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Context: The Swans M3 had the unplanned misfortune of arriving before the Gallo Stradas had departed. Priced identically, the Strada's filterless transient/time optimization and sealed loading operated at a clearly more elevated plateau of resolution, clarity and fine detail. The M3's vented alignment with its sizeable port made more bass but its transient quality was generally blurrier and duller and textures down low were patently thicker and ringier. These attributes compounded at low levels. Then the Swans sounded outright opaque, muffled and distanced where the Strada was already freely revving to communicate the musically encoded energy.
To judge the Swans on its own merit, the Gallo sound simply had to go. Since the Americans were due to move on to their Swedish distributor, they went back into their shipping cartons awaiting the man in brown.
As is normal during changeovers, the fact of the prior exulted performance was never exorcized from memory. Yet its tacit afterglow and feel did vanish over a few days. That's human adaptation. We compensate without conscious volition. It can be insidious in one way—returning to a permanent reference then is helpful—but accommodating and liberating in another. After all, there are many different flavors of presentation to sample and enjoy. As long as I didn't throttle back playback volumes too far (I never felt the M3 was at its best then), would I now be able to engage the Chinese boxes on their own terms?
Two minor housekeeping items. One terminal on one speaker rotated freely out of the box once I'd removed the bridging strap. Then one of the translucent plastic caps riding a post came loose to spin freely. |
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With spades, the latter would have required to remove the cap, tighten the post, then stick the cap back on. A dab of super glue could have fixed this in a snap. I bi-wired with bananas instead so didn't bother. If you wire singly, chuck the metal jumpers and replace them with short wires. The thick metal bits might look snazzy but sound bad. Retightening a loose terminal post is more of a pain. It requires unseating the woofer to access the insides. Because these were previously used traveling loaners, I chalked this up to wear and a lack of proper inspection before dispatch.
The M3s were otherwise so well finished that particularly in this price class I'd consider them more luxo items than mere sound appliance. Even the grill shafts were metal to presumably resist snapping off as so many of the plastic variety are wont to. I listened with the grills off. Stands were my extremely heavy WLM sand-filled twin-column jobs from their German supplier Liedtke Metal Design. Those are the bog-standard 24" in height. Instead of spiking the stands, I decoupled them on pads supplied by the makers of Teo Audio's Liquid Cable.
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Sound: With the ATC-reminiscent midrange dome covering 2.5 octaves from 800 to 4500Hz and crossed in and out steeply, the critical presence region lacks the usual crossover interferences where our ear/brain is most sensitive. Mostly the magnetostat is just an overtone generator. Frenchies who call bass units boomers might call such a restricted tweeter a sizzler. Upon arrival, it sounded somewhat forward for a few days but this subdued to end up with actually less energy, sparkle and air than the Strada's 180° CDTIII Kynar film tweeter or Franck Tchang's resonator-enhanced Dynaudio Esotar clone.
Swans included two frequency response charts with the owner's manual, one per speaker and quite tightly matched. While such graphs often don't conform with subjective impressions in important areas, here I had some correlation. The speaker did sound obviously midrange-centric and warm. Regardless of expected limited low-end response endemic to the monitor breed, the midbass power zone was recessed to undermine spunkiness and impact. Until 10kHz, the graphs don't show suppressed treble relative to the 50 to 400Hz baseline. My perception was likely a psychoacoustic response to the midrange emphasis and generally falling bass registers.
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Within reason, I believe that frequency response nonlinearities are far less problematic to our human hearing than certain time domain issues. The latter become more critical and acute as they relate to our perception of transients that rise steeply and crisply in realistic fashion. Think rim shots, slap bass, string plucks, brass staccatos. I think of that as a speaker's plosive power. It's a vital element of resolution and generally related to rhythmic accuracy, beat fidelity or timing precision. It's a vital sorting principle our hearing uses to feel at ease. It's also related to the famous quip about how easy it is to play the piano. "Just hit the right key at the right time." Organization in time is equivalent to the photographer's appropriately chosen focal length. It renders everything focused simultaneously.
