Still MIA for the Norwegian app was a playlist function. It's planned but most customers don't seem to miss it when Herr Roth reports that inquiries are few and far between. One assumes that this is because most users rely on Internet radio and streaming clients which include their own playlist functionality. Multi-roomies go wherever they best harmonize with the décor, not where the sound engineer nazi demands it. That influences any soundcheck which insists on setting up realistic conditions. Be thy gone, classic stereo triangle. Piss off, free in-room speaker placement such as is recommended so often for so many compact speakers (at least in theory). With the Tana SL-1, I went where no speaker had gone before: in the kitchen, bedroom, work room, living room, on the counter, in the rack, on the desk and finally in the bookshelf where my all-in-one Ruark Audio R4 lives.

That Brit kit served as my best comparator and reference point. Functionally it's apples and carrots. The Ruark neither streams nor Airplays but does CD, FM/DAB, Bluetooth and two line-level sources. Like the Electrocompaniet, there's Toslink. On price these are Siamese twins. Even more important, they're equals on where they can/will go: close to the wall on a lowboy or shelf. Lastly, I mostly went mano-i-mono. That's because I think that many prospective owners will find one EC Living box per room perfectly sufficient.


What prompted my Ruark choice at the time was support for various sources, its retro woodie looks and the impressive, surprisingly mature sound. To kick off, I played three CDs (listen to Fiona Apple/Tidal, Marcy Playground, Broadway the Hard Way) to tune back into the Ruark R4 mini system. This was followed by streaming the same via NAS to the Tana SL-1. Hola! Theirs was an even higher class of playback! The most similar was the soundfield i.e. size of the sonic cloud floating around each box. Here the Norwegian's was perhaps even more voluptuous but a lot of give there really wasn't. Once I considered the plasticity of individual sounds, particularly those of vocals, the Nordic box had clear advantages. Foremost, the musicians projected more upfront to follow the 'outta the box' maxim. The readings felt more physical and embodied, be it the guitar of Marcy Playground's "Ancient Walls of Flowers" or the songs of Mme Apple or señor Zappa. Mind you, this did't approach the quality of premium freestanding compact speakers.


But then this box sat in a bookshelf, with its back against the wall like on a firing range waiting to be shot. Under such conditions, it really got a lot closer to what hifi freaks expect than what the Ruark managed. More relevant still was the behaviour across the bandwidth. In the treble, the EC Living was milder, less silvery than the Ruark and thus perhaps a tick farther removed from dead neutral but, the top end was simultaneously better resolved. I noticed this on "Sex and Candy" from Marcy Playground whose hi-hats were recorded somewhat spry and dry. The Tana SL-1 presented them less forward which played to the cut and with it, felt more finely grained and less striated. The midband convinced with proper fill where everything was noticeably more sonorous and less anaemic and, like the treble, better resolved.