My threesome of ears and trust quickly found that the efficiency/power ratio of Alberich's bass system leaned heavily toward mayhem. A most ginger touch on its throttle was mandatory. Otherwise high voltage sensitivity and beaucoup power multiplied too quick. These seemingly harmless Slim Jims hold plenty of power reserves to rock even capacious casbahs. As playback SPL escalate relative to the bassment and the forces that unloads on the folded open-baffle enclosures, the all-metal cabs should come into their own. Because petite Hagen on top gained girth in its upper bass, the woofer low-pass freq wants an equally ginger touch. Otherwise undue overlap produces audible love handles. Of course all that is very room then taste dependent. It makes this sheer colour commentary. But writing in colour is more fun than keeping it black 'n' white. Making sound with no noise from the bass amps, I now was in the twiddle biz to learn exactly how the attenuator, phase and filter settings interact and what my ideal trim should be. Whilst set 'n' forget types could get weak in the knees from any notion of lengthy micro adjustments, they overlook that only adjustable bass can adapt to setup and room conditions. Fixed passive bass takes its chances. My experience calls that risk more miss than hit. Of course once we've dialled in our perfect tonal balance, we leave it alone until we move house or reorient our layout. Only extreme obsessives continue twiddling from track to track.

Shortly into my very own fiddle phase—fiddle-de-dee to Scarlett O'Hara—I had a Rhett Butler moment. Getting the bass balance and attack right was easy. It's what lived above the adjustments where I spotted shade. I felt shorted on the familiar widebander immediacy. Colour temps were a bit cool, textures on the dry side. Was my actively buffered otherwise passive preamp not compadre? What could I roll in its stead? Likely heresy to Marie Adler, I reached for my usual active crossover set to 80Hz 4th-order so steep. Alberich's own filter moved to its max 200Hz. Hagen's voice coils no longer saw any low or mid bass. Cutting two octaves gained me an eight-fold reduction of excursion and related distortion. Was that why I suddenly cooked with gas? One small step for my ancillary mix, one large step for my overall system performance. The difference was big enough to stick. The purist Wyred4Sound hoofed it back to storage, the COS DAC's analog attenuator controlled volume. The Lifesaver active filter lived up to its name and stayed. Having another one downstairs, I could easily replicate my success in the big system. Time for a bit more fiddling because men love their knobs. It's whilst polishing these that you'll notice how the built-in electronics heat up their mounting plate. This is no cool-running package back there but a pretender at class A hots. Yet despite all that thermal action, it runs quiet as a passive pre.

Bottom feeders or high-hangin' fruit? The woofer emissions of down-fire subs first hit the immediate immovable object of our floor. RiPol subs either use a face-on twin driver in very close proximity; or as in Alberich's case, a cabinet wall just a few fingers' width away. This too builds in extreme self damping for a real mule kick. Unlike down-fire box subs however which radiate omni to reflect off all room boundaries and solid furnishings, RiPol subs create lateral nulls. Where positive-going front wave and negative-going rear wave wrap and meet, they cancel out in an acoustic short circuit. Not only does this remove the side walls as reflectors to create less room boom/bloom from late-arriving reflections manifesting as lazy bass stoppages. As the RiPol inventor put it, his dipole-derivative bass concept operates as a velocity converter not pressure generator. It's very precise and not hobbled by a reactive enclosed box. It sounds faster because it is far better damped. On the flipside it won't build the room pressurization of omni bass. I've always hated that and its evil twin, the so-called room lock. But others adore the effect. They stack three REL box subs per side and enthuse over the resultant pressure massage. The point is, RiPol bass differs. Its textures are far more similar to the more direct less resonant mid and high frequencies. That's because RiPol bass is directional, not omni. So RiPol bass doesn't cause the typical textural discontinuity we might call six-pack abs in the treble and mids then a flabby pear-shaped bum in the upper bass and fatty thunder thighs below. Where RiPol bass meets regular box bass again is in what it does for playback's apparent scale and ambient recovery. Most simply put, true low bass bigs up our sound and the virtual stage whereupon it occurs. It's how tiny Hagen doing the effortless backpack atop Alberich transforms into a giant. This isn't hyperbole but demonstrable. Because the small widebander is quite a race horse, it all would matter naught if the bass tacked on drag and blurry reluctance like a brewery wagon does behind an enormous Clydesdale draught horse. "Let's get sloshed" isn't the RiPol motto. "Become a sharpshooter" is more like it. For that we best be sober. It includes maintaining that ginger touch on the woofer volume. Too much of a good thing rarely is.

Once my knobs were happy and I with them, the entire bandwidth was shooting sharp. This was very high-resolution sound which completely decorrelated from the enclosures. From top to bottom, transients had that crackling briskness which absence of phase shift and point-source dispersion can unlock. It was a rather more holistic and texturally seamless presentation than goosing a solitary widebander's limited bass reach and output with a many-folded rear horn. That far sloppier ship has sailed once you hear Alberich². Yet the typical widebander virtues of electrifying instantaneousness and energetic gush remain fully evident. Extending them to 25Hz is the novelty. Whilst on paper it could be just a few cycles of extra extension against a rear horn large enough, it's the continuous quality of articulation and control that now includes the full two bottom octaves which makes the decisive difference. That bandwidth now lacks the baked-in hollowness and bloat of resonant bass schemes. So in my book this was a bright new day at the Okay Corral of full-range widebanders. But there's more.