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Bass power. Small speakers don't have any. At least that's the perception. And mostly it's right on the money. The Mythology 1 begs to differ though. Because it's ported not sealed, it has surprising shove. It can really crack in the vital upper bass range to recall Platinum Audio's Solo of yore which pulled a similar stunt. Playing an older Chico & the Gypsies cut of rumba flamenca which begins with real church bells into which steps an organ that finally lays down a solid fundamental to close the intro, this low pedal roiled and rippled through our space with full presence. Whilst the Submission would render it more potent still, it simply wasn't needed. What the Californian did went well beyond hinted at. And though the ±60Hz range felt slightly stronger than perfectly flat, this small generosity gave the M1 real substance to counter the massive aeration and filigreed lightness of being from its twin-tweeter array.


Speaker design lore says that if your design is light in the 20-40Hz octave, you best roll off the 10-20kHz octave too to keep the tonal center in the middle and not shift it up. Would that imply that by adding the 20-40kHz octave with its ARD, the M1 would have to hit 10Hz to sound fully balanced? It's a rhetorical question by dealing in an impossibility. But it reconfirms my top-down description. To be clear, the Mythology 1 is not tipped up. It's not bright. It's not forward. It's exceptionally sophisticated and refined and effectively counterbalances its treble substance with that small extra dose in the 2nd octave for proper grounding. Yet after everything is said and done, the dominant sound feature remains that unbelievable upper end.

And it's not just about Sopranino. As stated before, even without it that quality is present, just not to as intense a degree. Enigma have fashioned a very special large dome tweeter indeed. That's the real parade horse. Sopranino is merely the feather in its harness.

Whilst not the equal of the flat-cone Tangband units in Sven Boenicke's B10—Anthony Gallo has his own version for the revised small sphere models—Enigma's main tweeter has good off-axis response. Spaced reasonably far apart, even for two chairs outside the traditional sweet spot the stage only moved slightly to the side to completely avoid collapsing into the closer speaker. In short, no need to get asocial and hog the lone chair to fully enjoy a well-developed stereo illusion.

With synchronicity at work, I had at the same time Takei-San's very different TakeT H2+ headphone on review together with a custom-built valve amp by Trafomatic Audio's Sasa Cokic. The H2+'s AMT-like folded piezo membrane with built-in piezo super tweeter made for a very similar ultra-resolution presentation. With one vital difference. In its original version it lacked LF weight and to a lesser degree some air and brilliance in the opposite extreme. This added up to a very electrostatic balance of strengths and weaknesses. By contrast the EnigmAcoustics boxes were decidedly dynamic transducers of the pistonic sort, albeit with electrostatic transparency.

Speakers from Mark & Daniel and Burmester which exploit Heil-style AMT tweeters promote lower distortion and far higher dynamics for their pleated drivers. Particularly the latter brand's trade show demos have routinely struck me as relentlessly bright and aggressive which wasn't helped by playing too loud. Even with certain M+D models the dynamic contrast in the presence region could feel emphasized. That would telegraph as a bit fresh or brisk though never to the extent of the Germans. Happily none of this applied to the M1. Here was an ultra-smooth and suave operator without any tendencies for aggression. It put a lie to the notion that extremely illuminated needs to equate bright. Not!

Yet if you subscribe to The Abso!ute Sound ideal that our playback should clone the sound of an acoustic live event—as close as that might be achieved in practice—the Mythology 1 lives up to its name. It's a bit of a myth. Unless perhaps one sat on stage or actually played the piano to be in extreme proximity where nobody in the audience ever is... one simply doesn't get this direct and uncut a dose of HF. It gets lost by absorption and drowned out by louder bass. Amplified concerts can have a mixer compensate a bit depending on the sound reinforcement gear at hand. Yet the M1 isn't a bad case of balding old men tweaking a treble tone control to compensate for their hearing loss. Like most women, my wife is allergic to brightness and high volumes which can exaggerate it when present. She'd have bolted before me (I hate it too). Relative to 'just sound' vs. the total experience our ear/brain generates from it, the M1's aspects which on the first count clearly exceed reality do for the second count compensate strongly for playback's complete lack of visual data. They fill in those visual 'but they're not really here' gaps with astonishing accuracy.


With our first Enigma tour guides AURALiC's powerful Merak monos, the M1 simply didn't do warmth and tone density like our wooden soundkaos or Boenicke speakers do. Instead they veered far deeper into detail retrieval both primary and ambient. For us this became a novel exposure to hyper resolution. Our question was whether over time such super-polished supremely sophisticated readings might backfire when material demanded to get raunchy and gritty. Could the M1 get down into the lower chakras? Would first enthusiasm cool down or get qualified by specific limitations? And how would other amplifiers shift things about?