Caesarium. With the Goetheanum in CH, why not a Caesarium in Eire? Nearly 10 times the power; more cubic volume plus vaulted ceiling; more air to spread out in. Here the Kaiser bedded in better. When big bass drums hit, their resultant power now developed unexpectedly. That was entirely at odds with the compact glossy baffles staring at me. Toed in directly, that's all I saw from the seat; that and apparently spindly white stands. Lots of small modern speakers go low. The resultant "unexpected bass from so small a box" has become staler than week-old baguette. Yet anyone with a big-woofer'd tower that brings from 12-15" to the bass player's job knows it. Small woofers make small bass. Going sufficiently low is only the half of it. Here Furioso Mini did bass with formidable impact and gravitas.
Confirming upstairs but further elucidating upon the theme was Rainer's more genteel upper midrange. That tuning enriched the timbres on Martin Fröst's Vivaldi extravaganza for clarinet and chalimeau on Sony Classics. Period strings sound wirier and leaner than today's modern instruments. Particularly the solo cello of the Concerto Köln forces shows up this vintage nasality yet over the Kaiser, these thinner coarser metallic elements had shaved off bite. The same held for the typically forward vocals peaks on Mahsa Vahdat's Enlighten the Night.
On the reverberant "Vocalise Op. 34 N°14" from Memory Echo, Nitin Sawhney remixes Hélène Grimaud's concert grand then adds Ashwin Srinivasan's watery bansuri. When that snuck in, I first didn't recognize its telltale timbre. It seemed as though the lateral radiators covering unexpected bandwidth activated my room's ambient field different than our usual 8" 2-way towers. Whatever its cause, the effect added to this production's inherent vagueness. The result was a further step down of separation. I felt more deeply enveloped in gauze sheets of billowing sounds. I was swimming inside liquid water colors still flowing one into the other before setting.
I personally fancy a lower dose of reverb enhancement so replaced our Vinnie Rossi direct-coupled DHT preamp running Linlai E-2A3 with the solid-state Wyred4Sound STP-se II 'activated' passive linestage. That swap dried out the atmospheric bloom just so. It's how I continued to run this setup. Nobody who spent observant time optimizing a given system should expect a new component and particularly a loudspeaker to dovetail perfectly without some subsequent adjustments. True, one might get lucky with the perfect fit but usually, there's some nip'n'tuck to be done. Swapping preamps was my bit of plastic surgery to bleed out some virtual botox. Hey, Allargan, Westport maker of Botox 15 minutes from our house, was valued at $63 billion (!) when AbbVie acquired them last year. So much for some local color.
With my personal beauty ideals catered to, here's the rest of the story which centers on saturated tone, dignified pace, fully grown bass and a very densely packed soundstage. "See this short clip about airborne sound energy transfer. The fellow hits one tuning fork which radiates the sound to excite a second tuning fork which then bounces the ball. With Furioso, the active cone is the first tuning fork, the two passive radiators are the second or receiver forks. This airborne energy transfer works across quite some frequencies so is on the rich and musical side of neutral." Quite.
