Axxess Forté 1

by Dawid Grzyb / September 4, 2024

Axxess is Audio Group Denmark’s fourth and latest brand. It lists only one integrated design named Axxess Forté that looks great, promises a lot and is this report’s main dish. Enjoy!

Mr Integrator

For many years the company Audio Group Denmark has been parenting brands Ansuz, Aavik and Børresen. To recap, the first banner features cables, power accessories and various anti-vibration tweaks, the second is all about electronics and third lists only speakers. We can easily put together more than just one full audio setup from these building blocks. That’s by design. Audio Group Denmark head honchos like to do things their own way and have everything under control. Although quite a few other audio houses follow this protocol, Danes push it to the extreme, in the sense that the gap between their most affordable and luxurious tiers is enormous. Suffice it to say, this financial span reflects their bold aspirations. Recently it got even wider in the direction that caters to broad audience. The fourth brand named Axxess had emerged specifically for that purpose.When Danes go all in with the best they got at various audio shows, wallets bleed. There’s a method to this and marketing-driven logic as well. Financially stratospheric statement designs presented at such venues are major points of interest and subjects of wild conversations afterwards, which boosts online presence and is hardly anything new. Car enthusiasts who can’t afford i.e. a Ferrari or Bugatti still visit events with such rides on display and feel inspired just upon looking at them up close. The same rules apply in the audio biz, with one notable exception. Unless you’re the lucky owner of a seven-figure exotic parked at a car rally, driving one is nigh impossible. Meanwhile, us audio geeks actually get to hear how oligarch-fi sounds like during i.e. Warsaw and Munich gigs. Lucky us, but I digress.It’s fair to say that most people already familiar with Audio Group Denmark associate it with prohibitively expensive designs clearly targeted at millionaires. That’s the natural order of things considering that this entire roster started from the very high top and then it scaled down, not the other way around. However, in recent years the Danish company had significantly expanded on pretty much every count that truly matters on the road of evolving into a larger even more successful enterprise; floor space, staff, technological means and product ranges on both ends. These days it’s as much of an upper-echelon business as it is one that bows towards consumers with limited budget. To make that point, during the recent Munich show Danes had three rooms at their disposal. One housed their expensive models, the other had a mid-tiered system and the last booth was kept on the surprisingly cost-effective side given what they’re the most known for.It’s just a matter of time when technologies exclusive for top shelf take their less resource-intense form that drips into tiers below, and eventually all the way down to the entry-level range. Folks at Audio Group Denmark have that fine art of downscaling mastered. Their fourth brand Axxess that had its debut about a year ago is the proof of that. When said out loud it also tells us exactly what it is. Accessibility is the key word. Today it unfolds into prices significantly below the manufacturer’s usual stickers atop cleanly structured lineup that’s busy with only essentials to not confuse newcomers. On that note, there’s only one Axxess power cord, interconnect, digital cable, bookshelf speaker, floorstander and so on so forth. This report’s Axxess Forté follows suit by being the only amp in this offer, albeit with many twists we’ll get to shortly. During my visit to the Danish soil in early 2023 I had the pleasure of hearing the late prototype of this design, which back then still had its official name and exact price under wraps. With Børresen X3 speakers on the job it struck me as a performer slightly above what its compact footprint and mainstream pedigree implied. I looked forward to the opportunity of sampling this beaut ever since. Fast forward to late August 2024 and here we are.The brand’s local distributor – Audio Emotions – sent over a nice cardboard with the key ingredient snug in-between two dense foam forms. Sundry accessories included woolen gloves, a manual, handy RC and twin batteries for it. In the past Danes used Apple’s remote wand for their Aavik electronics, but that’s no longer the case. Now they have a customized controller that embeds all the necessary buttons to fully operate their electronics from the listening chair. This report’s Axxess Forté 1 is an AiO amplifier, so a multitasking device that packs a streamer, DAC, pre and stereo power amp in the same very appealing enclosure. Priced at €4’999, it was designed as the center piece of a clean one-box stereo setup that needs only speakers to get going. Mainstream use alongside a TV seems fitting. Then again, this Axxess has a lot in common with pricier Aavik electronics. As such it promises high performance.Axxess Forté 1 measures (W x D x H) 420  x 370 x 110mm and weighs nearly 8kg, so is regularly sized given