Here are a few tracks I spun up to suss out various performance aspects. The first is from the Joachim Ianello Trio's Rire avec Charlie album called "Bertrand Swing". The Charlie in question is Chaplin. It features piano, Manouche guitar, violin and trumpet. As a lyrical number, it's all about glorious timbres so tone.

The next one pursued more tone but now with the added challenge of massed strings. I find their kind the most critical. Here we listen to a track from The Ayoub Sisters' Arabesque album.

For more massed strings which cross over Vivaldi and Irish fiddling with bodhrans and flutes there's Hughes de Courson's O'Stravaganza, a precursor to his later work on two Mozart l'Egyptien albums..

To check on transient speed, a go-to track is "Segue" from Curandero's second album Aras. Miguel Espinoza and Bela Fleck duel it out on Flamenco guitar and banjo while Ty Burhoe lays down tabla thunder and Kai Eckhardt bouncy bass. It's all about percussive spikiness and fierce timing, slaps, cracks and pops.

Rolling brilliant female power vocals into the earlier stew of massed strings, I reached for Hiba Tiwaji's Ya Habibi album and the track "Hobbi Li Intaha".

Would there be even subliminal issues when her upper registers and mastering prominence collide?

For very exposed male vocals, Salar Aghili's title track from Negar is a personal favorite.

Did the particular focus behind this short playlist reveal any weaknesses?When played at stout levels, the Lebanese songstress with the 4-octave range got just a bit shouty as you'd expect from Lowther-style widebanders. It's likely that she triggered mild response elevations in the paper driver's upper octave before it hands off to the tweeter. It's the shadow side of the Z165's vocal projection powers. If you pick 'cruel' test tracks with a lead foot on the gas, those can get a bit too forward. The same tendency triggered when Vivaldi's Baroque strings first enter at 0'40" like a horde of dirty bow-wielding scratchers. Here the Z165 captured far more metal than wood. The very sunny side of the same equation netted goose pimples on the Curandero track to whiz, zip, blister and pop like dragstrip champions. Even minor lameness one may ascribe to paper drivers in the speed department didn't factor. Alain's 6.5er did both massed violins and peppery Flamenco arpeggios justice. Using DC-coupled class A/B amps of 1MHz bandwidth could simply overshoot a bit to net speeding tickets for occasional presence-region forwardness.

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A resident antidote would be Vinnie Rossi's original DHT preamp fitted with Elrog ER50. Of course it'd also 'pad out' the 99% of other tracks in no need of it. That's how astute listeners who mean to enjoy everything from Doom Metal to string quartets weigh their compromises. To maximize the demands of one musical style invariably implies that their opposites aren't quite as well served. Given my favorite music and how I voice my systems around it, I'd happily err on the Z165's side. Time for a very different playlist.