Do speakers report, edit or interpret?
I am often looking for different ways of getting a handle on how to think about various components in a music reproduction system. Here's a picture that might be helpful at least for our current purposes. The speaker is an interface between you, the listener, and the signal that comes to it. The speaker takes what it is fed and feeds it to you in a form that you can experience as music. Speakers differ from one another in part by the attitude they take toward this role.


There are times in which what the speaker does to the signal feels to us as a kind of cold and indifferent reporting of the signal: a measured, sometimes disdainful indifference. Invariably when we listen to systems that have this character, we find it particularly difficult to become involved in the experience. There is no point naming names here, but every experienced listener has met up with speakers that have this or a similar character.


Other times, we experience music through speakers that don't appear merely to be editing this or that out of what has come to them, but as putting an interpretive imprint on the data. Such speakers speak with a relatively strong voice, often seemingly moved by a particular sense of what the essence of music is or what is valuable about it. Such speakers can differ as to the features of music they emphasize as most important to what they believe needs to be communicated: for example, tonality, dynamics or scale. These interpretations can sometimes seem appropriate yet other times too flavorful.


An interpretation requires having a view about what is essential to conveying the musical message and then organizing the information in a way that conveys it. Yet there is no agreement about what the value of music reproduction is and thus no agreement about which aspects of the music must be reproduced and in what way to secure what is valuable about music and its reproduction. This suggests that the interpretive approach is tricky to implement and as likely to turn listeners off as to excite or involve them.


What's the alternative to speakers on the one hand which leave their fingerprints all over the sound you hear and those that present the musical signal as a value-free activity that is indifferent to the point of music and its reproduction in our lives?
There are several alternatives in fact. I want to focus on two that are easy to confuse with one another. The first are those speakers that apparently believe that the goal of a speaker is to be as open a window to the source as possible - to let all the information pass through. These speakers are not indifferent to the value of music; rather, they believe that realizing the value of music in one's playback system requires letting all the information they can pass through as unedited as possible. Part of what they believe is that the value of music reproduction resides in having the listener play an active role in integrating the information into a musical experience. They view their purpose as giving the listener all the data/information she needs to construct a musical experience from it. Part of the value of listening to music requires acts of integration of the pieces into a musical whole. All the musical interpretation comes at the stage of listening: active, interpretive listening.


I am inclined to include many of the best single-driver back-loaded hornspeaker like the Beauhorn and the Lamhorn in this category. There is nothing cold or disinterested about them. They merely see their job as giving the listener all the information (within their limitations) they can and leaving it up to you to piece it together as a musical experience.

Like the best of these designs, the Gradient Revolution neither edits nor imparts its character onto the signal it receives. But unlike, say, the Beauhorn, the Gradient is not just a "pass-through" design: it integrates the information that comes its way. What it will not do is prejudge or evaluate the music. It interprets the signal as music. The listener doesn't have to put the details together to make musical sense of it, as one sometimes has to do with certain other non-editing designs. But the Gradient is neutral in the important sense of not prejudging the material. It does not believe that it is the listener's burden to interpret the details as music. That's its job. But it does believe the evaluative task falls to the listener.


So we can distinguish among a variety of different approaches a speaker might take as it interfaces between you and the music. Think of the speaker like someone you've hired as a research assistant to work on a problem for you. Some research assistants look up the facts and they want to give you the answer that they think you want to hear. That's one extreme. At the other extreme is the research assistant who is so reluctant to be misunderstood that instead of giving you her opinion, she tells you nothing. She just collects all the data you asked for and then lays it out in front of you to make of it what you will. Half your job then becomes trying to figure out what the data means. Trying to figure whether it is any good, whether or not it supports your contention is far down the road. You're not close to being able to do that.


Then there are those research assistants who aren't exactly sure what you are after, but know that the data they present has to be organized with sufficient clarity so that you can assess it and determine its potential value to you.


This is a continuum of course. Different speakers fall somewhere along it. Some speakers collect the data and give it to you as they think you want to (or ought to want to) to hear it. Others collect the data and leave it up to you to figure out which of it is pertinent even before you get to figure out whether it gives the result you are looking for. Still others present the data as organized sufficiently for you to determine whether it gives you what you want to hear or not. And that is the Gradient Revolution. It is neutral in every important sense of the term. It is not only neutral tonally; it is neutral in the sense of being unwilling to prejudge the musical experience for the listener. Instead, it will give the listener all the information she needs organized in a way that will make it possible for the listener to maker her own judgments. There can hardly be a more honest approach to reproducing music. Surely, those of us who praise accurate music playback systems have exactly this in mind: not a cold indifferent reporting of facts but an interpretation of music playback and its values that presents all the pertinent information organized coherently and without prejudging its merits. It strikes the balance between the role of the system and the listener just right.


The Gradient Revolution is a wonderful speaker for those listeners who want their speakers to organize the musical signal as complete, coherent whole, yet who themselves view listening as an activity that requires effort and engagement if one is to extract the value of it.


The speaker is honest and fair and represents a distinctive and meritorious approach to reproducing music in the home. One can spend a great deal more and find oneself experiencing a good deal less musicality and honesty. The Gradient should appear on every list of faithful and honest reproducers of music. It's certainly high on my list.and thus highly recommended for the active listener.

Coda: Bravo and Gradient Revolution
For the last several months, I have had the good fortune of having both the Combak Harmonix Bravo and the Gradient Revolution loudspeakers in my NYC apartment. Both speakers are built by Gradient and employ the same drivers in part. The drivers in the Bravo are the midrange/tweeter units of the Gradient.Revolution. No review of the two speakers would be complete without some remarks about the ways in which they are similar to and different from one another.
The Prelude is Gradient's affordable two-way monitor which first got Kiuchi-San interested in the Bravo project.

They have different ambitions; they are different kinds of speakers. It is not helpful to assess or rank them in relationship to one another. They don't belong

in the same class of comparison at all. The Gradient mounts the drivers in an open baffle design; the Bravo is a sealed enclosure. The Gradient crosses over two bass drivers at 200Hz. The Bravo runs the mid/bass driver full range. The speakers require and respond to very different electronics. The Bravo wants 10-50 watts of tube power while the Gradients won't come alive with less than 100 watts. The Bravo enclosure is finished in wood and tuned by Mr.Kiuchi; and so one.


These are simply very different speakers and they sound it. The Bravo is warmer, bigger and fuller. Its emphasis is on revealing the harmonic structure of the notes at a slight reduction in emphasis on the leading edge. The Gradient is more evenly distributed in its emphasis: attack, leading edge, harmonic structure and decay are given pretty equal billing. If anything is shortchanged in relationship to the other elements, it might be decay.


The main difference is that they engage the listener differently. The Gradient can seem a bit distant and laid-back unless the listener participates actively in the experience. The Bravo is all about bringing a lovely and emotional experience into the listener's life. It is effortless in its presentation and in the demands it places on listeners.


The Bravo and the Gradient are not just wonderful speakers within their own domains. They illustrate just how differently the very same drivers can sound when implemented with very different approaches to the essential values of music reproduction and how it is best achieved. It is a lesson that carries over to every component. It is as true of a 300B tube as it is of a SEAS fiberglass driver. It is a lesson worth learning - and remembering.
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