I favorably reviewed the Epos ELS3 mini-monitor in TAS Issue 145 and that well-balanced speaker later went on to win TAS’ 2003 Budget Loudspeaker of the Year award. Though the ELS3s didn’t produce much bass below 65Hz, they possessed an undeniable magic that beckoned to neophyte audiophiles and veterans alike—magic that made you want to listen to music. But good though the ELS3s were, I couldn’t help wonder what would happen if Epos expanded the basic ELS3 design to create a larger floorstanding speaker, one that offered better dynamics and more extended bass response. The idea makes sense when you consider that mini-monitors and their requisite stands often require as much space, and can cost nearly as much, as more capable tower-type speakers would. Apparently, Epos designer Mike Creek (of Creek Electronics fame) has been thinking along the same lines, because Epos now offers the ELS303s, which are ELS3- derived, 2.5-way floorstanders priced at $695. Can the ELS303s stretch the ELS3s’ performance envelope while preserving their innate musicality? We’ll tackle that question in this review, but first let’s establish some ground rules.

Years ago a favorite professor cautioned me that critics are sometimes guilty of “murder by dissection,” meaning that in analyzing and critiquing individual parts of art objects, they occasionally miss—or worse, destroy—the elusive beauty of the whole. This precaution has a bearing on our discussion of the ELS303 because it is the sort of speaker that, if subjected to a checklist-type evaluation, could sound much less impressive on paper than it does in real life. Accordingly, I’ll focus primarily on the overall gestalt of the speakers and avoid getting sidetracked by performance minutiae.

Having lived with the ELS303s for quite a while, I’ve concluded they are designed to do two main things: first, to reproduce music in an engaging and inviting way; and second, to promote relaxation by encouraging listeners to suspend disbelief and become immersed in the music at hand. Note that I deliberately did not use the word “accuracy” in that last sentence, not because the ELS303s are inaccurate speakers (far from it), but because their greatest strengths involve getting the feel of the music right. Oh, we could run through the usual litany of audiophile performance criteria, and I would dutifully report that the 303s deliver better than decent results in most areas, but that’s not really the point. The point is that these speakers go right after the soul of the music in a way that is refreshingly direct and devoid of typical audiophile hype or hoopla. At trade shows, I’ve witnessed the effects of the Epos’ musical directness on listeners, and it can be profound. I’ve watched journalists stagger into the Epos demonstration room looking weary and wrung out, yet after a few minutes of exposure to the beguiling, unfussy sound of the ELS303s many lose the frayed look of men under stress and begin to unwind and enjoy the music. That, people, is Epos magic at work.

How do the ELS303s pull this off? They do it, I think, through the fine art of compromise. First, the speaker’s tonal balance is slightly on the warm side of neutral—an intelligent voicing choice that enables the speakers to exploit the strengths of modest electronics without rudely exposing their weaknesses. The 303s never impart any sort of artificial, saccharine sweetness to the sound, but rather use their warmth gently to highlight the inherent richness of instrumental and vocal timbres. On the familiar title track of Paul Winter and the Winter Consort’s Icarus [Epic, LP], the 303s shed new light on the lilting cello and melancholic saxophone voices that carry the song’s melodic theme, so that I felt almost as if I were hearing “Icarus” for the first time.

The Eposes also reveal plenty of sonic details and nuances, yet without pushing things to a point where they sound inappropriately hyper-detailed. The speakers’ resolving powers are at their peak in the critical midrange, with very gradual softening of focus toward the frequency extremes. Oddly enough, though, this characteristic doesn’t make the 303s sound soft or lacking in focus, but rather has the desirable effect of making them more forgiving of imperfect recordings. Most of us own a few good but flawed records, typically ones that have been too closely miked, whose sound creates approach/avoidance conflicts; we are drawn to them for their clarity, but repelled by their stridency and brittle sound. The great news is that the 303s can plane down the raw edges of those kinds of recordings just enough to make them enjoyable again, without yielding much ground in terms of clarity or definition.

Finally, the 303s focus on getting the important things right without striving for unrealistically broad frequency response or large-scale dynamic capabilities. For example, the 303s make no attempt to produce truly low bass (their low-frequency response extends to a respectable but not overly deep claimed roll-off point of just 48Hz), yet the bass they do produce almost always sounds articulate, hearty, and appropriately weighted—never thin. Similarly, the 303s do not reach for treble response that extends beyond audibility, yet their highs for the most part sound smooth, silvery, and clear. Finally, though the speakers cannot play extremely loudly, they can beautifully reveal even quite subtle dynamic contrasts at moderate volume levels, so there’s no need to crank them up to enjoy lively sound. In short, the ELS303s do a lot of things well, and the things they can’t do well are, by design, left undone. This is a much smarter approach than trying to force edge-of-the-envelope performance in a half-baked way.

The 303s encourage listeners to set aside the cares of the day and to lose themselves in the music, and they so by promoting suspension of disbelief through unusually good imaging and soundstaging. Like masters of sonic prestidigitation, the 303s use realistic tone colors and spatial cues to create vivid illusions of real musicians performing in real acoustic spaces, yet they conceal their own roles in the magic act by eliminating edge diffraction and other discontinuities wherever possible. The speakers’ dual 5″ bass and mid/bass drivers are small enough in diameter to disperse very well, while the 303s narrow cabinet-faces and flush-mounted drive units help minimize diffraction effects. Note, though, that the speakers’ grilles must be removed to achieve optimal sound. Heard at their best, on well-engineered, three-dimensional recordings such as Marta Gómez’s Entre Cada Palabra [Chesky], the 303s remove themselves from the playback equation in an altogether self-effacing way, leaving listeners face-to-face with the performers and the music. Entre Cada Palabra showcases not only Gómez’s vocals but a vibrant Brazilian jazz ensemble, and through the ELS303s I heard that ensem ble spread in a broad semi-circle before me, with Gómez standing near the center, all within the intimate setting of a reverberant mid-sized room. At certain moments, the ELS303s in the foreground seemed not even to be playing, though of course they were.

Despite their strengths, the Eposes naturally cannot be all things to all people, and owing to inherent output limits I would say they are not the best choice for listeners who enjoy rock music played at high volumes, or who favor a steady diet of large-scale orchestral works. Similarly, the 303 might not fully satisfy listeners seeking high levels of resolution and detail and for them a better solution might be Usher Audio’s articulate S-520 mini-monitors. In turn, those who require more deeply extended bass might prefer near-full-range offerings from Paradigm (the Studio 20 V3 monitors) or from PSB (the Image B25 monitors or T45 towers).

But for the elusive combination of sophisticated midrange magic, dynamite imaging, and substantial though not quite full-range bass, the 303s are tough to beat at their price. I won’t tell you the ELS303s are state-of-the-art speakers (nothing in this price range is), but they offer a satisfying subset of the broader range of things that great loudspeakers do well. For this reason I think they would make superb starter speakers—ones that consistently connect listeners with their music.