Acoustic Energy Aegis Neo V2

Acoustic Energy Aegis Neo V2 review

Another month passes and another speaker set comes in for review. This time it is from an old hand in the Hi-Fi business, Acoustic Energy and they have kindly sent us one of their more budget offerings, the Aegis Neo V2. Older and wrinklier readers may recall that I was once the original production manager for the guys who set up Acoustic Energy. This has meant that down the years I have been entrusted as the reviewer 'most likely to be critical' of what the brand has been doing since the departure of the original designer, Phil Jones to pastures new. The back-story to AE's speaker know-how is worth a mention. Basically, Jones once had a broken subwoofer driver for his PA system and decided to fix it with Araldite. Inadvertently mixing too much, he idly covered the whole cone and, when it was set, tested it and discovered that it behaved a bit differently: it was much more rigid and pistonic. Eureka! This semi-accidental idea-sparker is how the (originally spun, now pressed) rigid, pistonic alloy AE cone came into being – that and a magic glue becoming available that finally allowed the manufacturer to really stick a foam surround well onto a hard anodised surface. The two combined to allow Jones to make his now-legendary rigid metal cone piston speaker: the AE1.