet phono stage.

I admire the thoroughness of fitting such a thing but I query quite how much use it will see use. Even when a turntable is present,  many of the ones that do will be to turntables with their own phono stage on board. There is the small matter of the space being needed for this being pretty significant as well.

In the StreamMagic app, there is a seven band adjustable EQ that sits alongside an g option to feed back the reflectivity of your room to the app for the Evo One to compensate for. It’s a welcome addition but it’s nowhere near as intuitive as some of the options being fitted to ‘just add speakers’ style electronics and, while it’s free, it can’t get near the facilities that Dirac offers. 

Sound Quality

• Slightly too much bass for music…
• …but it’s great for film and TV
• Plenty of headroom
• Capable of being a genuine hifi device

I tested the Evo One on one end of the large (three unit wide) Quadraspire rack I’ve owned for some years and that has played host to a few of these designs over the years. From the outset, the Evo One demonstrated some very hefty low end.

The newly released Night Flight, the remixes of Public Service Broadcasting’s The Last Flight has some deep bass at various points and, with the Evo One sat on the Quadraspire and the EQ set to flat, the bass output dominates proceedings. It’s impressively deep but it drowns out some of the detail present in the recording.

This effect isn’t limited to deep electronic bass either. The rapid kick drum at the beginning of The Bravery’s Honest Mistake is slightly blurred; the Evo One not quite ‘finishing’ each drum strike before the next one begins, It robs the music of some of the punch and energy it should have. Thanks to the wholly straightforward equaliser, it’s possible to tweak the bass extension a little and the bass extension falls back more closely to what I would regard as flat in this room.

With this done, the Evo One begins to reflect some more qualities of its builders. The easiest way to sum this up is that the Cambridge will never blow you away in the first 30 seconds of listening. Even the first few minutes are unlikely to stir the passions too far.

It’s after an album or so or even better an evening ploughing through your music collection before you realise that the Cambridge never sounds ‘forward’ or ‘soft’ or anything other than a good fit for the material being played.

For any given song that you have heard thousands of times, there might be one key rival that does that one song a fraction better but then you’ll play a different genre of song you love and it would be a different device that might be a fraction better but the Cambridge still superb. Cut an Evo One in half and it’s likely to have ‘ALL ROUNDER’ written through the middle like a stick of rock.

That slightly overwhelming low end serves a purpose too. Reset the EQ to flat (which is easy as you can save the music one as a preset and turn it on and off as needed) and the performance with TV and film is joyously hefty.

Re-watching the final episode of the most recent season of Reacher is extremely satisfying. The punches that the two man mountains land on one another have an impact you feel as well as hear and its extremely entertaining. There will be a few people that are put out that the Cambridge doesn’t have a sub out but I suspect most people will never need one.

They also won’t be troubling the upper reaches of the volume much either. At no stage in testing any aspect of the Evo One’s functionality have I made it past 35 on the 100 step volume and that was LOUD. Not – ‘ooh, I need to raise my voice’ loud, I mean ‘the cat has run out the room and I’m glad my neighbour is out’ loud.

The performance is usefully expansive too. Compared to a genuine two speaker stereo setup, the Evo One is unavoidably single point but the sound expands convincingly around the chassis in a way that is consistently room filling.

Having tweaked the EQ to your satisfaction, the Evo One can genuinely deliver the goods as a hi-fi product. Listening to Carbon Based Lifeforms’ Seeker, the Cambridge delivers the dense, shifting electronic soundscapes in a way that has you want to keep listening, even with more deluxe gear sat in the same rack.

I was also pleasantly surprised by the phono stage. It’s fractionally low on gain compared to the other connections and I still don’t know how many people will use it but the performance on offer is very respectable.

Should you buy it?