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A few days ago, I had a colleague to my home to ostensibly listen to the Exemplar universal player. In due course, I played several cuts including a live version of "Take Five" from We're All Together Again for the First Time [Atlantic Record SD 1641 0598]. Recorded in 1972 at the Philharmonie in Berlin, Brubeck's sidekicks include Gerry Mulligan as well as the song's author, Paul Desmond; Alan Dawson on drums and Jack Six on bass.


After listening and apparently being mesmerized, he turned to me and said, "I must have heard that tune a thousand times, but that's the first time I heard it both as a whole and with all of its parts completely separated out. It was the first time I could make sense of the relationship of the bass to the piano and the piano to the drums. Can we play it again? I want to figure out the relationship between the horns." We didn't of course. I had other things I wanted to play for him.


If your electronics are up to standard imposed by the Silverback Reference, I guarantee that you will experience the most balanced yet immediate presentation of music you have heard from a dynamic loudspeaker. I mentioned earlier that in this way, the DeVore is similar to various horn designs that I have owned or listened to over the years - much more so in fact than any other dynamic loudspeaker I know: similar but even better in most ways.


Take the best of the fullrange drivers in backloaded (as the Lamhorn 1.8) or back- and front-loaded horn enclosures (as in the quite wonderful Beauhorn). Both of these speakers are extremely immediate and vivid. Neither has a bottom end to speak of and in the case of the Lamhorn -- like most backloaded horns -- the bass is not on time with the rest of the music and is inadequately resolved by comparison. Like the Silverback Reference, these speakers are open to the source and immediate but not nearly as well balanced. There are ways of mating the Beauhorn with subwoofers that can resolve some but not all of these issues. Integration between the drivers in the Silverback is superior by any standard, and the high frequency extension of the Silverback simply cannot be matched by full-range driver designs.


You can add super tweeters and subs to a full-range backloaded horn to improve extension at both extremes but you defeat the point of having a full-range driver. The instances I have heard of such efforts -- commercial and otherwise -- pale by comparison to the Silverback's coherence and timing. This approach so far always sounded cobbled together by comparison.
The Hørning loudspeakers are a far better approach and much more successful to my ear. They maintain much of the immediacy of the full-range driver; in addition, the Hørning tweeter blends well with the Lowther midrange and does an excellent job with high frequencies in general: open and natural with air but no etch. Even so, the Silverback is more coherent and extended top to bottom and tonally better balanced if somewhat less dynamic and punchy than the Agathons. What both speakers share is an immediate and vivid presentation that puts you in touch with the musicians as much as with the music and which renders many other speakers hi-fi ish by comparison.


Only the very best field-coil compression drivers promise to have as natural and relaxed yet immediate a way with the music as does the Silverback Reference. 2005 is my year for reviewing compression-driver loudspeakers, beginning with the Exemplar Horns, which are to arrive shortly after the New Year. So we shall see.
As to dynamic loudspeakers, I don't take lightly the claim that the Silverback Reference represents a new benchmark in dynamic loudspeakers to this listener. To be sure, it has an immediacy and presence that is far more the province of horns than dynamic loudspeakers. At the same time, it is significantly more balanced than many of its better-known competitors. I've owned the Wilson Sophia and was very fond of its way with music. In comparison to earlier Wilsons, it softened and warmed the presence region,
making it much easier on the ears and more broadly compatible. The Titanium tweeter is also less prominent than in various earlier iterations of the Watt/Puppy including the 6. The Sophia is an excellent loudspeaker but not nearly as honest to the source as the Silverback.


As for various B&W loudspeakers in the Nautilus line with which I am familiar, they simply do not possess the immediacy or the resolution of the Silverbacks, certainly not in the midrange and even less so in the bottom end. The B&W speakers have a full and authoritative bottom end that provides a strong foundation to the music but which is veiled by comparison to the Silverback and significantly less resolving of important musical information. They are wonderful loudspeakers in their own right and always make a good impression but they do not get you in touch with the music in the way the Silverbacks do.


Whatever virtues of immediacy and transparency the Silverback may share with better hornspeaker designs, it is quite clear that DeVore's target has been the Wilson Watt/Puppy 7. That speaker represents the industry standard by which I am quite sure he meant to take the measure of his own efforts.


