This review page is supported in part by the sponsors whose ad banners are displayed below

Speedy Gonzales. „¡Arriba! ¡Arriba! ¡Ándale! ¡Ándale!“ T'was the toon's battle cry. When speed is the thing and we talk speakers, good examples can be electrostats and 100dB+ Lowthers. Depending on taste and hardware, you might be Wile E Coyote, perennially on the chase but never catching up, your life on edge and short on satisfaction. Think tone mass and general gravitas. For all their speed, panels and Lowthers can act a bit lean and zippy. That's why the latter love SETs to fill out their wiry frames with curves. Ultra bandwidth amps with front-to-back DC coupling can lean the Lowther way too. If your 300B barely hits 20kHz for plenty of treble phase shift and is bedeviled by high self noise from AC heating, mucho 2nd-order THD and loose bass... then a lit-up much accelerated transistor amp becomes icy shower to your favored hot tub. Humidity dries up, softness turns cool crystallization, fat sheds, soundstaging sorts better but images shrink, warmth and color intensity chill down and pale.


That was cartoonish of course. Back in the real world things rarely are as extreme. Still, a personal hifi must balance the various aspects to hit upon a flavor that pleases you most. The more adventurous of a listener you are, the more you learn what precisely that might be. You've listened to a multitude of approaches and technologies. That exposure stretched the coordinates on your map of what's possible. With whatever tools are at your disposal, you now push and pull, tweak and turn until you fix the sound dead center in your target. So much for intro. Let's circle an area on that map based on various triangulations I already performed during my Crayon Audio CHA-1 review. On temperament and general flavor, today's €1'499 CMA800R is a close relative to that €7'950 extremist statement. Here are some quotes to set the tone:


"The CHA-1 links two hifi schools of thought on what's important whilst elevating each to a very high degree. Their two conflicting ideals are detail density and humanity. Let's start with the first. Perceiving each receding layer of the sonic panorama at exactly the same perfect focus approaches hyper realism. Our eye sight is more used to a softening with distance. The Crayon has cyborg vision. The only softening occurs on amplitude when background performers or secondary sounds were recorded at a lower level. But sharpness of focus remains all-inclusive no matter how deeply embedded in or surrounded by louder events. Such aural omniscience or heightened simultaneity of image lock is intense. The better the recording, the more this veers into hyper realism.


"This could suggest quick attention wear with inevitable listener fatigue. Enter humanity. Like musicality the term is fuzzy. In this context it's most fitting though. It prevents the hyper in realism to get annoying or trying. Writing that was easy. Achieving it is far from. The current-mode Questyle CMA800R from China with 600kHz bandwidth approaches the CHA-1 on detail density but trails it in on humanity. Hearing that is easy. Describing it isn't. Have you ever heard a poorly integrated Heil-based pleated tweeter or midrange driven from bright edgy transistors played too loud like a Burmester show demo? It's super-incisive detail galore but also relentlessly needling. A demo of vintage Quads plus warm valve gear will be the polar opposite. It'll have humanity but no bandwidth, speed or true dynamics. The CHA-1 bridges the two...


"Overall it's a definite sonic tie to Akira Nagai's aesthetic at Bakoon. The extra twist or seasoning is subtle sweetness. It coats the mix's predominant accelerated spicy flavors just enough to add elegance. To approach this from another angle, think of caffeine. It dehydrates. Its buzz isn't true but stolen energy. That's particularly blatant in the evening. Your bio rhythm slows down, the espresso fights it. It's pushy and against the flow. It's an unnatural overlay below which lurks hollow exhaustion. And some ultra-resolution gear has that effect. It dehydrates. Its apparent energy is really faux. Underneath it all hides a lack of true substance. In the long run that gets exhausting. It's a very easy mistake to make. It gets more and more common the greedier we get for detail."


To extrapolate from this, the CMA800R's speed, noise floor and distortion ratings create very high detail density. Another perfect word for the density of little bits is multitudiousness. You hear more deeply into the sonic tapestry and make all of it out at once. Compared to the average or even brilliant valve deck it could seem quite surreal by contrast. Where for disproportionately more money the Austrian machine went farther was with its humanity into which detail galore was embedded. Here the Questsound had more caffeine charge and edginess. A few more quotes for contrast. "The Crayon's extreme handling of nuance and space was the benign 'ceramicness' of Albedo's 1st-order physically time-aligned Aptica speaker. It's however not a ceramic speaker from the usual MDF-box suspects. This tipping point is well greased. It takes little to trigger it. That the Crayon stays clear is testament to its designer's listening chops. What facilitates such performance? As listeners we can only guess which specification does what. Having heard a sufficient number of ultra-wide bandwidth amplifiers, I believe that lucid mode links to avoiding phase shift in the treble in particular but also in general. Packed density of coincident detail is almost certainly a function of exceptionally low self noise. We know it from digital sources. To this extent we're simply far less familiar with it from amplifiers. Various Hypex Ncore 1200 amps are one obvious exception. It's probably not too far off to think of the Crayon CHA-1 as quasi headfi Ncore but with a spritz of something else."

Playlist with one track per album.

The Questsound's degree of humanity was of a lower order. Without that spritz of something else. To describe that, a final quote: "That at 1/5th the purse the Questyle even entered this ring spoke loudly to its prowess. I'd already alluded that it matched the Austrian on detail density but trailed it on humanity. What did humanity sound like? Take Diego El Cigala's Romance de la Luna Tucumana. As my review of it said, "the Gipsy dandy with the big voice and long hair revisits his much admired talent for giving Latin boleros and Argentine tangos and milongas the fiery Flamenco-styled makeover. The novelty here is the addition of Diego 'Twanguero' Garcia's Gibson 295 electric guitar and repertoire from Atahualpa Yupanqui and Mercedes Sosa. It's the next chapter in Diego El Cigala's Tango saga replete with a Mariachi trumpet on "Canción de las simples cosas" and Mercedes Sosa's imported voice on the closer "Canción para un niño en la calle".


"That closer is the cherry. It's a simple folk song made famous by Argentina's 'La Negra'. Here Cigala introduces it. Later he and Sosa trade verses. The latter nearly speaks her first like a poem, then sings her second in that unforgettable heart-rending voice conjuring up indios and campesinos, suffering and great compassion. The setting is sparse but highly atmospheric. It's charged with emoción. Utterly alien to the setting but strangely compelling is that elegiac yet twangy fat Blues guitar. It's counterpointed by the Platinum-tinged Flamenco guitar. All of it is recorded in a quite reverberant style to enhance timbres. With the Chinese the close-mic'd elements of 'spittle'—not actual but as a sense of sharpness—were more pronounced and harder. Bathed in white light if you will. As a result attacks were edgier, atmospherics drier and the splendid saturation of timbral hues more whitish to be less unctuous." Back to the Questyle and against a personal new and very costly reference on what's possible, the next page covers some push/pull games around deliberate hardware swapping of source, DAC and headphones which I thought got the utmost from the CMA800R: the Roadrunner's speed uncut but also some peace for Wile E Coyote and Sylvester the cat.