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Listening Impressions
During the review period, I listened to a wide variety of music that included jazz, folk, classical, rock and what have you. Some of the music I enjoy is recorded really well and some appallingly poorly but most is somewhere in the middle of the recording quality spectrum. One of the things that really impressed me about the Leben CS660P was how well it conveyed the musical essence of a wide spectrum of musical genres and how tolerant it was of variable recording quality for such a high-performance design. Great recordings like Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section were totally mesmerizing; middlin' fidelity popular recordings like Lucinda Williams' World Without Tears were completely enjoyable and low-fidelity but musically important recordings like Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music were still listenable and enjoyable. I was able to easily satisfy and enjoy whatever musical muse was upon me at the time thanks to the Leben's even hand.


I think there are a few reasons why the Leben CS660P has such high performance across such a broad musical canvas. One is that the Leben really excels in reproducing the truth of instrumental timbre. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with the term timbre, it is used to describe the unique voice of a musical instrument. Timbre is the term for describing the qualities that makes a saxophone and trumpet sound different from each other even when playing the same musical notes. Or cutting timbre in an even finer slice, it's also the difference in the unique sound character of a Gibson Advanced Jumbo guitar and a Martin D-28 guitar even when those two guitars are made of the same tonewoods and strung with the same strings. They still sound and feel totally different when played. Timbre is what makes a Stradivarius worth millions and an ordinary violin worth hundreds of dollars. If you're not hearing a given instrument reproduced in a timbrally realistic fashion, then you're missing a major element of why a musician chose a particular instrument for their performance, which is a vital part of the recorded musical performance. That's timbre.


You might be surprised how variable HiFi rigs and different pieces of individual equipment are in their ability to produce realistic timbre (or for that matter an even somewhat believable sense of timbre) for a given musical instrument. The scary thing is that even some very expensive HiFi gear (think tens of thousands of dollars) fails this most fundamental of requirements for reproducing the musical content of recordings. For example, I have a couple of CDs that have my Brazilian Rosewood & Adirondack Spruce Gibson Advanced Jumbo guitar on it. I like to play a couple of cuts from those CDs to do a quick check of truth of timbre for a given component or system. I've heard $100K systems totally muff cuts from Jorma Kaukonen's Blue Country Heart, making the Gibson Advanced Jumbo sound like a nylon string guitar of disputable origins or conversely, a solid block of wood with skinny little
electric guitar strings attached. If a component or HiFi rig can't reproduce a realistic timbre for one instrument, it's not likely that the rolled-up timbre of all the instruments and voices at the band level will be realistic either. That's huge.


For a true high-fidelity rig, truth of timbre is my king supremo factor for getting the music off the source media and into my living room as a believably honest reproduction of the original music experience. And the Leben CS660P nails timbre. You'll never confuse an Advanced Jumbo with a D-28 when using a Leben CS660P for amplification duties. You'll never go "What band is that?" and then to your embarrassment find out it's a band you know well. The CS660P gives you a timbral truthfulness of the music on the CD, LP or hard drive perhaps more honestly than you've ever heard it before from recorded media. That's really, really good news for people who know what real instruments and music actually sound like and know how important timbre is to getting a believable musical experience at home.


For a nice study in timbre for guitars and mandolins, pick up a copy of David Grisman's and Tony Rice's Tone Poems album. David and Tony play a variety of great vintage guitars and mandolins that will give you a glimpse into the wide palette of their timbral differences. You'll get to hear the very example I've talked about above, the beautiful timbres of a Gibson Advanced Jumbo and a Martin D-28, and how uniquely different and marvelous each are. Be sure to check out Tone Poems II & III to continue your study of timbre with archtop guitars (David Grisman and Martin Taylor) and slide & resophonic guitars (David Grisman, Bob Brozman and Mike Auldridge).


Another thing that really impresses me about the Leben amplifier is how well balanced it is in presenting an appropriate sense of immediacy (how 'live' it feels) for a given recorded perspective (how far away the performers are from the listener). What does that mean? For a given live performance, you'll hear a different amount of instrumental detail and presence (immediacy) depending on how far your listening position is from the musicians (perspective). The ideal is of course the actual level of detail and presence you would hear from an instrument or band when sitting a given distance in a live performance. So when listening to well-recorded musical performances, the best equipment presents a believable amount of immediacy (detail and presence) commensurate with its perspective. If there is too much detail (or conversely too little), then a schizophonia occurs between the sonic and musical content of a recording during playback that diminishes the illusion of real music-making occurring in your listening room.


Immediacy and perspective are terms that apply to non-musical sonic artifacts resulting from the microphone placement during the recording process, but they are important elements to creating a life-like musical experience in the listening room. Again, the ability of high-
performance audio gear to reproduce this aspect of recorded music in a balanced fashion varies quite a bit. Some gear -- the Tom Evans Audio Design Linear A comes to mind -- resolves so much detail that it ups the level of immediacy across the board. Other amps like the Shindo Cortese are less immediate than the norm. This can cause things to sound a little screwy perspective-wise unless you are very careful to match those components with complementary preamplifiers and loudspeakers that balance out this performance attribute. For the TEAD gear, Avantgarde Duos have that magic balancing touch for example. With the Cortese, partnering Shindo preamps and loudspeakers do the trick. The good news with the CS660P is that its balance is one that will sound realistic on a very wide cross section of loudspeakers, more so than with amplification like TEAD or Shindo that have very specific house sound voicing and have to be very carefully matched to complementary loudspeakers and sources to achieve the very high level of performance they are capable of.


The Leben CS660P's canny balance of immediacy to perspective combined with its believably honest reproduction of timbre puts it in rarefied territory for creating a supremely life-like and emotive music-making experience in the listening room. I've yet to hear the amplifier that does the combination of these three aspects of music reproduction as well as the Leben CS660P. The result is high-fidelity reproduction of music from recordings across a wide variety of musical genres. I think the CS660P getting the timbre and level of immediacy so spot on is at least in part what Hyodo San was getting at when he told me "the most important thing is to achieve a total musical balance". It's the first step in making the music sound life-like in the listening room. But there's more.