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In use, the color-coded PTFE washers riding on the Nylon speaker terminal shafts should be bonded to the screws. Then one needn't peel those discs off the silver foil before inserting a spade or bare wire end. (Banana users, you've unfortunately been - um, terminated. Sorry). The Teflon washers also should be bigger in diameter to cover a standard spade across its whole width and then some. This would apply more even pressure without canting the washer. The fine Nylon thread allows for very nice and secure finger tightening however. The basic mechanical though non-standard cable connection scheme on the monos is thus perfectly sound. Tweaky as hell but good.

The light physical weight of the Bosanghwas means that especially substantial speaker cables but also springy interconnects need to be properly dressed to avoid capsizing and torquing. Why anyone would run silly he-man cables in this context is curious of course. The concept begs for something minimalist but choice. Those who simply insist on going thick and mighty? You've now been warned, tough guys.


There are no heat or hum issues. Decorator placement in line with the jewel box appearance is fully encouraged. Yes way, show this stuff off, José. Just what source component will create anywhere near visual continuity is naturally the loaded question. We'll leave that anxiety to the fussy interior design experts who need everything to match.

Do not attempt to open the Paeonia's angled panel. It voids the warranty and risks damage. On my unit, this panel to which the selector toggle and volume controls attach (one stereo pot per input) simply came off so easy that I carefully lifted it up just enough to take the earlier photo. Alas, one of the two inputs eventually passed no signal. "The Paeonia we sent you was working 100% when it left us. I personally tested all components individually in our reference system prior to shipping. Since it left us, the unit has endured at least two traumatic incidents: 1) The same fall that caused the rivets to stretch in the PS. 2 ) The faceplate being removed so that pictures could be taken of the inside. This was a sealed unit that contains 30 point-to-point solder points of silk-clad silver foil conductors that are 5 microns in thickness! (This is more than 2 times thinner than the thinnest conventional-wired device you have ever tested.) It takes extreme care to mount this circuit into the space provided by the box. In fact some of the assembly is done by my wife Svetlana, who has long slim fingers. My hands are too big and ugly to complete it without risk of damage to some of the joints."

Cough. Malcolm, one moment. I did not force my way inside your Paeonia. The same shipper's presumed drop, of your small carton containing ultra light-weight miniature components travelling from Luxembourg to neighboring Switzerland, the one that shore off the rivets - it also must have unseated your carefully sealed inner lid. I can fully understand manufacturing frustration over shipping damages. But I strongly suspect Malcolm needs to revisit certain mechanical solutions before entrusting his units to Oops, FedUp & Co. The shipping carton showed no outer signs of abuse at all.


To minimize emotional stress and eliminate findings that might be based on potentially underperforming equipment, I offered Malcolm the option of replacing the SMPS and Paeonia. My listening did not suggest faulty operation and Malcolm was comfortable with that assessment. Hence the original units were tested and double-ship fees avoided.

For listening, I relied on the same system that featured in my recent reviews - Esoteric's UX1 as transport into the Yamamoto YDA-01 DAC; from there to the ModWright LS/PS 36.5 and onward through various amps (for this review, my Audio Sector Patek SE, First Watt F5 and the testers) into the Acoustic System International Tangos via Liveline interconnects and Vinnie Rossi's Red Wine Audio speaker cable.


The Bosanghwas proved very comparable to my Audio Sector Patek SE but also quite different. Now we segue into a short story of extremism which won't feature religious intolerants but does involve 'idealization' of certain aspects and a concomitant skewing of the usual relationships. The music boxes as I thought of them turned out to be dialed for extreme openness and transparency. My Patek is pimped for jump, grunt and density. Hindu terminology of the three gunas might refer to sattva vs tamas to capture the gist. Modern dietary parlance might translate that to vegetarians vs. omnivores. Can you guess the sonic translation?

I first tested the Musical Laboratory* monos leashed to my ModWright. This obeyed 'thou shall not change more than one thing at a time'. It showed the Bosanghwas to be exceptionally lithe, fleet of foot and fast. However, the upper-most treble lacked just a bit of extension and decay. This gave preference to the lower harmonics. The effect was tizz rather than tissssss. It dried up a bit of tonal sweetness. Music's sense of breathing freely and expansively contracted by a few degrees. The subtle modulations of tone diminished. This takes advanced speaker treble performance to appreciate fully.


Knowing that the Bosanghwas run operational amplifiers on their outputs; and that most op-amps rely on extremely high negative feedback with tremendous open-loop gain; you might suspect said embedded feedback. If so, it would have to be a matter of how much feedback. The 20dB in my First Watt F5 clearly avoid this drying out at the very top.


What unexpectedly turned the tables was the Paeonia trailed by its intended silver-foil interconnect. Whoa. Now the upper treble lit up as though a light had been switched on. The resultant spatial expander action of enhanced visibility and ambient scale was powerful. Alas, the bass vanished. The bass still extended but it now seriously lacked amplitude. Weight and anchored substance had left the building. The performance was now all about light, space and air. But it had also been emasculated. This didn't take the colossal synth bass of Mercan Dede's Nefes to ascertain. Piano and cello were most sufficient indeed. There now was more emphasis on bowing artifacts and less on the redolent body resonance. Walking bass accents no longer touched the ground. Drums lacked oomph. Good-bye grunt, swagger and earthiness.

