With the darker bottom-up XA-30.8, Michael's quicksilvery ribbon naturally enjoyed less of the spot light. The Z1's overall built-for-speed attitude was less high-octane tweaked, too. In trade, density, mass and comfort factor increased noticeably. That better anchored the somewhat higher SPL this larger space warrants. Now I had eradicated all remnants of hollowness behind/beneath the midband. Enter a central audio verity: once lost, resolution won't restore. If the Z1 were voiced like our big amp—or to a somewhat lesser extent the Kaiser maxi monitor—replacing that amp with our quicker far more lucid monos wouldn't register alike. That darker thicker less teased-out slower 'class A personality' would become a filter which the LinnenberG cubes couldn't blast through. In my book, a maximally resolved quick pure transducer makes subsequent flavor injections like some valve-based THD or muscle-amp wallop child's play. The opposite doesn't. We can't add resolution and brilliance to a box that's reticent and dull. We can only avoid piling on more reticence and dullness. By that same logic as confirmed in situ, the Z1 responds with real alacrity not vagueness to upstream changes. That gives its owner a far broader scale for final system tuning; far more virtual knobs and sliders on the EQ of component interactions. The job title on the Z1's business card reads heightened responsiveness.

If you've tired of seeing me call out the Z1 as fast because you can't correlate speed with sound—after all, a 4'33" long track still takes exactly 273 seconds from start to finish as it does over any other box—it seems prudent to explain it as a lack of indecision, blur, fuzz, overhang, glom and congeal. Have you experimented with resonance attenuation by way of engineered equipment racks? Then you know how bleeding out 'stickum' and subtle blurriness lets in more light into music's structure. It's the opposite of cat-litter clumping.

It renders leading edges with more accuracy. That gives tunes more pep and vitality, more sass, strut and swagger. It's as though a band's bass player and drummer were turned on to play extra in the pocket. It's higher beat fidelity, better rhythmic drive. Though music's journey through time doesn't speed up, subjective pace quickens. That's the most literal connection with speed as an audio quality. Other upshots are greater clarity, more dynamic expressivity, more specific image lock and from that, superior soundstage sorting. All of these interrelated attributes tumble out of the 'speed' pocket.

It's why if I were allowed just one word to capture the Z1's personality, I'd still pick quick. If I were allowed two more to nail down its core benefit, I'd come back to heightened responsiveness. Now I'd simply break it down beyond responses to hardware changes. It also implies being acutely responsive to changes in dynamic inflections and textures. The transient of a plectrum-picked steel string has a different texture or feel than a finger not nail-plucked gut string. That differs from a staccato trumpet which differs from a rim shot. On these counts, the Z1 is more responsive than most. In my vocabulary, that makes it quick, period.

Conclusion. With a kitchen-sink approach to the B-01—throw everything at it then add up the bill no matter where it ends up—the Z1 must have been the still tougher engineering task. It did start with a fixed budget. Being very competitive, Michael Børresen then meant to come in as close to his flagship monitor as he reasonably could. Given how much the Z1 reminded me of my time with the B-02 and prior to that, my visit to the Aalborg facilities, I'd say that he got unreasonably close.

As such, this latest Børresen Acoustics is recognizably from a stable of racers so an exacting high-resolution speaker groomed for crisp timing and, to indulge the obvious, ribbon reflexes. Those continue down the bandwidth with little braking if you front the Z1 with electronics that are its equal on that score. If you go for Gemütlichkeit over Funkengrüven, the Z1 complies readily. After all, it's very easy to slow anything down that's already in top gear. Just take the foot off the gas or slam the brakes. If that suggests relatively little innate personality, you're correct. The Z1 is a compact high-performance monitor for those who believe that if any voicing is to be done, it ought to be infused upstream, not built into the final transformers of electrical into mechanical energy.