Another album of great music is Bob Marley's Legend: The best of Bob Marley and the Wailers with its mix of live and studio sessions. Depending on the venue, you can experience the music in two ways. When recorded in a stadium, your perspective is "you are there" if your system and speakers can recover the full ambiance, space and outdoor air. On the studio sessions whose microphones were set up to catch the performers not the ambiance, you sense that Marley and the Wailers are "here" in your space. Moab rendered these two different types of spatial illusions with a realistic sense and also created three-dimensional images without the bloating I have experienced on many occasions with either very large box or planar designs.

My last selection to get a measure of Moab's abilities with lower bass and resolution of micro detail was Keith Jarrett's solo recording The Melody at Night, With You. Jarrett plays a Steinway Grand in his home recording studio to offer powerful lower notes that can pressurize your listening space whilst the nuances of his fingertips striking the keys and the string decays are easily heard on good speakers. The best portrayal of this came from Ulfberht to a degree that I could have been fooled thinking Jarrett really was performing live in my room just for me. Moab came very close to resolving the most delicate decay trails and extended lower bass pedals with the tautness and tonality a Steinway Grand piano can produce in real life.

Once again I heard a slight difference in the lower mid/upper bass area from Ulfberth's extra eight mid-bass drivers. In a smaller space, Moab might actually be a better fit if Ulfberht overloads it to sound slightly bloated whilst Moab could then sound tighter and more accurate in the low bass.

I started this review with two questions. Could Moab deliver the stellar performance of its more expensive Ulfberht stablemate?

Both models are part of Tekton Design's flagship range. Moab delivers horn-like transient velocity without the colorations or distortions of horns. It has a level of startling transparency which makes the smallest details pop out yet, if driven by the right electronics, never becomes etchy or analytical. Moab is seamless top to bottom and creates a wall-to-wall soundstage with realistically sized images. The downfall of many large planars and boxes is that they enlarge/bloat the size of individual images. Everything sounds large whereas Moab scales down for intimate music and up for large ensembles. Its tonality is close to neutral if perhaps a smidgen warm because of its natural-fiber drivers. Finally its bass is taut, accurate and goes way deep. If you are a fan of the pipe organ, you will have no difficulties at all. My only caveat due to size is to place this speaker in a sufficiently large space where it can breathe.

So does Moab get you close to the performance of the twice as costly Ulfberth? I'd say damn close. The second question on the 'how' was addressed by Eric Alexander.