One album we are quite fond of lately is Dza Dza Dzum by Ot Azoj, a Dutch klezmer and Balkan band with Dutch, Polish and Turkish members. They claim to play the music of Molvania and for those who want to know more about that country, read A Land Untouched by Modern Dentistry from Santo Cilauro. This music is fresh, happy and danceable. Eric Vloeimans on Live at the Concertgebouw presents the versatile Dutch trumpeter together with pianist Florian Weber in the great-sounding Amsterdam music hall. Eric differs from many other trumpeters by having more than one sound. He uses his instruments—his mouth and trumpet are two different instruments—to create a multitude of timbres from softly floating to harder and sharper, open to compressed, soft to loud and back. Combine that with the lyricism of the compositions and the listener is in for a real treat. Again the Czech minis reproduced this music very nicely. Never did the drivers break up or betrayed any hard time dealing with the incoming signal. In the soundstage department there was a credible image with very acceptable depth and width.
Catrin Finch is a harpist while Seckou Keita plays the African kora. On Soar, the Welsh and Senegalese explore their respective cultural and musical heritages in ways which have much common ground. Together both instruments are wonderfully matched on tone. One of the many highlights on this album is "Bach to Baïsso" which quotes excerpts of the great composer's "Goldberg Variations". With the Lyra S, the size of the harp was a little smaller than real life but the lower frequencies were adequately present. Serendipity is an album by Orchard, a group formed by Aidan Baker (guitar), Gaspar Claus (cello), Franck Laurino (drums) and Maxime Tisserand (clarinets). This effort is a concept album and a long aural trip—or is that ambience?—that's very captivating and mesmerizing. We think this album is one of our better finds of late. With Lyra S we could easily follow the meandering journey though with this kind of music, the assistance of a subwoofer would be welcome.
The final album we want to single out is Little Big by Aaron Parks where an electric band joins the piano master for an exciting 80 minutes of scored and improvised music. Being heavier in instrumentation and complexity than other music mentioned above, our cute loudspeakers sounded bigger than their physical dimensions predicted. We could turn up the volume and there was no protest. The limiting factors were our ears, not the speakers.
In conclusion, we enjoyed our time with these petite Czech just as we had at the shows. Under the well-finished slick exterior hide enough quality parts and design to make for a highly musical experience. Combine this with the fair ask and custom colours and Lyra S should find its way into the hearts of many music lovers.
