Soundlab Audiophile G9-7c: a 30-year odyssey fulfilled

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Dietrich Buxtehude was a legendary organist to hear whom Johann Sebastian Bach walked hundreds of kilometers. He was born in 1637 on the Danish coastal town of Helsingborg (now part of Sweden), but spent much of his life as an organist at St Mary’s church in Lubeck, Germany, where Bach went to hear him. This Da Capo recording of his vocal music reveals that Buxtehude was much more than a church organist. This is a beautiful recording made in DXD in 2010 at 352.8 kHz although I’m streaming it in 88,2khz. The liner notes show it was made using high quality equipment in a church in Helsingborg where Buxtehude was born. The voices and instruments sound incredibly natural and the ecclesiastical acoustic helps greatly.

 

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What a long way the Roman Catholic Church, in particular the esteemed Vatican has come, in the past 1000 years. At one point, the hallowed music heard in the Sistine Chapel could not be performed outside it on pain of excommunication, which some undoubtedly regarded as a fate worse than death. As the legendary story goes, when the boy Amadeus Mozart heard the famous Allegri’s Misere’, one of the pieces recorded here, his mental tape recorder simply memorized the music allowing it to be performed outside. Now we have here a series of new recordings on DG of the Sistine Chapel Choir itself, the world’s oldest choir group continuously operating for a millennium. The recording made in 24-bit 96 kHz will come to many as a shock. You are bathed in the resplendent acoustic of the Sistine Chapel, below Michelangelo’s famous frescoes. The reverberation is so pronounced that the words are not as vividly heard as in a sterile studio recording. But the whole point of this and other albums in this series is to make you feel sonically that you are indeed in the Sistine Chapel. That it succeeds in doing splendidly. On the big 9 foot panels of my Soundlabs, the acoustic is overpowering. With my eyes closed I’m transported to the Vatican. It’s a marvelous sensation. But be warned. This recording may make you feel queasy because your room disappears. It’s a strange sensation indeed.

 

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Vaughan Williams was one of Britain’s finest composers and this delightful album collects some of his best known and most approachable works, besides his symphonies. Andrew Manze, well known for his conducting of original instruments ensembles, does a terrific job in keeping these pieces from getting too sentimental. There’s a lot mush here, particularly the Greensleeves piece, but the melodic power of these pieces is undeniable. On the big SL panels, the ambience of the hall comes out clearly and the strings have richness and considerable heft to them.

 

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Here’s a lovely energetic live concert by Gerry Mulligan at the Village Vanguard. Right from the opening track this is a high voltage adrenaline filled album with stunning dynamics. Those opening brass notes will turn your eyebrows up if you have the wrong kind of hyper bright metallic tweeter type speakers. On the big SL’s, the brass bites but it’s not acerbic. The music swings and there’s no bass heavy sluggish woofer cones to drag the tempos down. It’s fast and quick tempos as it should be. I’m playing this on an ARC Reference CD8 tube CD player that has better dynamics than any streamer I’ve heard.

 

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Astrud Gilberto’s accidental career began when she was recruited to sing the English translation to the Portuguese lyrics to the Girl from Ipanema, the breakthrough Brazilian bossa nova album that brought Getz and Jobim together. Here she is with the New Stan Getz Quartet in a live concert at the New York Cafe Au Go Go. Some tracks were also recorded at Carnegie Hall. It begins with the familiar Corcovado, or Quiet Nights and then adds a few more lesser known songs. Good vintage recording. The limitations of the microphones are obvious but it’s a well put together set of songs. On the big SL panels Astrud’s voice sounds a bit smoky and true to the genre of the songs she sings. This is a rare live recording from the legendary Rudy van Gelder who recorded so many great jazz albums in his parents house in Hackensack, New Jersey.

 

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As the Yuletide season is upon us, this wonderful DSD recording by the Anonymous Four recorded splendidly by Harmonia Mundi seems apropos. These singers are crystalline in their sound and are a great test for treble resonance in your loudspeakers. On my Quads, the treble resonances used to bother me. On the big SL’s, there’s no hint of any peakiness or brightness. The voices sound pure and gorgeous. Andrew- Lawrence-King plays a Celtic harp. The selections are carefully made to reflect ancient history of these songs. DSD recordings seem to always sound a bit lower in volume as a lot of players seem to reduce their volume by 6 dB. This is a ripped DSD disc played via Roon on my Mola Mola DAC. I assume it too reduces the volume a bit compared to PCM. But that’s a minor quibble. It’s a demonstration worthy recording.

