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The sound of music. The Purity incited me to leave the house to hear live performances. I listened to string quartets, jazz ensembles, rock bands and symphonies. My observation is that live music sounds a little bit gentler in the high frequencies than is often portrayed by high fidelity equipment. "Air" as the space around instruments and the gentle field in a performance setting is not associated with piercing treble. I didn’t hear a lot of soundstaging either. Choruses and orchestras occupy a lot of room but I couldn’t hear the unique spatial coordinates of singers or instruments. Most importantly, music does not call attention to separate features that can be compartmentalized.
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I also note that bass is not overly damped, seismic or gut-wrenching. Subwoofer reviews that comment on how the bass was overwhelming are telling you that the sonic balance of live music has been distorted. Such boom boxes may be dramatic but they’re not realistic. The same goes for tweeters that extend into low microwave territory. If they don’t produce a convincing reproduction of a musical event, they are feats of engineering that add nothing to the listening experience.
The triumph of the Purity Silver Statement is that it conveys information without imposing an opinion. Finally we have closed the circle: music with all the detail of the original performance with appropriately balanced elements.
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Revised cosmetics of the Silver Statement II.
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Costs and benefits. This Purity preamp and power supply will set you back $38’000. It would be specious to point out that there are far more expensive preamps because anything beyond your budget is on the same unobtainable plane. I prefer to think of this unit as the best expression of what’s possible at this time. If nothing else, the Purity is educational, demonstrating that we know how to build preamplifier circuits that are astonishingly close to the live event. The more practical consideration is that the insights Bill Baker and Joe Jurzec have obtained from designing and building the Silver Statement will trickle down into less expensive designs. That means there should be a Purity unit within your price range with the same intelligence and spirit as this remarkable device. |
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