For all the crap low-powered tube/horn guys like me (but not me in particular) like to give the Watt Puppy, the fact is that in many ways it is an excellent loudspeaker - much better than earlier designs which were light and bright on top and dark and bumpy down below even though they were always made well and looked great. The System 7 is a much better balanced speaker than any previous iteration thereof. And it makes perfect sense for someone like DeVore to take the measure of his speaker by comparing it to an industry-wide standard.


The System 7 is more dynamic than the Silverback, capable of an explosiveness matched by very few speaker systems, period. It also is likely to work better with higher-powered amplifiers than the Silverback. On the other hand, the Silverback works extremely well with low-powered tube amps including certain SETs. In a mid-sized space, I've heard it perform extremely well with the Shindo Cortese stereo amplifier of 10 watts. And I have installed it as my reference loudspeaker in a system that features an 8-watt 300B monoblock amplifier in a large room filled with lots of books, couches and a baby grand piano.
More importantly, the Silverback is a far better balanced and more even-handed loudspeaker than the System 7. It has a tweeter that reaches into the stratosphere to reveal incredibly layers of detail yet never to call attention to itself. All the high-frequency information is presented as part of the mix and never out front or in any way out of balance with the sound as a whole. It's a truly remarkable tweeter whose presence you will absolutely never notice. It is the antithesis of the ubiquitous Beryllium tweeter du jour.


At the end of the day
I never cease to be amazed by how much I continue to learn in the process of reviewing equipment. Nor do I forget for a moment what an incredible responsibility fair-minded informative reviewing really is - what the scope of our duties to manufacturers, consumers and especially the high-end itself are. There is not a single aspect of the job that we should take lightly. No degree of modesty about what we know or claim to know is too much. And while we strive to be entertaining, our first job is to be journalists. And good journalism demands honesty and appropriate modesty.


When I first heard the Silverback Reference, I was impressed but not particularly interested. I never would have reviewed them had not a colleague taken ill. Even as I began to see their special virtues when first set up in my system, I did not view them as a long-term references. My head and heart were in horns. After all, my reference amps pump out no more than a healthy 8 watts.
But the more I listened the more I liked; and the more I liked, the more I allowed myself to like what I heard. As my amp and preamp broke in and my sources were upgraded to ultimately reach a level of analog playback that I had not previously thought possible, the more I could hear these changes being reflected in the Silverback. And the more they were reflected in the Silverback, the more I realized the Silverback had the magical capacity not merely to get out of the way but to maintain their composure and unfailing balance throughout each change. Nothing fazed them or unsettled them. Everything just kept getting better.


But to be honest, all was not perfect -- though much closer to perfect than I had ever experienced before - and certainly close enough for me to be quite sure that I had met my reference dynamic loudspeaker.


Putting a system together even for very experienced folks will make a modest man or woman out of you, if anything will. Not long after I brought the Silverback in for review, I went out and bought a subwoofer to see if I could extend the bottom end a bit for my large and damped room. Then Shindo importer Jonathan Halpern showed up with the modified bearing and platter for my Garrard 301. All of a sudden there was bass that I hadn't noticed before and out went the subwoofer. I am sure it will serve my son well with his stand-mounted monitor setup.


Still, while the rest of the sound was great, there was a bit less resolution and dynamics below ca. 150Hz than I thought ideal. I'd heard the speakers be more resolute and dynamic in those frequencies in another setup and I honestly thought that a slight compromise in this regard -- probably the result of my amplifiers running out of steam in the larger room -- was something I might have to live with. At that point, I even contemplated two reference rigs: the Silverback with the Shindo Sinhonia (a forty watt push/pull amp employing the famous but rare Siemens F2A output tube); and a horn loudspeaker mated to the WE 300B Ltd. I was also contemplating poverty at the time so I figured I'd settle for one reference system with a bit of a compromise - hardly the worst that could happen and certainly nothing to complain about.


That's when Mike Latvis showed up with the second HRS rack I had ordered a month or so earlier. We removed a large wooden desk, replaced it with the HRS rack, separated the two-chassis preamp into separate shelves, put the Mr. T power line conditioner on a shelf of its own, moved the mono blocks so that each occupied the lower bay of each rack, turned the system on again and my jaw dropped. I had done nothing but add another HRS rack - and yes, I do know they are expensive but they are also without peer to my mind. I'd put every piece on its own shelf and all of a sudden, there was the resolution in the lower frequencies that had been missing. More than that, the noise floor completely vanished revealing ever more low-level detail. With that came dynamics and an ability to play the system even louder than before yet entirely without strain. Whenever Mike Latvis comes to my place, he leaves me much happier and much poorer.