 

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Here’s another lovely Anonymous Four DSD recording of the haunting music of Hildegard von Bingen, an abbess who lived almost a millennium ago. The album title refers to the legend of St. Ursula who supposedly was traveling back from a pilgrimage with 11,000 virgins when they were accosted by Attila the Hun at Cologne. Rather than submit, they chose to be slaughtered. It’s perhaps greatly exaggerated, but the myth perpetuated through the centuries leading to many works of music and literature. As always, the voices of the four singers are crystalline in their purity. A difficult album to reproduce well on many loudspeakers as the treble resonances in many loudspeakers causes the high pitched voices to exhibit some glare. On the big SL’s, there’s thankfully no treble resonances. In this and many other albums I’ve reviewed above, the hardest part is to recalibrate your ears to hearing a loudspeaker without bass or treble resonances. Peter Walker once famously wrote that if you went out in winter to a snow-covered field, you’d hear a loudspeaker without the room coloration. That’s not a task any of us would like to do, preferring to listen in the warmth of our living rooms. The big Soundlabs do a great job of minimizing the effects of room resonances and speaker coloration. But you have to recalibrate your ears to hearing a loudspeaker without the obvious box resonances. Lots of folks like to sing in the shower as the enclosed space makes your voice sound much richer and resonant. That’s how most box loudspeakers sound to my ears. Always the hangover of the box adds a bit of resonance and richness that many find appealing. If you went out to that snowy field and sang, your voice would sound entirely different. That’s what the difference is between the big SL’s and box loudspeakers. It takes some mental effort to change the way you hear a recording without a huge amount of room and box coloration.

 

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Arvo Part, the Estonian composer, is one of my favorite 20th century composers. I particularly like his choral pieces, but this album is mostly dedicated to his instrumental compositions. The Estonian orchestra presumably has this music in their DNA. They do a wonderful job in bringing each piece to life. The strings sound appropriately warm with a touch of stridency that indicates the modernism in Part’s music. We’re not in the Vienna of the 18th century here. The music is not melodic. The biggest challenge facing 20th century classical composers is how to break new ground in artistic form. One can hardly go back to write music like Mozart or Beethoven, much like Picasso was forced to invent cubism as he could not paint a woman’s face like da Vinci. Picasso’s portraits look nothing like da Vinci’s. Similarly Part’s music is based on a novel technique he called tintinnabuli. Creativity is hard because one has to do something new. Not repeat what’s old.

Arvo Pärt: The new strict style of tintinnabuli – Arvo Pärt Centre

The Arvo Pärt Centre combines the composer’s personal archive with an information and music centre. It is an open meeting place for musicians, researc...

www.arvopart.ee

His Symphony No 3 sounds nothing like Beethoven’s Eroica. It sounds mysterious and a bit austere. One detects the bleak winter in Estonia’s countryside in his music. Shades of Sibelius creeps through.

This is a Redbook 16-bit recording and sounds a bit harsh in places, but it is appropriately atmospheric. The challenge in high end audio is to reproduce music that sounds like it is happening in the concert hall, not in your living room. This recording achieves that milestone. On the big SL panels, it sounds quite nice indeed, although nice is not a phrase that can describe Part. Perhaps it’s his adherence to religious music that makes me detect spiritual overtones in everything he wrote.

His Fratres for string orchestra is one of his most famous pieces. You could start there if you want a taste of Part. A long set of movies has used this piece as background. Part has become cool. He’s been discovered by Hollywood. I’m sure that would shock him. Like Gorecki, the great Polish composer whose music I adore, I would think money has no place in Part’s life. Gorecki never cashed his huge royalty check for his breakthrough recording of his Symphony of Sorrowful songs. Part would do likewise. It’s hard to believe people like that exist. In the Bay Area where I work, people are obsessed over money. Gorecki and Part remind us that money can’t buy everything. Or in fact most things worth possessing.

Fratres – Arvo Pärt Centre

Fratres (Latin for “Brothers”) was composed in 1977 and belongs to the many works (Für Alina, Cantus, Tabula rasa etc.) that were created explosively...

www.arvopart.ee

Fratres - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

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Here’s one of my favorite Arvo Part choral albums sung by a New England choir from Cape Cod. It’s a high resolution 176.4 kHz PCM recording and sounds absolutely fabulous on the big SL’s panels. It’s closely miked. One gets the sense of sitting in the first few rows listening to this superb amateur choir. I taught fir more than 15 years in a Massachusetts university and sadly even though I was within driving distance of Cape Cod, where one of my colleagues had a summer home that I used to visit, never got to hear this great choir. Alas. The voices are pure and simply gorgeous. The strings are also superb. Part as always surprises you. It’s not atonal music, but his famous tintinnabuli method. It’s addictive. It grows on you. Part himself paid tribute to music, and I can do no better than share with you what he wrote from the liner notes, which you can read on the Qobuz release. I don’t know if anyone can top what he said!

