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The midrange qualities of the Cello in general were never less than impressive. What this speaker delivers in resolution, nuance and dynamics is absolutely high-end. Which carries a proviso. You'll be ruthlessly presented with whatever is on the recording. On microphones veritably shoved down a throat this approximates to pornography. I thus could follow the smallest details of sound generation and articulation with Ofri Brin's "Ofrin" from On Shore Remain. And here opinions diverge. Some voices profit from this somewhat slim analytic take. "Zaz" from the eponymous album was big-time fun. Did French origins have anything to do with that? Amy Winehouse's Back to Back for my taste meanwhile got dissected too much. I missed some substance in her lower reaches where Mrs. Winehouse usually adds the sheer gravitas Melua lacks (for her own benefit one might feel compelled to add).


With less than critical voices the midband presentation always impressed. The Triangles so excelled at dynamics, detail and intensity with guitars as to cause involuntarily goose bumps. Be it Omar Torrez on "Pica Pica" from La Dansa or La Chicana's "Milonga de los Perrors" from Tango Agazapao, each string pick felt like a lit firecracker whose explosion traveled through the guitar corpus.

The treble too expressed speed and dynamics but didn't attain to the same high resolution of the mid and bass registers. If for example you meant to count the number of wires in a drummer's cymbal brush, the magnetostatic tweeter of a Quadral Aurum Megan VIII would go farther. That said, in my experience it's rare to find an ultra-resolving tweeter which integrates flawlessly. Here I came back to the Cello whose treble sacrifices ultimate detail yet delivers a healthy dose of energy into the room without ever risking to get nervy and frisky. And dynamically I had no complaints either.

On soundstaging I've rarely come across a speaker with less personality. The Cello II simply seemed to paint whatever the recording told it to. If the recording engineer reached deep into his grab bag of effects like at the beginning of "Damned if I do" from Ursula Rucker's Silver or Lead where the songstress lights a cigarette under a virtual acoustic loupe, this telegraphed with excellent believability (I'll restrain myself from mentioning the bass which kicks in shortly after.) Even so the Cello II doesn't make space. In that regard rather more middle of field than awesome, Eva Cassidy's Live at Blues Alley very properly showed middling depth but grabbed points with dynamic qualities. Dee Dee Bridgewater's Live At Yoshi's meanwhile was recorded with spectacular staging cues and here I could track each and every small movement of the singer on stage.


With classical too I only noticed differences in recordings rather than traits I'd pin on the speakers. The older albums of a Solti sampler I love—Solti the master conductor, what a bloody awful title however—in general all display a big deep space in which the orchestra is properly separated out into individual soloists and groups but still comes across as one complex integral sound body. A modern recording with the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig meanwhile displays precious few venue cues (Sounds of the 30s/Steffano Bollani, Riccardo Chailly). Individual instruments and groups were all precisely located but in what exactly was hardly clear to make for more artifice just as the recording presents it.

Where the Cello truly surprised me was getting along with virtually any album. I always felt that I was told exactly what distinguished each production from the next. With old efforts this often was curtailed space and limits in the frequency extremes but also the type of immediacy and energy which are the hallmarks of good vintage live recordings, say Oscar Peterson's At the Cologne Gürzenich from 1961. But the Triangle also played it straight and true with recordings of a completely different sort. Take rock ballads. Somehow the Still Loving You Scorpion sampler with their most saucy and kitsch ballads had found its way into my CD library. What else to say now than what a marvel it was how the Cello immediately generated a laterally expansive venue which broad salvos of insistent fat and slightly gnarly e-guitars in all their proper wall-of-sound grandeur.