Tone modulations. Pick a simple but choice cut, say "Transatlantic Bolero" from the Transatlantic Guitar Trio's 1st album; or the title track to their 2nd album Swing Invention whose linked live video is quite different from the album. Three guitars. Three timbres. Next. Not so fast. Count again. If you have any aptitude for this discipline, you should notice quite a few more. The most obvious modulation is what Joscho Stephan does at the video's beginning. It's simply far from all of it when each player alters the tonal signature of his instrument in many subtler or more overt ways. Because the composition itself isn't complex, the playing not frantic, we may hone in on how, overwritten for effect, we seem to deal with more than three guitars. Delving into timbre modulations observes how tonal hues and textures shift from sonorous to steely, hooded to clipped, husky to rigid, warm to cold, rotund to shredding. With it we enter a dimension of artistic expression distinct from phrasing, articulation, vibrato, dynamics, embellishments and tempo. It's not merely about having a recognizable sound by which one guitar sounds different from another. It's about how many different sounds just one guitar can make; a bit like a master impersonator's voice, syntax and delivery can swap personalities from George Bush to George Carlin. Just how many Georges can he clone?

At first we may only notice certain stretches of difference. Later we could discern modulations inside a short phrase where it's not a dynamic but textural accent which gives it shape. Allowing us access into this dimension of painting with harmonic colours is another forté of this Enleum. Appreciation depends solely on the attention we lavish on it. If we're 'tone deaf' to not care, we're not utilizing our tool to capacity. Now we would do well with something far less costly. It's back at first determining the complexity of the job we wish to undertake before judging what tool is most fit to perform it. I love ambient, trance and certain techno but on the matter of finessed tone modulations, find those genres far less demanding than acoustic chamber music. Another fine exercise is focusing on the vigorous clarinet of the linked Rosenberg Trio track to watch what happens to its tonality throughout. Very obviously, our musical diet is a major factor which sets what hardware best covers all our bases. Playback SPL are another determinant. Pretty much anything sounds good loud. It might come apart at SPL too high but so will our ears and neighbours. Sotto voce to whisper levels are far more challenging. Here everything whites out sooner than later. The best kit delays winter the most. The AMP-54R belongs to that class of the long summers.

I have a faint theory on why massed strings can so easily sound off during playback. When a dozen 1st violins play in unison, ten 2nd violins do the same an interval below, eight violas plus celli and double basses build out those chordal harmonies with their own lines again in unison, it all leads to minute intonation errors. In a live performance, our ears hear extra fullness, juice, sweetness and colour, not one enormous squeaky-clean pristine string quintet. That's the glory of massed strings. Yet over much hifi hardware, they suddenly betray steeliness, scratchy etch and between-the-notes rust. Is that intermodulation distortion from one violin playing its concert 'A' at 440Hz whilst another uses 440.1Hz, another 439.9Hz and so forth? Does that trigger nano distortions in negative feedback loops the sum of which is said dirt? I suspect something along those lines. No matter, paralleled strings are one of the diva aspects a polyglot hifi must manage. If you don't listen to orchestral or contemporary Middle-Eastern music where string ensembles are as popular as e-guitars are in Rock, that danger is unknown. Ditto if you do but don't know from experience how bowed strings in a concert hall lack that metallic grit. My tastes include plenty of bowed strings in parallel. Hence I'm sensitive to that playback artifice. I never got on with operatic sopranos. I just know how those who do navigate their own danger zone whenever full-throttle high notes approach with warbling quarter-tone vibrato. Do their systems sail through said peaks without unpleasant strain? Suffice it to say that with the Enleum, my most volatile violins remained victorious not victimized. The phrasing is casual, that success anything but. It simply remains off-limits to those whose sonic diet shuns massed strings for whatever reason. This ability of the AMP-54R too belongs into the advanced category when it's far harder to master than making Diana Krall sound audiophile.

Space leaves a trace. It doesn't just rhyme. It's how we perceive recorded ambience, be it genuine venue data or injected reverb. As sounds expand out from instruments and throats, they hit obstructions in other musicians, recording kit, furnishings then boundaries of booth, studio or hall. As they travel, these reflections rapidly lose output. Before they extinguish, they light up the space through which they moved. These decaying reflections are nano traces whereby space aka silence/nothing becomes audible. For the fullness of ambient reveal, we want very high resolution from a low noise floor; and minimal time distortion. If these conditions are met by capable speakers set up to perform, we're rewarded not just by capacious imaging that populates our full lateral expanse and penetrates the front wall. We also encounter the overlay of an acoustic other than our own. These are different things. One is about how virtual performers localize left/right vs front/back. The other is about the original space of a recording whose traces our playback machinery should resurrect to have our ear/brain feel displaced to somewhere else. That elsewhere is part of my home page slogan beneath the celestial blue vortex. This elseawareness is another AMP-54R strength. It only depends on recordings which contain sufficient spatial data to be reconstructed. In their absence, no amp regardless of pedigree has anything to work with. Once again, to tap advanced aspects of playback requires proper conditions, in this instance quality recordings. We can't squeeze blood from a stone. We can't recreate space from nothing. No matter how subdued, we need traces of gossamer, planktonic memories. Where present, this Enleum has the magnification powers to make them matter. Consider it the 4th dimension beyond the width, depth and height of our listening room whose coordinates map our imaging. To sound 3D along those axes is part and parcel of any proper stereo. To add the recorded space and make it perceptible goes beyond that. If you don't care about it or don't play recordings which contain such ambience, that particular capability of the AMP-54R exceeds your needs.