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What impressed me most was the bass spread or perhaps not so much spread as its energy. With Mr. Rogoż’s anti-vibration system, the bass from a Daft Punk album was remarkable in its amplitude and physical strike. It was the sound of a bass guitar played live with a large guitar amp. As I once said, I was at one of Edyta Bartosiewicz’s concerts marking her return to the stage. I then sat just a few meters from an amp like this. During the concert, the bass player shifted his volume and effects and also altered his playing technique. The review platform had an impact on the sound of this instrument as though the musician put more energy into it and slightly turned up the volume on his bass amp. This occurred without blare or bloat. Presence increased and attacks hit harder.
I felt the same when I returned from a Portishead concert on June 25th in the Nowa Huta Arcelor Mittal Poland tinning hall and played their latest album. The amplifier put on my table top played it seemingly hard and complete, with the bass reaching low as features of this valve amp I'd already liked a lot. When I put the amplifier on the platform, my half-asleep wife emerged from the adjacent room eyes blazing and 'asked' me to turn the pounding off. When I asked if she had heard anything earlier—I'd lost all sense of self-awareness for a while—she suspiciously asked if I had actually listened to something. She'd not noticed anything then. I could wholeheartedly confirm that the second time the reading was far more energetic and the bass reached far lower. No wonder it also was stronger on the other side of the wall. This is the way I enjoyed the concert I was talking about. Records convey a bare flicker of the energy and power conveyed in a live rock concert. Records are the chilled lounge version but this platform ushered the sound in at least the right direction. The sound livened up infused by greater energy and pulsation, bigger images and higher bass output. I was still listening to just recordings but the experience had moved a bit closer to the concert's contact high.
The high frequencies behaved similarly. With the platform HF accents insignificantly yet still perceptibly shifted. The change was most audible with commercial records targeted at the mass market to perhaps emphasize a built-in tonal balance. This manifested as a presence region emphasis. With more purist records including both jazz performers like Danielsson, Dell and Landgren's Salzau Music On The Water as well as classical from Johann Sebastian Bach's St. John Passion, this effect manifested as more refinement. Though on Daft Punk the bass was exceptional, the upper range in which human voices operate was clearer to the point that you could hear the work of many people and effects associated with those voices.