its type and on the enjoyably light side. It also does 100/200wpc into 8/4Ω and most likely scores DF values in the ballpark of triple digits. In other words, this is no pushover. It won’t say no to inefficient modern speakers, quite the contrary. That’s hardly a surprise given Pascal UMAC class D circuitry inside this amp, which also explains its cool MO under stress, high overall stability and fairly quick readiness for action upon powering it on. Further specs list THD+N <0.003% (1W, 1kHz, 8Ω), IMD/TIM below 0.006%/0.003% (10W, 8Ω), 7.5Vrms max. output, line stage THD below 0.005% (1kHz, 1V) and standby/idle power draw respectively below 1/30W. The headphone amp does 120/240mW into 600/32Ω and at THD <0.01/0.005%. Digital inputs natively work with PCM up to 24-bit/192kHz on S/PDIF, while USB accepts data up to 32-bit/384kHz. MQA and DSD playback are supported. The streamer module inside Axxess Forté 1 is built upon the ConversDigital platform that uses either mconnect app on iOS/Android smartphones, or Aavik’s own software on iPad. It supports UPnP, DLNA, Spotify Connect and Tidal Connect, while the Roon-ready certification is in the works.In recent times Aavik and Børresen rosters welcomed quite a few new designs visually unlike their siblings. That’s what happens when you hire Gryphon’s founder Flemming Erik Rasmussen, who in this industry is famous for his unique artistic style. My Aavik I-880 review already tells that tale. More importantly, this wasn’t a one-time thing for Flemming. Since May 2021 he holds the position of the visual consultant at Audio Group Denmark, so Axxess Forté 1’s dress code is largely his effort, which on external prettiness also beats the previous-gen Aaviks without mercy if someone asks me. It also remains true to the company’s enclosure ethos that forbids sound-degrading aluminium and welcomes dense wood-based composite plates instead. Today’s integrated affair has its underside, bonnet and rear built upon these, and alongside the steel front and cheeks with four deeply milled x’s per side. The product looks very good and serious.The forehead is very clean mainly because it’s busy with a large gloss-red LED dot matrix display that’s perfectly readable from afar. It’s a personal preference, but I fancy that one-colored scheme way more than LCD screens, which as I was told generate way more noise. The massive rotary works as good as it looks. Brilliantly. It regulates volume (76 x 1dB steps) and adjusts settings. Three buttons just a hair to the left are the secondary on/off, mute on/off and input selector that also grants access to the menu when pressed for three seconds. Therein we can set display brightness (10/40/70 and 100%) and fully dim it after five seconds, adjust L/R channel balance, check temperature of the power stage, engage home theatre bypass and gapless playback, check the network status, streamer/OS firmware version and WiFi signal strength, and also perform FW update. Axxess Forté doesn’t feature any wireless utilities, but its upper USB port supports external WiFi dongles. The menu has a dedicated subsection where we can scan networks within the range and connect to them via the RC included in the set.The business end features speaker posts with translucent caps, between which there’s a fused IEC inlet with the primary on/off rocker, a RS-232 port for firmware updates, one DC trigger connector, twin USB type A inlets for external storage (up to TB) and WiFi dongles, LAN input on RJ45 and three digital inlets; USB and S/PDIF on BNC and Toslink. Twin RCAs in that area are the line input (4.5Vrms max., 10kΩ) for a standalone DAC, and the pre out for a sub or external power amp. Axxess Forté is a single-ended design just as all Aaviks are. Four footers on its underside accept external Ansuz Darkz or Axxess Noir decouplers. As many round discs on the bonnet serve the same purpose, which may suggest more electronics with the Axxess logo in the future, but time will tell. The view under the hood is straightforward and familiar to quite an extent.The manufacturer’s Pascal UMAC class D module that unifies a stereo power amp and PSU for it was cherry-picked due to its sine not triangular waveform output and minimal noise. Although the odds are that we’d find the same module in other amps available out there on the market, that neither steals anything away from the integrated Axxess, nor makes it a cookie-cutter design. Class D has gone a long way since its early days. Now its sonics are really unpredictable and there’s a good reason for that. Switching modules by ICEpower, Hypex, Powersoft, TI, Anaview, Infineon or Pascal are the easily applicable OEM base. Most audio makers use it as is, while the minority including Audio Group Denmark goes the extra mile by supporting it with additional filtering, exotic caps, non-standard input buffers, linear PSUs, anti-vibration means etc. This is what makes all the difference and often raises sound quality beyond expectations.Metaphorically speaking, Danes’ class D amp module of choice is the high-performance engine, around which they built their entire car and additionally tuned it with their in-house developed noise-rejecting boosters. The Axxess