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As noted in the B10 review, sidefiring woofers at least in my room are trickier to integrate. I generally get more boom with them and lumpiness in the bass. With the W20's solo woofer the user can fire it out or in. At first the latter produced insufficient amplitude. When the opposite orientation produced too much unevenness after settling down, I reverted back to woofers in. Even so I never managed the type of punch, dry articulation and complete extension I get from the sealed 12-inch Fostex woofer in my Gladius. With the massive size of Sven's port I'm unsure in fact whether it technically still operates fully like a conventional vent. My hunch is that the woofer actually works in partial bipole mode.
At a front-wall/front-baffle distance of ~2m, seat another 3m removed, this must have created some cancellation and addition. It certainly sounded that way. Compared to my straight-faced 11cm Fostex midrange, the W20's up-angled 16cm Supravox produced less focus and separation particularly at my favored lower levels. Here the Cypriot box with its 4dB lower sensitivity acted more efficient. It exhibited greater whisper resolution and clarity. On top my Raal was airier and more dynamic. |
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Gladius in exposed layer look. Automotive lacquer finishes are available to go two-tone against the black head.
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The French gold dome let go of decays sooner and didn't render triangle strikes and similarly charged transients as brilliant. Overall the Gladius was more exciting with snappier transients, lower stronger bass and higher top-end resolution. If you factor that I sold my Yamamoto A-09S 300B SET to a Lithuanian reader and moved my EL84 Trafomatic Kaivalyas to Marja & Henk when the transistor SIT1 monos had put them all to pasture in HP's closet beneath the stairs, you might appreciate my current listening biases. The W20 was obviously designed not only for low-power valve amps in general. During its gestation period it had played with very particular 300B amplifiers. Which I had on hand. As such one would expect this Boenicke to deliberately cater to their mellower more relaxed presentation whose calibration is a bit heavier, slower, softer and genteel than I'm fully tuned into.
The kink in my ink came from having a decisive preference for the half-priced system. I can usually quite readily inhabit a sound that's built on different values. It gives me a voyeur's taste for how other ears might live and groove. Such pretense works for cars, clothes and homes. It also works with hifi. |
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Staring down a CHF 70.000 bill for the amp/speaker combo with the small print of the prior page simply was a bit of a damper on my narrative at this juncture. Hitting up the always mandatory balance of fairness and facts, being cognizant of room issues and the wide variability of taste... this is where any reviewer's real work begins when it's not unbridled enthusiasm writing itself.
Enthusiasm usually responds to superlative performance. Or simply performance unexpected for any given price. Here the main issue was price versus performance. A smaller but real issue was the ultimately frustrated search for the type of low bass which woofer size and enclosure volume would seem to promise but at least in my room failed to deliver. |
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Precisely because it seemed so counter intuitive, I wasn't the fastest to catch on that moving so substantial a speaker quite deep into the corners would prove best for bass. I'd never had one there before. This obviously sacrificed some soundstage depth and layering. Yet it was here that the low end really gave up on its lumps and linearized. I still lacked some impact and reach compared to the Gladius but I also did have a transformer-coupled 300B amp at the helm. In the end less bass quantity allied to greater linearity was far more appealing to me than a more ragged response with greater amplitude. In these corners aiming the woofers out got too thick and more ponderous. By already playing it slower than my reference system, that wasn't a direction I intended to pursue.
After playing musical chairs between same-powered 300Bs and static induction transistors—vertical Jfets really—I also realized that past confirmation for unreasonable headroom at domestic usage in standard rooms, the valve amps weren't what I wished to pursue either. I've heard David Berning's Siegfried in a friend's system. I knew that my complaints weren't the triodes per se. It was their transformer coupling. By doing away with the usual output iron (Berning handles impedance matching at RF frequencies) the 300B Siegfried does not exhibit the bandwidth and speed limitations typical of the breed. It's in fact a surprisingly close stand-in for the Pass monos. Given that the system below was noticeably slower, noisier, less extended, softer and more polite than my €30.000 equivalent of SIT1/Gladius, I moved in the single-ended single-stage transistors for a shot or two of adrenaline.
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Still wishing for somewhat quicker midband reflexes I finally thought of removing the batting behind the widebanders and even left the magnetic hatches off. This gave me the best sound from my ancillaries at hand. What were its highlights?
