Triggers. All listeners have them. How we weigh, rate and sequence them from most to least important is intensely personal. The idea of an absolute sound is a complete myth and utter miss. With prospective trigger points, the 3xD of dynamics, density and directness factor. There's imaging aka soundstaging. There are textures and airiness, warmth and excitement, slam and romance. The list goes on. It could include apparent ambiguities like continuousness which some invoke whilst others haven't a clue what they're on about. For my upstairs system they're 3xT. That breaks out as timing, tone and textures; in that sequence. To maximize them obviously had to factor the room and ancillaries. Since those had locked in years ago, my speaker choice could get most specific to lock in the three T in my preferred balance. Timing dictated a pistonic well-damped hard mid/woofer in a sealed ultra-rigid enclosure and time-aligned dipole tweeter of excellent reflexes. Think speed so very crisp starts and stops. My sonic reference here are ribbon headphones and widebander speakers. Tone dictated the right interaction with my 2.5MHz direct-coupled class AB amp; and a very resolved high-output tweeter to track the ever more homeopathic uppermost harmonics and how microdynamic performer modulations alter their weighting for expressive emphasis. Textures to me are about where on the axis between reverberant and damped, soft and hard, loose and tense we want to sit. I favour sitting closer to the 'right' polarity without getting needly, pixilated or glassy. That's what the MusikBoxx crossed out at 80Hz/4th-order and over to my 2 x 9½" sealed Dynaudio sub gives me. In my ~30m² small room, dynamics aren't about the macro but micro. Max SPL aren't a concern. Acing immersion and full satisfaction at low levels is.

Chai Baba my Bengal lounge leopard looking on. 

Superlative soundstaging is a by-product of compact non-ringy enclosures and 'free-space' setup as wide as layout allows then being toed in face-on. In my opinion, first-class soundstaging is primarily about proper setup and can be achieved to a high degree with virtually any speaker sized to suit a particular space. Airiness to enhance spaciousness is a by-product of this dipole AMT. Inserting an active not passive purist high-pass filter in front of this mid/woofer to not have it see the bottom two octaves reduces its stroke demands by a factor of 8. Not only does that lower mechanical but also thermal distortion. As voice-coil temps increase, the driver's resistance goes up, its sensitivity down. That not only undermines dynamic linearity. Over longer louder bass-heavy sessions it shifts our tonal balance because the tweeter's output doesn't compress whilst the mid/woofer does. It's why many systems get brighter the longer and louder our sessions run. Acquiring the MusikBoxx with the foregone conclusion of a subwoofer meant that its mid/woofer didn't have to make bass so could be smaller and improve resolution across its higher reach. The same thinking allowed for an octave's extension loss versus a ubiquitous ported cab. A smaller sealed cabinet not only doesn't ring but its physical dimensions simply look better in a smaller room.

If we unpack these two paragraphs, we understand how fronting my smaller system has the MusikBoox contribute to a very quick well-damped high-resolution sound that's exciting, direct and completely decorrelated from its enclosures as apparent sound sources. It's capable of tracking fine tone modulations and a broad variety of discrete timbres. It lacks the timing blur which so often mislabels as warmth. It's also an airy decidedly non-stuffy sound compliments of those excellent Mundorf tweeters. Whilst kneejerk reactions based on Spectral-type ultra-bandwidth amps plus early-gen Accuton drivers could predict lean tone trending toward the white and monochromatic, the current ceramic crop with Michael Wydra's choice of crossover topology and premium Mundorf parts plus 25Hz anchor of my force-cancelling sub squarely defy that prediction. But again, in my trigger hierarchy and for this installation, timing precedes tone which precedes textures. And with these small very handsome German monitors, that's what locked in. Their compact concept and see-through stands will also travel easily and relocate ideally to whatever my next rented residence might be. Though I have no current plans to move, a quick glance back at my life just knows. When the urge to change revisits, it will manifest quickly. With Ivette in the Great Beyond or a womb again, my next place will certainly be smaller. A widower doesn't need 200m². Having small but premium speakers in attractive white to disappear more easily than black or colour will age well. Should Ivette visit me in spirit for my next birthday—it's something her own dad did on her birthdays for very many years—she'll approve. She loved these speakers when they were in for their formal review. And that's all I've got on the ModalAkustik MusikBoxx; again. Though of course being installed now, they're bound to appear in many future reviews even if just as backdrop. By then the filters' foam risers will have gone and been replaced with sufficiently long jumpers from Exact Express to tidy up the looks. Those matter. Playback is a multi-sensory experience. If my eyes don't like what they see, it can't help but bleed into the listening experience. Even shut eyes don't remove knowing that some 'Feng Shui' is off. Ivette taught me that and so much more. But I'm nearly there now…