This review page is supported in part by the sponsors whose ad banners are displayed below

During the review period I attended the Cully Jazz festival's booking of the Turkish Taksim Trio whom I'd rate as my all-time favorite ensemble. Hosted in a small lakeside church which sits a dozen across the venue's width, we'd arrived early to stand directly at the front door. This secured our party of six the front pew right off center when the door opened. With Aytaç Doğan on qanun at left, Ismail Tunçbilek on baglama in the middle and Hüsnü Şenlendirici on Amati G clarinet at right—each backed by a small Fender cab, with Hüsnü switching in a Korg octave doubler at times—the three musicians sat farther apart than my living room would accommodate (audiophiles who claim realistic playback of a full symphony orchestra are plainly delusional). The church acoustics were far more reverberant than my own. The audience in the farther reaches toward the organ must have suffered very swimmy conditions. Those should have been particularly deplorable during the many rapid ornamental runs which this music so routinely executes in perfect parallel. But regardless of slightly excessive decay times even front-row center, this became my best concert ever. The musicians played mostly eyes closed but so perfectly meshed across the many time changes and complex interplay as to seem like a single organism. Talking with Aytaç and Hüsnü afterwards we learnt that they were just one week out from releasing their second album. This instantly made for my most looked-forward-to CD of the year especially since the concert had previewed some of the ravishing new tunes.

The following day I cued up their first album Taksim Trio [DoubleMoon] for an impromptu reality check. Obviously the recorded ambiance is far drier than Cully's Temple had been. Optimized studio microphone placement then eliminated the need for concert-hall sound reinforcement. This segues into Jacob's and Geoff's ongoing dialogue about tone density. In this comparison our amplified live concert was clearly fatter, thicker and bigger. But, it also lacked the refined separation of the recording which lays bare all the intertwining musical tendrils and the players' many strategic timbre shifts. In Cully those had bled into each other to gelatinize. Obviously the trio meant to be loud enough to satisfy in the far rows. This wasn't done playing louder but tweaking their Fender cabs.

If such amplified sound is your true north, Rethm's aesthetic could strike you as too lean. It doesn't include pumped-up elements of sound reinforcement (and here we add the ringing of ubiquitous ported bass). For expediency's sake we must now distinguish between tone and tone modulation. Tone per se benefits from acoustic reverb. Compare your own voice to how it sounded in the bathroom before and after you moved in. If you're looking for such tonal fat, amplified and/or reverb-enhanced sound is the ticket. In widebander terms that's unmistakably the Zu Druid V. If however you meant to distinguish exactly just how a player modulated instrumental timbre with airflow changes, reed or finger pressure, finger-pad or plectrum string attacks and such, you cannot be pre-burdened with such built-in enhancements. Those distract from and diminish the scope of true tonal changes. It's not so different from what happens to a finely woven wool cloth after it's been washed and hot-air dried for the first time. It gets thicker and denser and shrinks. Shrunken expanse of tonal color values equals thicker denser sound reinforcement. By design Rethm doesn't add the latter's contributions by itself. Perhaps this really will appeal primarily to those who value and recognize the full scope of instrumental timbre shifts in the nearfield because they either listen to a lot of unamplified live music and/or play(ed) an instrument themselves.

Here's the upshot. if you mean to have most your recordings sound 'better'—as though recorded in an empty rather than accessorized bathroom to gain that reverb fullness—they will in trade sound less different from each other. The more you load up the former, the less you get on the latter. Hence Rethm has strategically opted for more different over more enhanced. At the end of the day that's the central decision to agree with. If you've got lots of recordings of predominantly acoustic music that were properly mastered, you could be living at Rethm central.
 
Like guitarist Franck Tchang who treasures tone modulation über alles—hence his transient-accurate LiveLine cables and non-ported breathing Tango speakers—Jacob George played the violin to treasure similar qualities. Their focus is an insider's perspective on the subject of pleasure listening. It's no different than a master chef being incapable of approaching a dish like a regular eater. A chef doesn't stop at presentation and taste. He appreciates and derives pleasure from seeing how the dish was made. He enjoys spontaneous reverse-engineering vision. Such vision is triggered by creator's minutiae that elude pure consumers. Rethm's approach to sound is an expert's vision on the constant process of tone modulation. It allows a critical listener to see how things were done.


