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As Herr Schur promised on his website with confidence, the first aural encounter was really a shock. I couldn’t deny it. I wondered how such a compact box could reproduce such clearly defined bone-dry low bass. Since the music was unfamiliar, I paid little attention to audiophile aspects and simply listened. What did stand out in particular were dynamics.
Next we played one of my cuts. Herr Schur cued up Dire Straights’ "Private Investigation". If you know the song, you know what was coming. When the percussion kicked in with utter brutality and the guitar screamed like a banshee, a bit of a purchase decision began to gesticulate. Nothing got boomy or fuzzy even at elevated levels. Good I thought, loud definitely works. Unusual was how the percussion arose in the room. That was simply impressive. The omni dispersions of the cymbal was more convincing than I’ve heard with most full-size boxes.
Despite all this bass bravura, the mids and treble didn’t suffer. I handed Norman another disc—-we were on a first-name basis by now—by the sadly still obscure Florian Ostertag who laid down a brilliant production in his home studio.
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I picked "I have been good" from 2009’s The Constant Search. Toward its end the band does a short instrumental solo and with a good speaker, the performers around singer Florian Ostertag appear nearly holographically precise.
That’s what I awaited, perversely hoping that this newfangled and affordably priced compact speaker would finally lose a bit of luster over against what we’d already heard. Instead I was served up space with such depth as I’ve rarely encountered it. Most speakers manage width just fine but to map out the far depths is not as common. In fact this was one attribute my old speaker lacked – proper depth layering.
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Relevant too is that regardless of loud or soft, the Anima didn’t drop a penny. Spaciousness and detail remained independent of volume. Obviously the most fun was to be had loud but even quietly I was kept in the loop, this likely a side effect of higher sensitivity.
Time to scale up expectations for a real test. On the Chinese album Para Mita by He Xun Tian, "Earth Song" pulls out all the stops in the bass. By now I was putty and fully captivated. I couldn’t stop grinning and even the designer seemed somewhat surprised by his babies. The entire array of huge drums had materialized in full inside his ca. 20m² space. I felt compelled to invoke the audiophile term ‘airiness’. The depth panorama was out of this world. This was music in 3D. Sounds grew bodies and I could actually touch everything.
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This called for "Like a dog chasing cars" from The Dark Knight soundtrack. Once again the speaker didn’t disappoint. Each instrument was clearly allocated its proper position in space and between individual performers there was sufficient air. The illumination of space was very good. Admittedly an earlier auditioned pair of Diapason Adamantes had grabbed me even stronger. While orchestral fare isn’t an outright weakness with the Pointos, its real virtues are elsewhere.
Once again the bass foundation was superb. These boxes could substitute for Jägermeister. That’s how the low end massages the stomach. The turn-on factor of the Anima was so high that 3.5 hours of non-fatiguing listening passed in no time. That’s how my audition of a different kind ended. I simply knew that these speakers would trade owners soon.
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Pointos Audiosysteme
Holzhauser Straße 177 | 13509 Berlin
Website
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redaktion @ fairaudio.de
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