Naturally, just how loud a speaker can play before crying Uncle I find mostly academic. Peaks in the high 90s are plenty loud in most sanely sized listening rooms. And anyone with a castle shouldn't (and wouldn't) buy small speakers.

Which gets us to Casa Chardonne and my ears. Regardless of applied power -- and the 18-watt Ancient Audio SET proved plenty sufficient and endowed with the necessary gain -- the speaker's attributes remained consistent except for ultimate bass control. There the big Hegel amp expectedly ruled. To put the following into context, my reference speaker is a 1st-order minimum phase design, the Rethm Saadhanas are zero-order crossover-less from 80Hz up. Many people claim so-called time coherence to be inaudible. The vast majority of higher-order designers would certainly support such a notion as well. I'm not among them, however.


Coming from the ASI Tango R, the first thing one notices is a slight dulling of the leading edge and a less see-through quality in the treble. Those are the results of phase shift. While it's attractive to conjecture that knowing the Neeper's network traits beforehand would cloud perception accordingly, I can assure you that if you're sensitive to this issue -- and again, most people seem not to be -- it is patently audible. That's not to say 1st or no-order designs are inherently superior. Many have obvious issues and time domain behavior is arguably superseded in importance by grosser infractions to fidelity. Once the basics are covered though, what separates competent from magical designs is very often timing. In ultimate terms, that's not the Neepers' strongest suit.

Accordingly, the truly filigreed fine gossamer stuff of upper right-hand ivory tinkles for example is more robust in character, with less extended decays and harmonic finesse as a function of minor blurring. Which gets us to the second obvious trait, namely warmth. When you compare a standard SET amp with a superior transistor amp, you'll notice that the former will tend to sound warmer. That's often a mere euphemism for less separation, water color transitions and overall fuzziness.


The Perfection One is endowed with a bit of that warmth as well. It derives, I think, from two sides. The aforementioned minor timing inexactitude is one. The other is a very potent bass system with the kind of somewhat enhanced midbass punch one routinely finds with 2.5-way designs where the lower woofer overlaps the upper one only partially. Compared to the thrice paralleled 8-inch units in my 3-way reference speakers, the Perfection One, despite its far humbler weaponry, is actually the more potent in the 60-100Hz band. That's the core contributor to the minor warmth character. It makes the high-current warmish Red Wine Audio Signature 30.2 amplifier a conspirator if you wish to enhance this aspect. Personally, I wanted more lucidity and speed. Hence I gravitated to my First Watt F5 as the best amplifier mate in my arsenal despite what Kim Rasmussen Neeper would undoubtedly consider its insufficient power. As I said before, such thinking can miss the boat by miles. The 6C33C monos from Poland played this speaker louder than I wanted despite the 'mereness' of their eighteen paper watts. As a matter of fact, I had a hard time deciding between Hegel's fantastic single-stage, zero-feedback single-ended P10 preamp + Ancient Audio's Simple Six review monos and my resident ModWright DM 36.5 + First Watt F5 combo. Both were excellent pairings with distinctive qualities.