Total recall? If anyone brags they possess it for a hifi's sound months or years later, cough and move on. That said, one aspect of Nemo action triggered instant recall of Ivo Linnenberg's Georg Friedrich Händel. Those are €23K/pr class A 100-watt monos (400w/2Ω) with advanced switch-mode power supplies. I reviewed them in late 2021. Specs like 1.5MHz bandwidth, 126dB S/NR with 20µV of noise, fully balanced circuity, DC coupled and bipolar output devices trigger more overlap. Sonically it was their memorable blackness of bass which pinged recognition. I'd not heard that before yet here it was again. Coming off my Kinki EX-B7 monos with eight lateral Exicon Mosfets per channel i.e. half of Nemo's bipolar artillery, this presence was very tacit. A fallback from audiophilia's lexicon might be authoritative? This bass wasn't louder. That would only have upset tonal balance. Neither did it reach lower. Yet it was decidedly blacker. Usually inkiness describes a lowered noise floor against which images pop harder for higher contrast. Here it was specific to the low registers. They felt richer, quite like a handful of premium potting soil that's jet black, moist not dry, airy not clumpy so very other than sand or stone. But the effect's upshot certainly didn't limit itself to bass. It caused a wholesale shift into something more present and majestic, innately relaxed yet muscular. Returning to the Black Continent, this wasn't the twitchiness of a cheetah zigzagging at speed behind a prey. This displayed none of the nervy explosiveness which soon runs out of breath because such effort isn't sustainable. Neither did it feel like a rampaging rhino's locomotive mass. It had a far more easeful quality, perhaps like our former wolf hybrids in long-distance ambling mode. Nemo's power clearly telegraphed no ponderous amorphous massiveness with lost definition. Au contraire. Articulation was on point. As lame as it sounds, blackness really is my best and first term even though I don't find it particularly encompassing. Sometimes a few words just aren't enough; or one lacks the right words to begin with.
Standby with a red symbol in the power switch; and the central blue logo of the 'on' state just a circular space holder. And yes, this glossy fascia is reflective as sin.
For more pointers, this change also impacted my perspective on grounding. When someone says that music freely floats between their speakers, we know exactly what they mean. Images hang in space like big soap bubbles, usually at approximately the correct height. I won't say that here they suddenly stood fully down to their boots as though all difference to live performers had ceased. But I was certainly more conscious of a particular earthing; as though gravity exerted stronger pull. The images didn't shift in their usual positions relative to the floor. Rather, the 'ground' had become another entity or presence I was aware of. The sonic imagery floating over my front wall had a stronger connection to anchored physicality that leaves footprints. Ghosts certainly don't. In that sense of physical presences extending down to the floor, realism had notched up. I think that's a fair description of the overall effect or biggest change. More grunt, less float.
Following closely, the second change was dynamic life. With the same comfortable median volume I always use, singers or instruments leaning in for emphasis on a melodic arc or embellishment made their points with grander gestures. Think of normal people encountering a deaf person who must read lips. They suddenly animate their lip movements more to be better legible. I don't know whether a deaf person would find it so but in my hifi context it certainly was the correct assumption. What imaginative writers call musical message—I prefer microdynamic expressiveness since I haven't a clue about the artists' true intentions—was easier to read. After all, as hifi listeners we aren't deaf but blind. We never see anything other than our familiar room and hardware. It's all imagination from interpolated aural cues. When those contain more dynamic range, our 'before' state invariably feels flatter so more like a telephone autosponder speaking with only marginal inflections. If microdynamics are ripples on a plate that moves up/down with changing average volume, Nemo plated up bigger ripples. And to remain with the autosponder image, those bigger ripples expanded the inflective difference between a more monotonous telephone automaton and real people speaking through lively instruments and song.
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Putting this into one paragraph minimized the effect's true relevance. Just because describing it only took a few sentences doesn't make it small print we barely read. Just because the prior page predicted as much, this foregone conclusion still made for very happy confirmation in the listening seat. In the sense of emotive expressivity too, realism had notched up. Here that doesn't mean live music, just easier believability. It's less stuff our ear/brain must process to accept the hifi illusion. Let's be very clear. An illusion is all it is. Applying 'more realism' to an illusion is very funny business. Our sector is simply used to it. I trust that you appreciate the distinction. The same goes for a side effect. The cheapest trick in any rigged audio comparison is to play whatever we want to win slightly louder so as to not be obvious. But it'll invariably sound fuller, richer and denser so better. Even though I didn't play Nemo louder than my Kinki monos, its more padded microdynamics did reach higher so cloned the 'slightly louder' benefits of A/B cheating. Going hand in hand was a basic sense of bigger. That actually reflects live music. As sounds get louder, their origins enlarge, too. Scaling up SPL has a parallel track which scales up size. That factored as well. With Nemo, images got slightly larger. À propos large and associated idiocies, turning Nemo on neither temporarily dimmed the lights, caused any pops or stabilizing crackles nor followed some lengthy inner countdown. A fat relay simply turned over, the red power button went blue, the big € logo lit up and voilà; reassuringly normal for such 'lethal' specs.
Did I hear any demerits or areas where our sub €4K/pr 250-watt monos had the advantage?
