Wildebeasts; or my Baroque queen. During playback, I find Baroque music devilishly difficult to ace. With its clearly mapped quasi-geometric structures built upon precisely enunciated phrasing, usually simple harmonic progressions and smaller ensembles than during the Romantic period, even tiny flaws in timbre have nowhere to hide. That's quite unlike other music styles which prove far less fussy on that score; or blissfully oblivious altogether. Add that massed strings seem such fertile breeding ground for IMD aka intermodulation distortion. It presents as subliminal rust between/around tones executed in mass unison. Factor that review systems are in constant flux. Getting them honed to Baroque-in-full-bloom fitness is tough. Thus observing myself cue up a Johann Melchior Molter concerto for high clarinet with Thomas Friedli followed by an equivalent piccolo trumpet concerto with Reinhold Friedrich came as somewhat of a shock. Yet the TD1.2 made me do it; and I kept imbibing greedily. Message. Received. Sorting and separation to partake in those musically mathematical/architectural games was flawless. Thinner more nasal or pinched aspects of certain instruments like spinnet, oboe or piccolo recorder presented without flinching yet clearly drawn. Timing felt impeccable yet inherently elastic so devoid of any sense of the mechanical. That's when Baroque devolves into spectacles of musical sewing machines laboring away with duteous industry. I thought of those rhythmic, phrased and structural aspects as crystalline Nordic clarity such as we instinctively correlate with the Faroe Islands for example. Yet tonality added a golden hue of autumnal sun that felt rather more Tuscan.

Voilà, an unusual frisson between virtual frostiness of extreme clarity, precision, transparency and lithe airiness subsumed in late-afternoon sunniness. This absolutely fabulous reading of the famous Brandenburg Concerto N°2 with its four masterful soloists of Giuliano Carmignola on violin, Reinhold Friedrich on trumpet, Lucas Macías Navarro on oboe and Michala Petrio on recorder sums up this balance.

With that in place right off the bat, the table was set, the bed made; or whatever other image of fully tweaked readiness comes to mind. Before proceeding, I had to decide on stereo 2.0 or 2.1. Unlike the X1t, the TD1.2 proved sufficiently complete on bandwidth to not require a sub. The far bigger decider in favor of the sub wasn't extra bass reach. Though real, that was more of a fringe benefit with electronica. Without crossing over to a highly directional sub for the bottom two octaves, the speakers simply rode the room far more. This showed up modes, nodes, lumping and clumping. It caused overall blurring of reflections and pressurization effects which confuse the time domain and make the low end more opaque than the rest. That wasn't Raidho's fault. All conventional speakers whose bass radiates omni do the same. No shame in that. It's when one possesses an antidote which makes an immediate difference that not invoking it becomes both counterproductive and unreasonable. With sufficient reviews on hand that ran the TD1.2 classically solo, I decided to instead proceed with it high-passed. It also meant that now the smaller Enleum AMP-23R sufficed which tonally is still more advanced than the 10 x more powerful monos.

Most reviewers gush when small speakers soundstage imperially. Properly set up, they all do. I don't find that a special quality baked into a speaker but mostly a question of correct setup. Hence I won't bore you with faux such revelations except to say that in particular depth specificity seems to benefit from low phase errors. It's where most dual-concentric designs shine; as do widebanders without crossover. Many two-ways with time-coherent filters do likewise. Often less bass is actually advantageous because it causes less room interference. Think of that as the difference between a mud-floored brook left alone; then its water after you waded through it stirring up silt and flotsam. With clear water guaranteed by my very directional so not omni two-plus bottom octaves usually causing the most problems then the monitor's clearly time-conscious tuning and precision transducers, all soundstaging facets operated at a very high level. You'd expect no less so confirming it approaches boilerplate triteness.

What I found far less predictive though self evident in its obviousness was tonal elegance. Unlike my Børresen monitor recall of played-up speed and dynamics as the primary attractions, this Raidho too harnessed speed to facilitate exceptional clarity and sortedness—those quasi chilly attributes—then treated tone and decay as equals rather than overdraw dynamic brio and transient bluster. That was its sunny or gently gilded aspect. It transformed otherwise icier purity into a less fussy friendlier form. It's precisely why Baroque's fussiness of rushing up and down clean scales proved no hurdle; why patent airiness and up-turned treble light caused no hollow whitishness. I heard nothing I'd identify as warmth per se which I'd actually view mostly as imprecisions like harmonic padding, elevated upper bass or fuzzy timing. Yet the sound was obviously elegant, polished/poised and fluid rather than too crisp, blunt or choppy. Hearing it was easy. Understanding what exactly made it so wasn't.

But I did task myself with trying to see it more clearly. Given the preceding tech backdrop, I had obvious suspicions. This had to be about things its extra-hard membranes didn't do; so subtraction of the artefacts of lesser metallic drivers. After all, today we're not on a road paved in soft cellulose and polypropylene. That's a real thing. Just as it is with sunglasses or prescription specs where a core decision is for a metal or plastic frame, speaker designers and their buyers opt for either silk/paper/plastic or metal drivers. The most resolved speakers in my career had been Børresen and Vivid, two metallicos. Other resident speakers use classic cellulose or old-timey parchment-based widebanders. One is a pure 1st-order ceramic with transmission line. It seems to me that the hard(core) metalists have the highest potential for gold medals in the resolution Olympics. That's if 'early Accuton' tendencies are resolved to avoid the brittle, lean, monochromatic and clipped. That's if for all their brilliant extension, tweeters avoid even subtle grit or forward tendencies which betray separatist sound makers.

When in a later session the AMP-23R refused to come on and an easy fuse replacement didn't revive it, I briefly had a FirstWatt F5 then F7 step in. Settle a curiosity. Both instantly made the sound heavier, darker, thicker and slower. Because my fascination with the TD1.2 centered on its street-legal racing tuning—very high precision and agile suave tonality with body—I heard the usual class A influences as counterproductive. So the Kinki monos returned. I wanted to hear the Raidhos uncut. After the Enleum, those amps got me closest I felt. Clearly the TD1.2 needed no mollycoddling. It responded most happily to the shortest cleanest signal path I could muster.