As all experienced audiophiles know, plonking a new component—particularly a speaker—into a system that's been finely tuned to quite different hardware is very rarely a recipe for instant success. Nearly always some nip'n'tug is required to recalibrate the balance. It could be as basic as different cables or power cords. In this instance, rather more was needed to regain speed, incisiveness and top-end lucidness. Over successive stages, this meant out with the grills, out with the Aqua Hifi DAC in favour of the Metrum Hex, out with the FirstWatt F6 to try the Job 225 and Crayon Audio CFA-1.2 and FirstWatt SIT2 amps instead, then out with the Esoteric C-03 altogether and finally down to the Metrum Hex run directly into the 15wpc ultra-wide bandwidth super-charged Bakoon AMP-12 with passive pot.


You might say I was on a kind of strip search: searching where and how to strip off weight and mass to minimize body/warmth and inject the right counterbalance of crackle and snap. If you belabour the preponderance of undernourished fashion models in ads; and similarly skinny twenty-something gals playing high-ranking TV show FBI agents and coppers with decades of experience but nothing physical to show for it... then the Puls has your number in capital neon signs. Not even a deliberately PRaTty system with no single glowing bulb in evidence could turn this speaker into a pale anorexic. It's tonally voluptuous per se. It's a stand-in for that famous Stereophile cover of 20 years ago which had both a Cary CAD-805 valve amp and a transistor Krell KSA-300S. If one of those was right, mustn't the other have been wrong since they represented such opposing concepts and sonic aesthetics? Juxtaposing them on the same cover was a crafty discussion trigger. For our review subject, it means that if the Puls has it right, most of what goes for high-end speaker sound at trade shows has it all wrong.


In your mind, combine the standard close-mic'ing with its unnatural near-field perspective of attack vs. decay—direct vs venue sound—with fêted concrete-bunker style speaker cabinets, ultra-hard drivers and digital front ends which are tuned for maximal detail and separation. The result far exceeds live performances on pixel detail and contrast. It's what a speaker like the Puls criticizes and attempts to correct. In that it isn't alone. In the US, Zu Audio for years have championed a sonic rebellion against the same status quo. That they would pursue it with a very similar type of driver is probably no coincidence. If we paint a broader picture in admitted generalities, we would say that analogue media like vinyl and tape were weighted toward tonal bloom, bass mass and dynamic chunkiness. Digital media focus on the leading edge, speed, separation and microdynamics from superior S/NR. Then many modern speakers pursue a treble that's hotter than you'd hear live. That's perhaps due to a predominantly male audience whose age reduces HF sensitivity.


Then there's the matter of bass frequencies interacting with a room's geometry to trigger standing waves. Audiophiles allergic to boom tend to deliberately downplay bass heaviness and extension to avoid issues. That often means that true low bass is missing whilst the opposite frequency extreme is overdone. Of course many audiophiles favour a very visual presentation—soundstaging, imaging, outline sharpness et all are all visual terms—which gets sharper with hotter HF. Hence a tipped-up balance is often favoured and pursued quite deliberately. This plays yet further into digital's attack-heavy style which is lighter on the development of full tonal bloom, colour and realistic weight.


At left, with Model 1 bFly stand.