Forté platform is available in three tiers named 1, 2 and 3. For the purpose of this review I asked for the entry-level model 1 that features 36 regular and 72 square Tesla coils in their active version. The former takes the form of multiple spirals protruding on their own PCB, while the latter comprises an army of squares etched into its surface. Both were designed to do the same. When one coil leg encounters a voltage spike, the other immediately activates a counter-spike and eliminates incoming noise in the process. Axxess Forté 1 also rocks three scalar dithering ICs, which modulate ground noise floor by injecting precisely defined squared frequencies into signal, somewhat similarly to how marine sonars operate. The Forté 2 (€7’499) features 72 regular and 144 squared Tesla coils plus 6 dithering components, while Forté 3 (€9’999) ramps these numbers up to 108, 216 and 9 respectively. Both these versions also incorporate the extra 4 zirconium Tesla coils on the internal wiring from the power stage to speaker posts, and the top dog also enjoys its internal copper bottom plate.Axxess Forté 1 internally is far from empty, but there is some space left and most likely for the additional noise-cancelling parts in the model’s higher tiers. Either way, the large mainboard just next to the Pascal module embeds a separate class A amplifier for cans, digital input stage and D/A conversion circuit built upon one of Sabre chips, which provides enough voltage to simplify the analog output stage. The ConversDigital streamer circuit takes the form of a standalone unit piggybacked on the main PCB. A large rotary on a shaft encoder is controlled digitally, but signal attenuation is executed in the analog domain inside a chip. Now let’s find out how all this translates to sonics.At first I thought that incorporating Axxess Forté 1 into my platform and testing its every utility was the right approach. After sleeping on that idea, well, not many people would benefit from it. Designs such as this one are bought by customers who want to use it as is and without any additional electronics. They just want to connect it to a router and speakers, then engage the control app on their smartphones to stream music from Tidal or Spotify and call it a day. This is why the Forté loaner worked solely as an AiO device in my listening room. Sure, it saw a fancy power cord, outlet multiplier, speaker cables and floorstanders, but nothing else really. I also confess that its headphone out remains a mystery to me. It so happens that HifiMan Susvara are the only cans at my disposal. It doesn’t take a crystal ball to know that the Forté’s headfi would ran out of steam and headroom with this notorious planar type. Technically speaking, Susvara works well with the product’s speaker taps, but there’s no point in telling that story given its extremist nature. All in all, the Axxess saw a thumb drive loaded with music, the mconnect iOS app was the handy RC interface and my Boenicks were the target load. Life was peachy.Let me first go back to the day when I auditioned the Forté prototype with Børresen X3s. I still remember how this simple system impressed with spatial fill, shove, authority, dynamic span and, above all else, control. Just so we’re clear, these speakers are rated at 88dB efficiency and 4Ω nominal impedance, so not exactly easy to drive. Meanwhile, the Axxess amp clearly had what it takes to tame them, and the difference between it and Aavik’s standalone pre and power amp wasn’t huge by any stretch. This is the primary reason why I wanted to listen to this one-box affair at my place one day, but not the only one. The Axxess/Børresen setup was also generous on color, heft and moisture. So much so in fact that on slower minimalist fare built upon soothing calm vocal lines suspended in pitch-black space you wouldn’t tell that this was a switching design. They’re not known for such traits after all, some plainly wrong stereotypes are still alive. The reality is that these days class D amps can excel on tone provision, sensuality and warmth more than on their usual assets; speed, dynamic prowess etc. S.P.E.C. amps make that point very well and so does Sven Boenicke’s tiny p1. The Axxess followed suit in Aalborg atop being ace on control, momentum and raw horsepower. This combination of traits not only etched deep in my mind past that first memorable rodeo, but it also resulted in rather tall expectations just now.In one recent review I wrote that: “Ported bass is a wide subject. Some speakers do it better than others. Although Boenicke W11 SE+ floorstanders feature narrow openings on the rear, you couldn’t tell upon connecting that load to a powerful amp with very low output impedance. Then the Boenicks hit very hard, reach very low and develop enough edges and composure downstairs to behave like a sealed box busy with a large bass cone or two.” Axxess Forté fits this profile to a tee, so is the amp in question. When set in the class AB mode, Trilogy 995R monos output 200wpc into 8Ω and probably twice that into 4Ω, but their output impedance is considerably higher than the Forté’s. Unsurprisingly it didn’t take long to notice which amp was the better fit for the W11 