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The M3's time focus was softer than realistic. This wasn't relative to just its direct Strada competitor but all the speakers I own (ASI Tango R, Rethm Saadhana, Boenicke SLS, Zu Essence). It wasn't a matter of just forgetting the Gallos. It was more fundamental and telegraphed as virtual cotton batting around musical energy to insert distance. Imagine that instead of tone controls, your receiver had a reverb generator. On a whim, you could move from bone-dry anechoic to swimmy cathedral. The farther you shifted towards cathedral, the more echo and overhang you'd inject into the sound picture. On legato solo vocals or instruments, it'd add richness like a piano's lifted damper pedal. On anything faster and more complex, it'd compromise separation and intelligibility.
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My reactive impulse at first was to crank the volume as though it would overcome this drag resistance. Higher volumes did become more compelling—they often do—but of course couldn't address this aspect. Combined with the textural warmth from the elevated midband that was firmly centered on the exposed dome, the M3 was cuddly and soft focus.
Fronting it with even powerful transformer-coupled valves wasn't the ticket. From my options, the DC-coupled wide bandwidth FirstWatt F5 was best.
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Given Johan Stam's prior comments, it would seem gratuitous to say now were it not relevant: the M3 should also appeal sonically to those who fancy the Sonus Faber aesthetic. Popular audiophile parlance calls valve-derived THD effects musical. The beautifully crafted Swans M3 with the American designer and Chinese assembly belongs to the same general voicing. Without any glowing bits—see system above—it's a type of deeper SET sound in both the tonal balance domain and the thickening action which no-feedback triodes cause with high TDH at the edge of their power band.
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In terms of tonal balance,
the Swans does not apply a brute force alignment that goes after maximum port boost—and then pays for it with maximum ringiness or boom—but it is tuned noticeably higher than for example the small Dayens Tizo also in for review whose long very narrow exhaust has it sound much closer to a sealed box than the M3.
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Due to the textile dome's not merely physical prominence, plosives within its core zone could be somewhat highlighted. Clarinetist Richard Stoltzman with a thin reed doing staccato on a Brazilian number for example became more nasal and saxophonish than usual. These occasions aside, the overriding impression of the M3 was a combination of unapologetic midrange focus with stepped-back bass power, sufficient extension to not require subwoofer augmentation and a non-zippy treble that was fleshier and less metallic than a standard ribbon tweeter might have predicted.
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Given Swan's obvious engineering resources, this score card suggests very deliberate voicing. It makes a distinctive counterpoint to the leaner more incisive sound of many popular ceramic speakers. Not being familiar with the Swans catalogue on an audition basis, I'd be curious whether this at all reflects on a house sound. Or does this company apply strategic sound profiles to different lines to appeal to different listener preferences?
With the M3, the woody warmth of its enclosure dress and the chunky dimensions
well complement sonic expectations. If intuitive psychology expects a metallic sound from aluminum chassis speakers and a glossy high-contrast sound from piano-black speakers with strongly angular visual cues, the M3's cosmetics predict perfectly what it sounds like - woodily redolent, warm and with rounded edges. When expectations and delivery coincide this closely, buyers get exactly what they want. |
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Quality of packing: Double-boxed, top and bottom foam inserts, no foam protection around sides, speakers in white cloth bags with draw string.
Reusability of packing: A few times.
Ease of unpacking/repacking: Unproblematic.
Condition of component received: Flawless except for turning binding post.
Completeness of delivery: Includes grills, owner's manual, white gloves and frequency response charts specific to each unit.
Website comments: The Swans EU site is very complete.
Human interactions: Reasonably responsive if delayed from the German headquarters, not so from the US design center which failed to respond to technical queries altogether.
Pricing: Competitive.
Warranty: 72 months from Swans Europe if warranty card is returned within 30 days.
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