If that reads mental/dry rather than emotional/juicy, it's only true with effort. To aficionados this process of seeing is automatic. It does involve mental appreciation but isn't heady. It's just a secondary data feed. They not only pay attention to the end result everyone else is tuned into. They likewise monitor the process of creation and enjoy doing so. Let's be perfectly clear now that music enjoyment is entirely possible without it. It's in fact vastly preferable if this parallel act of seeing involves any 'listening for' effort. Effort turns seeing into a mental activity. And that obscures direct access to music's emotional content to bury its entire raison d'être. Should Rethm's particular informativeness overstimulate your mental faculties, you might be better off knowing less.

If you're the type of listener who naturally enjoys or even demands participation in this secondary data stream, you'd really get Rethm's Saadhana. An excellent example is my staple recording of Hector Zazou & Swara's In the House of Mirrors. Let's quote from Jon Lusk's BBC review thereof: "...In The House Of Mirrors places Indian and Uzbekistani instrumentalists centre stage, answering, echoing and embellishing their slow melancholic-sounding improvisations with a beguiling array of effects. The opening "Zannat" is a typically hypnotic piece that marinades the dry metallic plunking of Toir Kuziyev's tanbur (long-necked lute) in a pulsing heat haze of discreet looped percussion, backwards samples and woozy insect chatter. One by one the other featured artists appear, first Manish Pingle artfully twanging an Indian slide guitar à la V.M. Bhatt/Debashish Bhattacharya backed by what sounds like a kanun on "Kanoon Ampa".


"The ethereal "Attainable Border: South" features the violin of Milind Raykar whose long aching phrases in the gayaki style eerily mimic the human voice, building to an extraordinarily emotional climax around six minutes in. Norway's Nils Petter Molvaer tentatively shadows Pingle's playing with ghostly tooted trumpet on "Wanna Mako" and by "Sisyphe" we finally hear from bansuri (bamboo flute) maestro Ronu Majumdar. And so it goes on for over an hour. In The House Of Mirrors could be seen as an ideal starting point for those curious about Asian classical music and its derivatives but perhaps put off by its apparent austerity. Zazou's lush treatments bring out the instruments' seductive sonorities and the beats don’t overpower their charms as often happens in these kinds of fusion efforts..."

Put in the simplest of terms, if this recording seems boring to you, there are only three possible explanations. One, you're not the 'inside' type listener. That makes your general hifi shopping much easier. Two, you don't have a system which can unlock its 'innards' though you'd like to. This makes you a difficult hifi shopper. Three simply adds one and two. With a SIT1/Saadhana system, Zazou's introspective washes of lazy or no apparent rhythmic action with minimal melodic development transform into a most delectable celebration of kaleidoscopically shifting tonal hues of often alien flavors. That's because on this album tone modulation is the primary action. Take that away and what's left is yawn. Buy this album to verify my writing. Put today's core claims about the Saadhana's special qualities into context!
Particularly on such organic-ambient fare—let's now mention Mercan Dede as the grand daddy and true master of the genre—the added demands for synthetic infrasonics become extra grave. Acoustic instruments played and recorded expertly are embedded into an artificial though equally masterful faux venue. This combines demands for timbral nuance with abysmal reach that won't interfere with, obscure, fatten up or alter the upper bands but augments them with true sub bass. Only this recreates the full scale of recorded space and subliminal effects. The previously mentioned Kamasutra soundtrack is one of those albums, particularly the "Gold Dust Bacchanalia" track. So would be certain remixes of Jamshied Sharifi's Footsteps in Africa soundtrack.


Routinely reviews qualify monitor speakers or low-power amps by saying they do very well on small-scale acoustic stuff. The Saadhana has all the qualities you'd expect of a speaker to fit that description. Where it blows hinges off the monitor category is with true subwoofer depth and power. What it still won't do like more time-confused hazier ported multi-ways is cut across that vast swath of Rock 'n' Pop if (as they arguably should) folks expect such fare to sound like it does in a club: amplified and made to energize a big space. This remakes it over unplugged. And such a refusal to completely rock out is not due to any lack of loudness, reach or weight as would be true for nearly all monitors. It's due to what's been discussed all along. Rethm's deliberate voicing is too clean and lean for phat grungy music.