As soon as Latvis left, I called both DeVore and Halpern; the former because I was about to finish a review of his speakers, the latter because he knows the sound of my system in my room better than anyone else at this point. I told them that my system had been transformed and that they had to come up and hear it. I was surprised to learn that their visit would have to wait a week or two. It's amazing that so many people feel entitled to live their own lives on their own schedule and not mine. What chutzpah!


They arrived together from NYC last Sunday. It took only one CD and one LP for everyone to hear what was plain as day. Finally fully isolating all of my components had added a level of resolution and dynamics that was immediately noticeable and took the system to levels I had frankly not imagined possible. For me, it was yet another humbling experience because I had attributed the slightly less than fully resolved and dynamic bottom end to the fact that while the Silverbacks loved my amps, they'd have been even happier with something that could light their fire with a bit more punch down low. I felt like an idiot.


It was also a source of great relief as I saved myself the tidy sum another quality amplifier would have cost me.


The High End and the bottom line
More than most, I think the high end is not just about sound. It's about art, artisanship, craft and craftsmanship; and above all else, it is at least in part about supporting the creative impulse and its realization. I love it whenever I see it even in products that are less successful than I would want them to be or less successful than their creators take them to be.


The great political philosopher of the last half of the 20th Century, John Rawls, once confided in me his view that originality in philosophy is much overrated. Puzzled, I asked him why. His answer: "Because there are no new ideas." This response came from the person who was not only the preeminent political theorist of our time but widely acknowledged to be the most creative and original as well.


Well. there may be no new ideas in speaker design either. Everyone stands on the shoulders of those who preceded him or her. It is nearly unimaginable how it could be otherwise. Yet there are breakthrough products even if they do not spring from wholly original ideas. Sometimes the creativity lies in the synthesis of more or less well-known ideas.

John DeVore did not create the Silverback Reference in a vacuum. The influence of other designers is too obvious for any such claim to be taken seriously. Nevertheless, the Silverback exceeds what predates and inspires it in three important ways.


First, unlike the best dynamic loudspeakers in its class, it not only works with but thrives on its relationship with low-powered tube amplifiers including appropriate SETs. At the same time and like its brethren, it is equally happy with a more powerful amp. If, like me, you believe lower-powered tube amplifiers (especially certain SET designs) to be capable of revealing the private meanings in music, the finest subtleties and nuances, then this fact about the Silverback Reference is not to be taken lightly.


Secondly, the Silverback is significantly better balanced, more even-handed and yet more capable of resolving detail than its chief competitors. And it does so in such a relaxed and composed way that it puts you completely at ease listening to and through it.


Finally, the Silverback's immediacy and presence, its ability to lay material bare before the listener while simultaneously removing itself from the scene is without peer. It is much more like the best of horn loudspeakers in this regard. The sound is so immediate, intimate and involving that even when I sit in the critical listening seat ten or so feet away, I find myself wanting to move closer and closer to the speakers so that I might be completely wrapped up within their soundfield.


At $14,000, the Silverback is not inexpensive by any means. But it is a true reference quality loudspeaker that is much less expensive than its closest rival. It's in fact the best thing to come from Brooklyn/New York since the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Thinking about the Silverbacks and their Brooklyn location reminds me of that kid who memorized all the batting averages of the Dodgers, who learned math at the foot of his grandmother, who attended every game and updated batting averages after each plate appearance. The kid whose very same grandmother once wrote a letter to Walter O'Malley, then President of the Dodgers, demanding an opportunity to manage the team and who used to once a year invite all the Jewish players on the Dodgers over for dinner. It was an era, mind you, when the players showed up at such dinners. God, that was a long time ago.
And I wonder whether thinking about the Silverbacks reminds another kid of those many hours at his mother's feet under the piano. You
just never know how these kids are going to turn out, do you?
John DeVore replies:
I would like to thank Jules for taking the time to get to know the Silverback Reference. I'm honored to be a part of this review not only because of his thorough exploration of the speakers, but because of his insights into music and reproduced audio. His reviews are always thought-provoking and this one is no exception. He understands that music (whether experienced live or through a well-balanced audio system) has a way of freeing the mind and inspiring thoughts and ideas not necessarily limited to audio.

Thank you also to Srajan for his magazine and his courage to let the 6moons contributors be free to review and express what they want.

Keep up the great work and happy listening,

John DeVore
Manufacturer's website