Where the Cellini works with standard cable terminals, the High version adds a solid-silver loop beneath them. This makes instant high-pressure contact upon screw-down and bypasses the terminal's inner solder joint. It obviously mandates spades to exploit fully. Perhaps that's just a small detail but enough of them will contribute, noticeably. Once I asked about the crossover, Richard Rudolph went schtumm. All I managed to get from him were some vague hints about shallow filters, exceptionally even sound from perfectly mirrored slopes and premium Rike Audio capacitors.
For amplification, I used a Silvercore L2 preamp and my trusty DarTZeel NHB-108B power amp. My cable loom is by Analog Tools even if Acapella's own silver version might have been a nice alternative. But I wanted known quantities to hone in on differences to my La Campanella.
Days of thunder? Don't underestimate the sheer fun factor of these horns. They play a lot louder than expected; so loud in fact that cueing up Charly Antolini's Knock Out 2000 ought to mandate ear-plug protection. The last time I faced such an acoustical tornado was during the Westdeutsche Hifi Tage 2019 with AW's €70'000/pr Pure Emotion hornspeakers. Then and now, there was no dynamic redline. "Jammin" steadily escalates to the very final beat. More than once did I cast worried glances at my darTZeel whose power reserves aren't indefinitive. Nothing untoward happened, no fuse popped to interrupt my party. Next on my Raven turntable went Boston Pop's Gaite Parisienne [Classic Records LSC-1817, 180g] whose repertoire might straddle the fence between serious and shallow but whose orchestral power and vehemence the Cellini dispatched with astonishing pressure yet impressive nonchalance.
To normalize any shit-eating grins, it's important to stress that these horns don't just do grand spectaculars. They excel equally at quiet levels. When my currently favorite pianist Yuya Wang on Deutsche Grammophone's The Berlin Recitals leans into a chord, it manifests firmly in space before feathering out into elusive fade trails. Just before crossing the line of perception, it's usually only the resonant tone wood action which remains audible. But Cellini even held onto the subliminal steel string aspects behind it. This didn't only extend the decays but broadened the overlap of intermingling leading and falling edges across the most varied resonant frequencies.
Cellini in fact owned this metier of mellow SPL. A wakeful music lover like myself needn't stop just because the family already chases dreams. Just as present well below regular room levels, the emotional tension of Leonard Cohen's Live in London concert (an album for the ages) held steady across its full 2.5 hours for a midnight performance which, because I simply don't have the time for it during the day, I would otherwise have missed.
