Another benefit was soundstage excellence so extremely sorted 3D mapping, image lock and separation. Eyes-first listeners who naturally gravitate to looking at or into the virtual soundscape will be tickled pink, those with rather lesser systems enviously green or a lustfully pulsing crimson red. No matter how dense the fare or complex a mix, the 8c's refusal of location confusion or focus softening means that investigative or cerebral listening is fully 'on'. If you mean to follow all the musical strands no matter how marginal, knotted up or presumably hidden behind or dominated by bigger louder lines, this highly visualized presentation will serve you to perfection. It's aided and abetted by stripping out all residue between individual sounds. This eliminates what we might call half shadows or connective tissue. Over the 8c the virtual stage is fully and evenly illuminated front to back, left to right. That denudes it of darkness to leave nothing vague. It makes the 8c an ideal dual-purpose stereo/AV speaker when for so many modern movies, dialogue intelligibility is at an all-time low because the actors mumble or whisper being on the Brando method; or because location din or Hans Zimmer orchestration overpowers their utterances. Now transducer mojo on raw detail retrieval and separation is king. For the D&D it's suggestive of very low distortion in the time domain and what from other reviews we already know to measure very well all around.

My usual amplification of four monoblocks and their wiring the 8c makes redundant. It also incorporates my outboard crossover and D/A converter.

Which begs the question, what about remedial BACCH power? Again, accessing it is currently limited to Ethernet and Spotify with at best 320kbps resolution; or Roon for full and high resolution. Making it live also over AES3 should really be on the company's 2024 roadmap to expand usage scenarios. For my second remote intervention, I was thus hoping to get temporary Roon access to test BACCH at CD quality and above. I seriously doubt that Spotify-only users shop anywhere near the 8c's league. That makes Spotify-embedded BACCH mostly a fall-back option for when existing Roon users host guests who want in on the action off their smartphones. For complete IT engineering cred, Martijn and his techs were obviously keen to enable my Spotify access. I already saw the BACCH on/off slider in the browser window's lower right-hand corner's Plugins tab. Just then it simply still said 'not available for XLR input'. The same browser window also allows one to turn off the white power LED; select a preset; order a remote €499 intervention; and more.

For the second TeamViewer meet, Kevin Kleine was my designated operator who subsequently handed over to another colleague. After their Ascend Support software ran an initial remote diagnostic on each speaker, TeamViewer's chat window hosted an email exchange which I've shorted below for the highlights. An hour after launch, the problem was solved. In a follow-up email, Kevin explained that "apparently Spotify was unable to connect to the default gateway provided by your router over IPv6. It was however able to connect over IPv4 so we disabled IPv6 on the 8c to make everything work. If you experience these kinds of issues with other devices or software, you could consider disabling IPv6 on your router (if that's an option)." Having had no such connection issues with any other devices or Spotify on three computers, all this was news to me. I don't speak Network Protocoleze.

Now I was ready to BACCH it. My arrow above is meant to indicate how the 8c's stepped software volume locks to the jittery volume slider in Spotify so I defaulted to using the D&D again in its own window.