SE+. As predicted, the Axxess had just what these floorstanders need the most and then some, which only shows that mechanical compliance goes above money. Suffice it to say, I knew that the Axxess/Boenicke was a spot on pairing long before the loaner’s arrival. On paper it had a lot of sense, but I still had to listen to it to make sure that this theory was any true.The Axxess’ upper hand over the significantly dearer Trilogy set manifested via bass that reached lower, was free from any wobble and maintained a spot on balance between its anchoring, textural fill and outline work. The W11 SE+ fronted by the Dane also remembered how to engage their sensibly tectonic disposition upon demand, and when to stiffen their suspension that supports proper slams. Naturally the sensation of might, directness and scale increased along with it, just as it should. To put that into a perspective, twin 995Rs with the Swiss load produced shallower, bloomier and lazier bass. It was perfectly acceptable in the grand scheme and the monos were excellent on every other count. Then again, bass has that foundational quality to it, so all above takes a hit if it’s not fully sorted. Let me stress that this didn’t take anything away from Trilogy mono amps. High-efficiency speakers enjoy their company far more than the Forté’s.Thunderous bass wasn’t the only ace up the W11 SE+’s sleeve when connected to the Axxess. I quickly mapped other rather obvious reasons why this was a brilliant match all around. The Swiss embeds several drivers yet goes about its business largely in the point-source fashion. Exceptional openness, quickness, freshness and illumination are in fact its primary traits. High-tiered spatial accuracy, precision and resolution follow, but at a small cost paid in substance. In short, the Boenicks benefit from companion amps which inject the extra body and tone into their naturally somewhat lean profile. Trilogy 995R monos ooze color and tonal mass left right and center, so provide exactly what’s useful in a rather marvelous manner. The Forté isn’t shy on that front either. Its switching heart inside a particular enclosure just next to an army of the company’s potent noise-rejecting spiraled soldiers results in sonic profile that feels gravitational and earthy, but also spot on soft, a touch warm even and not dry, skinny or overly mechanical in any way. When repertoire demands, this is a proper class D design alright, so powerful, ripped, controlling and resolved, but always very civilized and elegant in its delivery. As such it says no to pointiness, coarse edges, dehydration, overdamping and excessive upstairs glare. It also keeps listening fatigue at bay and handles poorly recorded music with dignity, which I find very cool.Resolution stands for a speaker’s ability to grant us insight into a recording’s deepest layers and  visibly project nuances suspended in the air. These details can take the form of needles magnified and then shoved down our ears, or delicate particles and reverb extensions out there in the sound field, yet served as smooth, easeful and casual supports for all else rather than pointy attractors. Pristine noise-free backdrop is mandatory to have that. All Aaviks I’d sampled fared truly well on that score and so did the Axxess now. The manufacturer’s noise trimmers fused into this box largely make it so and are the key reason why it sounded very elegant with my floorstanders. The more unwanted disturbances are removed, the higher are gains on color range, saturation, resolution and background blackness. I’m very happy that the Forté 1 loaner packed a lot of that in the context of its price. Here one thing should be taken into account. This AiO affair is sensitive to power. Upon connecting it to a regular white outlet multiplier, well, a fair share of its color intensity and expressiveness was gone, and the entire view was drier, narrower, more mechanical and dynamically less keen. This is why I’d strongly consider a proper power distribution unit for this Axxess. Considering what it does and how, I think that it fully deserves going that extra mile. Let’s wrap.

Although in my reviewer reality Axxess Forté 1 is an affordable product, its perception among the target audience will probably differ. Newcomers to the hobby who’re after a one-box do-it-all design will still see it as a significant expense. Fair enough, €4’999 is no spare change by any means. This time around it really buys you a lot. Axxess Forté 1 is nicely put together and feels like a far dearer hardware. It also embeds all the relevant utilities a modern AiO design should pack and looks fabulous to boot. Most importantly, it very skillfully supported my speakers and sonically proved a highly gifted elegantly voiced performer all around. This virtue atop all its other assets makes Axxess Forté 1 an awesome standout that deserves your attention. If I were after such a design for my living room, I’d settle with this one. I don’t see a single reason why I wouldn’t.

Associated Equipment:

Retail prices of reviewed components in EU (excl. VAT):

  • Axxess Forté 1/2/3: €4’999/7’499/9’999

 

Manufacturer: Axxess

 

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