| This was a well-balanced system: all the little
faults in the playback were minor and distributed fairly evenly
across the different audiophile attributes.
All that is except a little 'ceramic-driveriness' associated
with these brand new speakers here. Ceramic-driveriness is when
you can tell that a ceramic driver is producing the sound - a
certain over-sharpness to the leading and especially trailing
edges of each note - and is endemic of all ceramic driver speakers
until they are broken in, as we can well attest to here, where it
seems we are always breaking in one ceramic-driven speaker or
another.
I hope I don't embarrass Daniel by talking about the setup here
a little - but few rooms are well thought out sonically, although,
as it happens, most of our Most Loved of Show rooms are. This
particular setup applies to most reasonably efficient cone-driver
speaker setups. Horns, planers, high-efficiency system designs are
somewhat different.
The slightest bit round and laid back ASR electronics seem like
a good match for these speakers with somewhat sharp and sometimes
forward ceramic drivers. This gives a person a degree of
flexibility with what cables to use, depending on what they want
to emphasize [and their budget], as long as they are not too
bright nor too laid back - again trying to strike that balance -
and the Argento cables and power cords seem to do the job.
The economical Oracle CD player is used only as a workhorse
transport into the DAC that looks like it is from Mars [yes, I am
sure it has a name, and I was told the name, but I was just happy
to remember which way to turn, right or left, or straight ahead,
when I left each room]. Finally, there is at least some attention
paid to vibration control for the electronics and the digital. Not
the brand I would use, but... :-)
And out pops a system that actually works. No, it is not a
blow-you-away type system [yet :-)] but nothing has a
blow-you-away price tag here either. |
