It's fair to admit that I'm imprinted by Boenicke Audio's general voicing as much as their sleek optics. Any subjective reasons for my recent purchase simply ended there. The W11 SE interested me primarily as a tool of far greater revelatory powers and less room boom. This translates to hearing connected components more keenly than before, thus less of the room and more of the speakers. And that shortens my time to get a firm aural fix on anything in the chain. The W11 SE+ affirmed its predicted usefulness which was comforting. But it did a lot more by only partially resembling the W11 SE I had the pleasure of living with for several weeks prior. In fact the newcomer's voice was more unknown than familiar. That unmistakable Swiss aroma was still there but now heavily augmented to be more complex, fragrant and substantially more enjoyable.
The considerably more fit, open, energetic, resolute and insightful W11 SE had its priorities reshuffled over the more romantic, distant, calmer, rounder, darker and somewhat shy W8. That's why the W11 SE+ was expected to behave at least as sporty and direct as its SE version. It did to become common ground. Ditto soundstaging of gargantuan proportions which is inherent to all Boenicke speakers. But the major twist came with the SE+'s greatly elevated moisture, textural substance and background blackness. Not only did it have by far the upper hand on musical tissue but it was no less high-res or muscular for it. To simplify, the W11 SE+ landed somewhere between W8 and W11 SE on density, then jumped over both on quality. Here the height of this leap was anything but subtle. The key question to ask would be about just what facilitated that.
Stealthy steroids? The LessLoss track record in our pages is immaculate: four different cables, two accessories and one DAC. Including Sven's IC3 CG and S3 cables based on Louis Motek's scaled-up C-MARC tech, that's seven hits and zero misses. The more LessLoss gigs I have under my belt, the more obvious their shared backbone has become. This behavior regardless of product not only takes strategic design know-how but hones our attention on their ultimate goal of utter background silence. As a direct result of noise rejection by various clever means, silence is the proverbial soil from which everything flourishes. LessLoss have made their unique solution scalable, additive and free from tonal skewing, thus universal. The modular Firewall for Loudspeakers is their latest and most advanced such development to date.
Although its main ingredient looks innocuous enough, it's the result of more than two decades of work. I already had a good taste of this on my power cords for key gear. A single LessLoss Firewall 64X for power was found to be profoundly effective on my DAC when fed from a wall socket. To explain, picture a hauntingly black musical backdrop free from any grain. All virtual sound sources outline finely to be pleasantly round, filled with pigment and very much alive. Treble shows brilliant decays, differentiation and weight with the tiniest nuances. Bass slam is as taut or elastic as your music demands. Now expand immediacy, dynamic contrasts and clarity. Then remove one of these noise killers. Performance instantly plunges to become more matte, tense, edgy, chiseled, coarse, grainy, artificial and considerably less pleasant. Put the thing back in. Music blossoms again. Pull it out and it collapses. That's what one small accessory's silencing can do. It's spooky indeed.