 

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Here’s an early recording from the BIS label of Scandinavian string music performed by the Swedish Sinfonietta conducted by Essa Pekka Salonen, the current conductor of the San Francisco Symphony near where I live in the Bay Area. BIS’ early recordings were made by its original producer Robert van Bahr using a very simple two microphone setup into a Sony PCM F1 digital tape recorder. Later recordings were made on a Fostex DAT machine. BIS makes very high quality recordings even their initially modest equipment because they use simple signal paths, do not compress with equalizers and record mostly in concert halls. This 30-year recording more than holds its own with recent recordings for these reasons. On the big SL panels, you hear the strings as they are meant to sound, warm when okayed that way, strident when they are meant to be, and with plenty of dynamics. Soderlundh’s oboe concertino sounds wonderful like a real oboe is playing, not some dessicated plastic imitation like a lot of recent recordings that are heavily multi-miked and compressed.

 

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Another early BIS digital recording from 1991 of French flute concertos. All the early BIS recordings had this warning sign in red saying that the company could not be sued if you blew up your speakers. I guess they dropped that eventually for the more neutral “A BIS original dynamics recording”. What they meant by that is that unlike 99% of record companies today. BIS does not compress the dynamics of its recordings. This innocuous recording of French flute concertos might seem not like material that would unduly tax your loudspeakers but you’d be wrong. Play the flute concerto by Jean Francaix a bit too loud and be prepared to replace your blown tweeters when the trumpets kick in. It goes from soft to really loud in a hurry. The flute is not spotlit. It sounds like it’s in a concert hall, not your listening room, as it should. But if you make the mistake of cranking up the volume to hear it better, watch out. Delightful music in the quirky French tradition of Poulenc. It’s a bit hip and irreverent. It’s gaudy. Grotesque. But ooh La La, it’s like walking down Avenue des Champs-Elysee’.

 

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And we end tonight’s listening with another brilliant recording of Arvo Part from the Capella Amsterdam that features his amazing tintinnabuli music. Part composed this in 1997! Wow is all I can say. We seem to be in this modernist period of music deluged by the likes of Taylor Swift that I had grown despondent of any music of our time that will endure. Pärt will endure because his music is deep and timeless. Listening to this album takes you back thousands of years to when music meant something beyond someone dancing and lots of strobe laser lights. Music is supposed to move the soul. Part does that for me. He doesn’t need sound effects beyond a beautiful chorus, no laser lights, no smoke, no 3D laser generated snakes or other horrors from the Swift Eras tour. This is music as music was meant to be. On the SL’s, it sounds like you’re transported back a thousand years. When music was supposed to uplift your soul.

 

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Brahms was so petrified of following in Beethoven’s footsteps that he waited till he was in his 40’s before writing his first symphony. He remarked that few understood what a giant shadow his Viennese predecessor cast. His second followed shortly. This album presents all the four symphonies conducted by Simon Rattle when was leading the famous Berlin Philharmonic. Rattle is no Herbert von Karajan, who recorded all these symphonies in his stint on DG. But he makes a good case for the beauty of the second symphony, which is what I sampled. My memory is instantly transported to an unforgettable concert at U.C. Berkeley in 2017 when I was lucky enough to hear the famous Chicago Symphony perform the second and third symphonies conducted by Ricardo Muti. What a thrill that was to hear the meltingly beautiful opening of this symphony. On the big SL’s, the strings of the Berlin Philharmonic are indeed beautiful and the brass is powerful. The drums pound with a tangible impact. This orchestra knows its Brahms for sure, it’s in their blood. Brahms for sure was highly selective in what he left behind, but what he did became a staple of western classical music ever since and that includes his four symphonies.

 

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Bruckner is famous for his bombastic symphonies but I greatly prefer his quieter and more profound choral music. This is a very early 1982 digital recording on Hyperion performed by the Corydon singers conducted by Matthew Best. They bring out the beauty in these pieces. It’s a standard red book recording but despite its vintage holds its own against more recent recordings. The singing has plenty of dynamics from pianissimo to fortissimo. Choruses can get really loud in concerts. Here we get a bit of compression on peaks but almost every recording sounds compressed to me compared with live music. The voices sound wonderful on the big SL’s panels.

 

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Claudio Monteverdi was born in Cremona in 1567, where the famous violins were made. He was a prodigy who published his first book of madrigals in 1584. He went on to have a long and distinguished career who composed many famous works including his 1610 Vespers. I just received a collection of Monteverdi’s music from Brilliant Classics that seems truly brilliant (no pun intended). Listening to the first CD of his book 1 of madrigals, I’m always reminded how good Redbook CDs sound when played back on a top quality transport, in my case the CEC TL0 two box belt driven wonder, through the Mola Mola Makua preamp with the built in Tambaqui DAC. On the big SL’s the voices are full and warm. Im sure I’ll enjoy listening to this box set for years to come. Don’t count CDs out yet. They’re a bargain and unlike streaming, someone can’t make your playlist disappear.