As it turned out, the blame for some of this effect snuggled up to Malcolm's interconnect. With it, I could duplicate degrees of bass loss also on my First Watt F5. The silver foil cable, it appears, is greased for lightning speed and fully blossoming top extension. Yet it completely ignores grounding the performance into the soil under your feet. This tells us something about the designers' bias. After all, their cable is meant to connect their passive to the gain clones. That's why it was included, directional markers and all. This must be the general sound the musical lab guys are after. Moi, I had a deja vu of Mapleshade. Purity is very good but do feed my sinful impulses as well or you don't address the whole person.

To recapitulate, the monos are tonally even-handed. There's just a bit of upper-most shading but articulation is terrific; separation, layering and staging are highly accurate and top notch; and bass is lean, pitch perfect and thus very intelligible and agile. In short, it's all about exactitude. Textures are somewhat dry but not objectionably so. This sound is all about the quick, the clean and the pure.


When the Paeonia enters with the silver foil interconnects on the arm, this tonal balance upshifts quite significantly. This drains the weightiness of the presentation. Gut-level impact reduces. What impacts you instead is the scale of space and its extreme visibility. That's a function of treble illumination. It's not sharp or steely in the least. It's not the quality of the light that's in question. No nasty neon here. It's the quantity. There's too much on top, not nearly enough in the bassment. It's the sound of well-treated silver without dielectric smearing. Excellent zing, no substance. So it's also the sound of pure silver without the weighting action of gold or copper.


At this point, I tied up my impressions, from actual acoustic auditions to handling the gear to prior e-mail exchanges. I already knew Malcolm to be quite opinionated and quick with assumptions. Inspecting his chosen solutions and implementation, the term 'hair shirt purist' suggested itself loud and clear. It denotes a certain extremist view point, one that risks sight of the bigger picture.

Certain performance aspects get idealized and honed to the extreme. Others fade as though less or not important. To my ears, the Bosanghwa monos, minus a few practical nits that will be easily enough addressed, are highly credible performers. They plot their idealization shifts well within the accepted frame work. There's no distorting its overall shape. The Paeonia on the other hand is in-credible. Its idealization distorts realistic tonal balance context particularly with the matching silver foil cable. That flatly leaves the reservation most of us call home. Whether you're inclined to follow is impossible to predict. Playing the audiophile game of matching a component's strengths and weaknesses with a perfectly inverse component is a very haphazard road to satisfaction indeed.


Running a more 'embodied' cable on the Paeonia creates more anchoring. It downshifts the tonal balance center. But it cannot completely make up for the loss of bass amplitude that's apparently inherent in this passive circuit. Again, the bass isn't gone per se. Pitch accuracy is excellent in fact. It's the weight and volume of the bass which are insufficient. Midrange and treble become prominent, the presentation turns top heavy and fundamentals lean out. The false illusion at the end is one of extreme transparency and speed because proper grounding is lacking.


To get out more often is good advice also for oddiophools as Stephæn calls us. It challenges our introvert tendencies to erect isolated realities that are not really shared with others. Because the submitted quartet of boxes and cable was designed together, it neatly minimized poor ancillary choices. That's why I'm a bit troubled by the combo outcome. I can't be the only one hearing these effects. Do they suggest engineering in isolation and getting lost on a tangent? Whatever, the Bosanghwa monos by themselves are great. They're worthy brethren to my Canadian Pateks, just more sattvic in makeup. The mutual trade of attributes between these two gain clones occurs well within the center of the field. So it simply accommodates different preferences. That rascal Junji Kimura would surely approve of both.


In closing, Musical Laboratory* is tweaky hair-shirt fi and damn proud of it. The cosmetics won't match anything else but visiting females all swooned. The monos have so much gain that the big 91dB Tangos, in a 13-meter long room with a 2nd-story loft, had the passive's pot sit at 9:00 o'clock for customary volumes from a 3V source. Though petite and lightweight, the Bosanghwas pack quite the punch. I'm less convinced of the Paeonia and think the interconnect is flawed, period. But one of three is respectable betting average. And now you know just who to bet on, too...
Quality of packing: Apparently good but shipping damage still resulted.
Reusability of packing: Multiple times.
Ease of unpacking/repacking: Easy.
Condition of component received: Partially damaged - see review.
Completeness of delivery: Power supply, 2 twist-lock umbilicals
Website comments: High on concept, a bit lean on hard data.
Human interactions: Informative and opinionated.
Pricing: Expensive but Korean lacquer inlay makes this an object d'art where pricing conventions differ.
Final comments & suggestions: Tweak speaker terminals. Rethink Paeonia voicing to improve bass performance and rebalance the silver-foil concept.
Musical Laboratory* website