When it comes to piano as that simultaneously percussive and reverb-rich king of raw bandwidth which Geoff's customer used as indicator, much depends on how a given take captured direct vs. ambient sound. With mics at extreme proximity above the strings where no human ears ever sits, a very revealing non-fat speaker like this Rethm will by necessity paint an appropriately unrealistic harmonic balance where on-string action dominates over sound-body redolence as though you sat on the player's bench or inside the piano. Unnatural mastering engineering decisions simply don't often get this exposed. If you don't like your recorded truth, don't look at it through a magnifying glass like the Saadhana. That said, upper right-hand piano passages will exhibit a somewhat metallic aspect the more on-axis you sit.

 
The end of practice. Ancient Hindu deities are out on the town for a stroll. With 2013's Saadhana, the Indian firm's more than decade-long quest for a perfected full-range single-driver speaker has concluded. That it would incorporate an active triple-woofer isobaric bass system merely illustrates the designer's very hard-earned pragmatism. With modern music's bandwidth, one driver can't do it all. Linearizing the breed's presence-region response without castrating its well-known side benefits, then giving it brass cojones of serious heft and doing it all in a single box of friendly dimensions, the Saadhana's apprenticeship in the widebander milieu has matured to full mastery. It's the perhaps first speaker of its kind to be unaccompanied by the usual qualifications except for that of proper amplifier matching. That remains critical. Here 100dB efficiency makes for more unusual but very effective choices which aren't restricted to valves. Bass integration is superb and finally also ticks off the ability to do kick drum properly violent justice. The twin-cone main driver of course remains more directional so most listeners will fire it straight out. This also defines speaker width versus listening distance.


Whilst the speaker can play very loud and its bass system has proper headroom to keep up, greater real-world relevance is what happens at the very shallow end of the SPL pool. Even without an airtight listening room bunker, the family can already be asleep while you continue the music. This speaker retains good visibility even in dim candle light as it were. Apartment and townhouse dwellers take note. This could have your name on it. And because one of the first things to go awol at low levels is bass, Rethm's active system is the antidote. Just open the bass attenuator a click or two.

 
Amongst market alternatives, neither PHY-based competitors nor Voxativ have yet embraced active bass to compete on bandwidth. The only direct alternative I know of will be the soundkaos Wave 40. Its pending Subwave 30 mate replicates Rethm's recipe but with external woofers and outboard bass amps for more placement options. Should you desire fewer rather than more boxes and a meatier upper bass/midband than either Trisha or Maarga manage plus bass reach and power they can't touch, the Saadhana for now seems to have no natural predators or enemies. It sits at the very top of its particular food chain. No rain on Ganesha's head today!
Postscript: On April 11th potential Rethm dealer Kurt Bühler and a client drove from Bern to Villeneuve to audition the only pair of Saadhanas in Switzerland before it made tracks to Monaco. They expressed particular surprise over its gargantuan soundstaging sitting less than 3 meters removed. Kurt who's heard a number of widebanders over the years to accord them specific advantages always accompanied by equally specific demerits concurred that here we had one which didn't suffer the usual liabilities in the expected ways. It's simply that compared to standard speakers faint echoes of speed-related whitishness remain. That's the price to pay for this degree of informativeness. It's precisely why the softening action of valves has become such a go-to recommendation for the breed. The type of very thin paper required to achieve 100dB efficiency creates a certain sharpness which is best complemented by valves. Slightly heavier thicker paper as used by the less efficient Enviée driver of soundkaos becomes more suitable for ultra-fast transistors. By the time one arrives at the even heavier paper of the Zu/Eminence driver, yet more varied amp options open up.


Quality of packing: Palletized cardboard with foam liners.
Reusability of packing: A few times.
Ease of unpacking/repacking: Easy but moving the very slippery speakers upstairs requires two with stout backs. Once on the main floor and fitted with carpet or parquet sliders, dirt easy to move about.
Condition of component received: Flawless.
 Completeness of delivery: Doesn't include power cords.
Human interactions: Excellent.
Pricing: Given its active bass sections, very fairly priced. The brilliant performance when a single Zu Submission substituted the integral bass sections—simply don't power them up—suggests there could be a market for a half-sized bass-less Saadhana.
Final comments & suggestions: None. All previous complaints or wish-list items have been addressed.

Rethm website