Once liberated from double-boxed thick foam cradles, Syzygy had thankfully lost its hideous bolts in the driver trim rings. Remaining incongruities were the rear spikes' long exposed bolts. Speaking of generic not elite falconry perches, László Raiffai's aesthetics are distinctive enough as to look a wee bit—a wonky ton?—disjointed atop just any ordinary speaker stand. His design deserves a more continuous support to eliminate the top spikes and integrate the necessary port clearance. Of course if the destination is a low boy or credenza, that subject is moot; or mute.

The speakers proved heavy enough to require no BluTac even with a down-fire port creating clearly felt vibrations all the way down into the stand's plinth to make its metal molecules dance. As I put it in the Pass Labs review on this combo, "as a dispersion hybrid—front-firing directional tweeter, upfiring omni mid/woofer—Syzygy deliberately exploits longer room reflections over its majority bandwidth. That builds in more acoustic reverb than conventional speakers which begin to radiate into full space at far lower frequencies. This design thus has naturally rich tone similar to how your own voice acts more sonorous in the bathroom than balcony. Here the INT-25 behaved like its own hybrid. On the '+' side, it got more bass power from the small 5" driver. On the  '+' or '-' side depending on your own taste, its own richer voice added itself to further play up those aspects. By implication, that further diminished articulation and incision which this mostly omni already softens by design. Our Bakoon nicely shortened that leash for more controlled good-dog behavior whilst giving up some low-end weight in trade." For that review, those comments had been sufficient.

For today, we dig just a wee bit deeper into "diminished articulation and incision softened by design already". Syzygy's tones came at me not like sliced hard golf balls but fluffy clouds. Focus was rather more vague and ambiguous than the outgoing Acelec had rendered. Images were billowy, oversized and approximate, not locked, loaded and maximally sharp. Hence their location specificity was down and depth layering only suggested. With the INT-25's warmer denser personality, this gap with standard speakers broadened in like+like addition.

Here we see the new bolt-less look but the cable drape remains unnecessarily long. It'd look better if the terminals exited at the bottom.

Hence the Pass passed out, then the Bakoon. Whilst it improved focus as far as the speaker allowed, the twice-as-powerful Crayon CFA-1.2 still was grippier. It also has that variable pre-out whereby I could rope in Zu's Submission sub on a 10Hz/4th-order low-pass with extra 20Hz PEQ gain and just a few clocks above mute on its throttle. To my ears this was our best hardware match.