 

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Michael Haydn was the younger brother to the far more well-known composer Joseph Haydn, but in his time Michael was the one who was more famous. As a boy he joined the Vienna Boys Choir where his voice so impressed Empress Maria Theresa that she gave him 25 ducats. Michael composed almost 800 pieces, including 40 symphonies, 30 of which are recorded in this box set compilation of his music. They sound really lovely, shades of the elder Haydn and Mozart are clear. Michael was also far better at choral compositions than his elder brother. He served as Kappelmeister at the Salzburg court where Wolfgang Mozart began his life as a composer but abandoned for the bright shining lights of Vienna.

Wolfgang’s father Leopold Mozart remained in Salzburg throughout his life and knew the younger Haydn well. Michael Haydn was also a distinguished teacher, far more successful than either his elder brother Joseph or Mozart himself. A good composition teacher needs patience with students learning their skills and Mozart had no patience with those not as gifted as he was. Michael Haydn’s music deserves to be more well known and this brilliant box set from Brilliant Classucs once again shows they are masters in producing these complete sets. The sound is first rate on the big SL’s. Redbook CDs remain a remarkable source in the streaming age provided one has a good CD transport and DAC.

 

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Stop press! My ARC 750SEs are finally back from a visit to their Alma mater (for those who don’t dig Latin, it means they went back to the factory!). Running them with the SL G9-7c for the 3rd day now. Will wait to write a formal review. But wow. What an amplifier. If you can put up with a fire breathing dragon.

 

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Day 4 of my listening with the majestic ARC 750SE’s driving my equally imposing Soundlab G9-7c’s. Too early to write a review of this imposing combination. One often hears that the greatest composers like Beethoven, wrote music that is more profound than any performance of their music. I feel a bit like that. Both these components push the boundaries in their respective genres — amplification and loudspeakers — so remarkably that it’s hard to describe the sense of their joint effect in mere words. I’m listening to a lovely recording of Offenbach’s cello duets. It’s remarkable how every stroke, every nuance of these two instruments is reproduced so that there’s never any confusion about who’s playing when. Anne and Xavier take turns in leading, and you instinctively know who’s playing when, as you would in a live concert.

An amplifier has to take an input signal and amplify it. What coukd be hard about that? Very little, except it’s not acting alone. It has to cajole the loudspeakers to go along with it. But the loudspeakers have their own goals. They want the amplifier to listen to them. That’s what makes the amplifier-loudspeaker interface challenging. In the case of the massive Soundlab’s, their extremely high impedance in the bass (> 30 ohms) and very low impedance in the high treble (< 2 ohms) makes them an exceptionally challenging load. Most solid state amplifiers will produce a quarter of their rated 8 ohm output into the low bass impedance of 30+ ohms. The huge power supply in the 750SE’s makes them far more impervious to loading issues. The massive power bank of 16 KT150 tubes along with a huge energy storage capacity gives them an ease of sound that’s hard to match for smaller amplifiers. More to come…

 

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Here’s an interesting temperature measurement. After about 1.5 hours of running my huge ARC 750SE’s with the ARC 6SE’s and the Lampizator Pacific — that’s a lot of tubes — temperatures are holding steady at about 69 degrees in my listening room, thanks to a cool 56 degrees outside. Winter in the Bay Area makes this possible!

 

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Heres an old gorgeous recording of the Gerry Mulligan sextet that has brightened many a night for me. Art Farmer’s trumpet is dead center, Mulligan’s baritone sax is right channel, percussion and guitar etc. on the left. It’s the usual jazz ensemble recording. The atmosphere is one of complete relaxation. This is not a high stress Coltrane gig. It’s not even raucous Mingus. It’s a low key low stress West coast jazz gig. Boy, does it work in calming me down. Tomorrow will be brighter than today. That’s what this recording says. On the huge SL’s driven by the majestic ARC 750 SE’s, the sense of relaxation and calmness is pervasive. Listening to this recording is better than visiting your favorite masseuse. It relaxes you and you start to breathe more deeply. Yes, there’s a lot wrong with this world, the newspapers are full of it. But as long as there’s music like this, there’s hope for a better day tomorrow. The ARC 750 SE’s bring a sense of realism to Mulligan’s baritone that’s so incredibly overpowering. It simply oozes with charm. Hard to believe this recording is 60 years old.