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| As with other Boenickes outfitted with his usual tweak items—sundry electrical inline and parallel gizmos like Bybee and Stein Music filters, purifiers and signal enhancers—the W20 proved radically free of even very low-level grunge and grittiness. Massed strings as on 2L's high-density 24bit/354.8kHz DXD file of Tchaikovsky's String Serenade [Trondheim Solistene's Souvenir] exhibited no signs of artifice or even subliminal wiriness and metallization (what casual talk calls sawing). This sophistication of tone, textures and nuance was very high. |
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Despite my anti-depth setup to pursue best in-room bass, the W20 still managed surprising depth of field. This I've found is not only a result of proper time domain behavior. A previous A/B showed how it is heightened by Sven's fearless exploitation of 'nano' and 'quantum' tuning devices of the sort mainstream manufacturers might be hesitant to acknowledge since their mode of operation remains mysterious.
Another telltale sign of advanced tonal sophistication was the behavior of recorded sibilance from close-mic'd vocals. If you've ever noticed how during playback such sizzle steam will often inhabit a different point in space than the voices producing them, you'll appreciate that special work in speaker design is required to have them spatially coincident.
Apparently also built into the speaker was a degree of transient softness such as dominates the farfield once one is sufficiently away from the stage. The combination of off-axis midrange listening—at 40° up my listening distance had the Supravox hit the ceiling right above my seat—sidefiring refracted bass with bipole ingredients plus rear-firing ambient tweeter strategically played to the ambient field and energizing it. Direct line-of-sight emissions were limited plainly to just the gold tweeter! |
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This quasi omni sound didn't completely water-color its edges. The TG1 tweeter still delivered all the usual HF localization cues if arguably dynamically tamer than my Serbian ribbons. These image-locking cues were not first diffused by multiple room reflections. Listeners familiar with downfiring subwoofers already know this difference in the low frequencies. Front-firing subwoofers produce more guttural kick and impact. The greatest acclimation for directionally conditioned listeners (the vast majority of us given current speaker design conventions) will be the W20's midband. Here it's perhaps useful to invoke the fundamental difference between transient-focused wide-bandwidth direct-coupled transistors with fast rise times; and bloom-focused transformer and capacitor-coupled no-feedback triodes with slower rise times and restricted bandwidth. By design the W20 emulates the latter. With my transition to basically radar parts with triode curves, hindsight understood why I didn't completely lock into this presentation. It was too 'tubey'. Where was the gear box to downshift and engage the turbo? But this of course nailed the design brief for this specialty speaker project to the 't'.
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By now more show reports had published. AudioBeat's described the Boenicke/Colotube exhibit as making "an extremely engaging and sweet sound despite the absence of our kind of music". Our Polish colleague Wojciech Pacuła singled it out as one of his Best Sound rooms. Clearly none of these listeners complained of insufficient bass. I'd thus blame my room. What these commentaries did agree on was 'sweetness', 'extremely engaging' and 'natural'. Given the usual razzle-dazzle of show conditions which wears down attendees, mellower rooms naturally become rejuvenating respite and recovery counterpoint.
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| That's exactly what I had in my room now. Mellifluousness. Serenity. Minor diffusion. Energetic reticence. Honey sans cayenne. Where were the heightened articulation and concomitant musical charge I get from higher-efficient speakers like Rethm and Voxativ? Those major on lucidity, speed and electrifying impact. Clearly the W20s were about more than just sensitivity matching to 300B-type amps. Their entire gestalt was matched. With my pedal-to-the-metal amps run DAC direct for maximum directness, I still felt as though I were moving through familiar canyon twisties like a big plush sedan. If that's your preferred mode of transport through the musical scenery, the big Boenicke would seem tailormade. That's true even if you don't run on single-ended 300B fuel. If you do, your option menu for speakers has always been quite short. That's been particularly true if you meant to energize large spaces but couldn't accommodate horns (for their size or unconventional cosmetics). With the W20 you've just been given an expensive alternative.
A prerequisite for success with its mostly omni nature will be proper distance from the walls. This insures that direct and reflected sounds arrive at the ears as two discrete clear events rather than one summed fuzzier one. The Munich exhibit photos show an ideal setup and one that obviously prompted favorable comments from many experienced listeners. That type of big space—Gino Colombo's where this very pair ended up is sized twice of mine—I simply did not have at my disposal. Hence it was perhaps predictable that I couldn't unleash the speakers' full potential... |
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