The Hunting Days. These three terse words can also unpack THD. First I had to know what the Mozzaik1 sounds like with all controls bypassed. Installed backwards for easy access, I inverted the RCA channels to restore proper l/r assignation. The speaker cables tapped the lower more powerful terminals because our speakers don't biwire. To minimize upstream THD contributions—they'd only inject confusion I figured until I had the hang of this—our usual direct-heated triode linestage made room for Wyred4Sound's STP-SE II. With Mozzaik's high voltage gain, that sat at ~48dB below the source signal. There it operates without gain so like a passive. My hifi pipeline was as clean, neutral and unadorned as I could make it.
It didn't take long to realize that Marko's own input buffer with gain was tuned similar to Aavik's €36'000 U-380 Pascal-based integrated. As such it also reflected Dawid Grzyb's assessment of the current €10'000 Aavik I-280 again with 300wpc Pascal module. His closing summary triangulates it against two other class D contenders: "The S.P.E.C. Corp. RSA-M99's power output was that of a beefy transistor amp but it sounded very much like a purist SET. On snap, resolution, overall maturity and freshness, the AGD Productions Vivace runs circles around almost anything I've heard to date. The Aavik now fit right between those two marvels." I reviewed both Vivace and Gran Vivace. They were virtual stand-ins for our own LinnenberG Liszt monos. Those bracket the Croatian in these photos. That made the Pascal recipe from Zagreb warmer, thicker and less energetic on transient edge than our DC-coupled class A/B. Like Wojciech Pacula in his review, I'd call the Mozzaik1 groomed for more density and saturation, not lightness of being, air, speed or maximal resolution.
Armed with the list on how to input the crossover frequency, I set the Mozzaik1 to 3'404Hz so within 4 Hertz of my target. To get my feet wet, I turned the second coarse control to fully open, listened, backed off to 50%, listened, back to bypass and so forth. I changed music. I soldiered on, just couldn't lock onto anything definitive. I spent two hapless days chasing rainbows in big and baby steps. It did rain but no sun. When I finally questioned why I was so bloody obtuse, I remembered this chart again.
It shows the audible bandwidth of instruments, drums and vocals. Even with this speaker, only the very highest/shrillest tones of piccolo flute and piano make it to our hornloaded tweeter's 3'400Hz entry point. In practice the 8" Accuton mid/woofer handles all of music's fundamentals. The tweeter just handles overtones. Now I injected varying amounts of the 2nd harmonic an octave above its filter so at a still far-out 6'800Hz in the mid treble for overtones of overtones. Gossamer stuff. Then our speaker runs a 3rd-order filter. Marko had said that a 1st-order filter is most telling about his THD adjustments. As filter steepness and phase rotation increase, the effects become more subtle. That described my situation. I flashed back on digital filter options which I couldn't tell apart. I stoked lustful memories of Audiopax's TimbreLock which had been dead obvious.
Still chasing insight on what performance aspects my ears should focus on today, why not start out easier? Hello 1st-order speaker. Anyone? Thankfully Albedo Audio's two-way Aptica sat in our waiting room with a 2'400Hz filter onboard. Next Marko called to explain that his diabatic distortion cancellation—air's nonlinear compression relative to transducer size/SPL— doesn't apply to horn-loaded tweeters. Their distortion behavior differs. I'd started off on the wrong foot. Re: Børresen's Z1 2-way monitor with ribbon tweeter and 2nd-order filter on hand, Marko explained that the smaller surface area of a classic dome tweeter would respond better. For that I still had Kaiser's Furioso Mini with its Ellipticor soft-dome tweeter on a 2nd-order 2'300Hz high pass. Our Acelec Model One with Mundorf AMT was out again for its tweeter's abnormal surface area relative to a ubiquitous dome.
