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The naturalism and effortlessness are simply the result of the speakers’ ability to give more color and resolution than we are normally used to. It can sound like a real piano, then when it gets loud one can immediately place where the microphone is in relationship to the sound board and so the artificiality of the recording appears for a moment. Then the ear adjusts as we get swept back into the musical experience again. The effect at least for me is somewhere in the region of cosmic. I’m getting odder and weirder notions of what music is, the least weird being that it’s a pure expression of the universe as a natural and creative force. And these speakers so agree.

It's easy to make a fetish about resolution, about being able to hear how many angels are standing at the top of a guitar string and I very much doubt you will hear a speaker that can reveal more angels than these - but it’s a quality the speakers are not stressing at all. They reveal Hubble telescope-like resolution but only as a basis, as a foundation that is subordinate to and in the service of experiencing the music. That is what these speakers want. They don’t want to show off about how they look or even how they sound. They don’t have a particular sound style (phew). They will give you a new ability to be lit up by virtually any reasonably good piece of music in a way that is extraordinary and difficult to describe though easy to experience. It’s like we get litmus paper souls that can light up and become supremely emotionally and spiritually aware and sensitive. Or like we were dancing and take off great clodhopping ski boots and put on ballet slippers and a new set of legs. We are on the tip of the violin bow being transported. The vibrations are playing us.
That is immediacy of a different order to all other hifi I’ve heard. Audiophiles like to talk about how important the room/speaker interface is or this and that. In my view the only interface that counts is that between the music and the spiritual aspect of our sonic experience. What we really crave is the ability to be moved, transported, taken away into the interior meaning of the piece, not its intellectual meaning but its capacity to recreate or even create new and true and beautiful emotional experiences within us. A piece of music can do that. It allows us to inhabit a complex world of emotional landscapes which we have not experienced before.


Shostakovich Symphony 14 conducted by Bernard Haitink at the Royal Concertgebouw [Decca]: This a brooding semi-desperate canticle, a release from worldliness into a kind of mad Byronic existential detachment, a snow tiger walking away from a failed attempt to kill pretending it wasn’t really trying. The fantastic thing about music is that it can be experienced as great art in so many different ways, from the iPod to the car radio to live music. Unlike painting or visual and plastic arts, there’s no fetish about the original. Like poetry, the way it appears within the listener’s experience is the key. Purpose, reason and meaning reside there. For whatever reason, these speakers in this system seem naturally able to communicate this quality in complex music. So that’s why I would dearly love to own them. It’s about being able to connect to the umbilical of the universe.

Shostakovich String Quartet 15 Opus 144, Borodin Quartet 1996 [Teldec 4509-17-2]: On a car radio, only our surface senses can be enveloped and overwhelmed. We are more taken by melody. On this system, it saturates us to the marrow, to the depths of spirit so we become reactive angels, almost co-participants in a musical experience. The mourning, simplicity, plainness, plainsong, asceticism and peasant lyricism come through like shafts of sunlight on a landscape that is rapidly becoming a past memory. This is a piece written from the foothills of death and it encapsulates life itself, how we experience it. Kevin says that ‘the problem with this piece is afterwards. When you walk away you find your legs have melted.’ It’s an interior and spiritual pastoral with an almost unique sonority, a dirge-like droning that echoes some Mongolian and Turkish instrumental music yet blends it with simple peasant Western themes, opening up like shadows of clouds on mountains and then passages of sunshine.


The ease with which the music expresses or captures what is most profound and elemental about the experience of life is almost surreal.  We are transported across a spiritual landscape of living and dying, its thoughts and emotions, its forgetfulness, its discomforts and little joys, its fears, its moments of cosmic entrapment, its conflict between sensing the eternal as a thing of kindness and peace while at the same time as a bottomless fear or foreboding. It’s a stream-of-consciousness piece where consciousness is both at an extreme of self awareness and at the same time like a wave of experiences without thought, calculation, memory or expectation. What is odd about the experiential landscape of this piece is that unlike almost all works of art, it contains no expectation beyond the boundaries of itself. That purity is what allows it to communicate itself so effortlessly. 


Conclusion: I’ve tried to keep this piece as close as possible to the original notes as I made them during the listening sessions. Even if my reactions may appear to be over the top in the cold light of day, they represent as accurate a description of what was happening as I could describe. I felt it was extraordinary to listen to music in this way and come away in awe at the sheer emotional and connective power these speakers possess. I listened to this system in a variety of iterations over several years and heard many exceptional pieces of music. Prokoviev’s Cinderella Suite Opus 87 [2004], Argerich and Pletnev (DG B0003109-02), George Crumb’s unsettling Apparition [1979, Onyx Classics 4021], Beethoven’s Opus 18 N°.1 and 2 performed by the Quartetto Italiano [Philips 1997] and Mozart’s Don Giovanni [Harmonia Mundi HMC901964] remain the towering musical events of the last few visits.


While the musical programme may have changed each time, each individual performance emerged as an intense life experience with vividly rich colors and flavours, with a clarity of vision, heightened perception and depth of immersion into the music itself that made for unforgettable memories. If you are wondering where the pinnacle in musical reproduction as a real and profound experience is happening, it is here.
Living Voice website
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