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

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In keeping with the holidays approaching us next week, it seems appropriate to hear the world’s oldest continuously operating choir — the Sistine Chapel choir — sing Christmas music in the world’s most iconic recording venue under Michelangelo’s famous frescoes that millions come to see each year. This recording like the other ones in this series are challenging to reproduce because of the incredible resonances of the venue. The added challenge is how to reproduce the crystalline clarity of so many voices. The music is chosen from the Vatican’s vast repertoire of compositions and include pieces that were originally performed in this venue, giving it a historical heft that’s hard to equal. The recording engineers have wisely decided to record these pieces with a generous amount of ambience. No spotlighting of voices here. The big SL’s envelop you in the natural ambience of the venue. The echoes seem to last for an eternity. It seems as if the sound is traveling all the way to the heavens beyond, an acoustical trick no doubt done to create this effect on the faithful who heard the masses performed here over two millennia. It’s a rare treat to hear this most secretive of choral groups finally opening up their vast archives of music. I hope further recordings in this series continue to be released. Kudos to DG for commissioning this series.

 

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Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina was an Italian Renaissance composer who lived in the 16th century from 1525 to 1594, a really long life when average life expectancy was in the 30’s. His music had an incalculable effect both on religious music performed at the Vatican and churches throughout the world — he invented a form of polyphony when multiple voices sing together in unison in a way that minimizes the discordant sounds. His music greatly influenced the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and many others, who treated Palestrina as the gold standard. Palestrina in effect was the Isaac Newton of polyphonic music. His laws of polyphonic composition were followed for centuries, much as every automobile continues to be designed according to Newton’s laws of motion.

So what did Palestrina invent that was so special? In Western classical music, if we measure the beats in music by counting 1,2,3,4 for each measure and repeat, the beginning 1 is considered the “strong” beat of the measure where a chord change is most likely. The third is also considered a strong beat. The second and fourth beat in the measure in contrast are considered “weak” beats. Polyphonic music is where multiple musical lines are heard in parallel. Certain types of notes played simultaneously can sound pleasing to the ear. These are consonances. The dissonances are those notes when played together sound unmusical to the ear. Polyphonic music is challenging to compose because of the challenge in managing dissonances. A great part of the success of composers is learning how to manage consonances and dissonances. No one did this better than Palestrina, who invented what is referred to as the Palestrina style where dissonances are relegated to the weak beats of a measure.

Here we have a wonderful recording from a complete series of Palestrina’s music by The Sixteen, one of Britain’s finest choral groups. The recording is humble redbook 16-bit.but sounds fabulous. The voices are bathed in a natural ambience. This recording sounds magnificent on the big SL’s where the ARC 750 SE’s reveal the sumptuous ambience in the venue, London’s Church of St. Alban the Martyr. Unlike rock music, which is usually poorly recorded in a studio using many microphones that feed into a giant multitrack recorder and endlessly post processed, this type of choral music is recorded “live” in a natural venue and subject to very little usually no post processing. It’s what you hear is what you get. Accordingly such music is essential in testing high end equipment, whereas rock music, however enjoyable it may be, is a poor substitute. Listening to such recordings, one is reminded yet again that the human voice has no equal. This fact guided Palestrina in the 16th century as well as 20th century composers like Gorecki and Part.

 

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Polyphonic music did not completely supplant the earlier monophonic chants going back to the 13th century, predating Palestrina’s music by several centuries. The intrinsic purity of monophonic music has attracted recent composers, most notably the Estonian composer Arvo Part in this magnificent recording of the Passion of St. John, narrating the last days of Christ. Many composers have set the St. John’s Passion to music, notably Johann Sebastian Bach. But these have been polyphonic settings. Arvo Part in 1982, four centuries after Palestrina, went back to the simpler monophonic style with a special new innovation, his Tintinnabuli technique.

The word tintinnabulum is Latin for bell. Part intended to combine the resonance of the human voice with that of bells. Tintinnabuli compositions feature an M-voice — the melody — and the T-voice — the bell. The two voices work closely together. In the Roman liturgy tradition of the four great Passions, the Passion of St. John is generally recited during Good Friday. Instead of a single voice of the Evangelist who narrates the story, Part uses a quartet of four voices. Jesus’ voice is sung by a baritone and Pilate by a tenor. Part adheres his Passion closely to the written text. An organ provides a brooding accompaniment giving the note of somberness befitting the tragedy that is to occur. The Helsinki Chamber Choir sung magnificently and the BIS 24-bit 96khz recording is splendid. The recording sounds lovely on the big SL’s driven by the ARC 750 SE’s.

Part followed his tintinnabuli compositional doctrine closest in this work compared to his later work. Alto and bass voices sing the M melody, whereas altos and tenor sing the accompanying T melody (which is the bell melody). All of this sounds hopelessly academic till you hear this piece. It’s really hard to invent a new compositional style in music, but four centuries after Palestrina, Part manages to do just that. It took science several centuries to move from Newton’s conception of absolute space and time, of a universal clock beating time in the universe, to Einstein’s general and special relativity theories which shattered the illusion of space and time being separate or even universal. Time depends inextricably on an observer. If you stand on top of Mount Everest, time moves differently for you than if you sat in your living room at sea level as I’m doing. Einstein shattered the scientific orthodoxy that stood for several hundred years. Part is trying to do the same here with his tintinnabuli system.

 

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Antonio Vivaldi is one of the most popular Baroque composers who wrote a phenomenal number of compositions — 600 violin concertos itself! He was a music teacher in Ospedale’ Della Pieta, an orphanage for abandoned children, mostly girls, and managed the school’s orchestra made entirely of young girls. The prevailing rules decreed that the women had to be hidden from view by a screen that was acoustically transparent. He was so prolific in both instrumental and vocal music that it boggles the mind. He wrote 50 operas, masses, choral works, and of course hugely popular pieces like The Four Seasons that’s been recorded hundreds of times.

Here we have a delightful set of his pieces scored for two guitars and played by the Katonah brothers. I’m playing a DSD version ripped from my SACD multichannel version. It sounds absolutely beautiful on the big SL’s with the big ARC 750 SE’s. There is a bounce and sparkle to many of the pieces that’s characteristic of Vivaldi. Whatever personal challenges he faced, his music always uplifts you. He had a gift of melody and an uncanny virtuosity in writing for both instruments and voices. It’s stunning that in the 16th and 17th century, there were so many illustrious composers who wrote so much wonderful music that’s survived for several hundred years. What does that say for the age we live in? Will any music written now endure so long?

 

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Few musical sounds are as pleasing to the ear as Gregorian chants. These are a form of plainchant, a monophonic musical style of Roman liturgy developed in the 9th and 10th century, a millennium ago. That it survived tells us how enduring it is. It’s written in and sung in Latin preserved in beautifully illustrated manuscripts like this one from the 14th century. It’s often written in the notation called neumes, from which the modern Western notation evolved.



This recording of Christmas music is sung as Gregorian chants by a Cape Cod New England choir group called Gloria Dei Cantores Schola. I have many of their recordings on my playlist. They are remarkably good for an amateur choir. The sound of the voices is gorgeous on the big SL G9-7c, which captures the richness of so many voices sung in unison. Keep in mind that Gregorian chant predates the polyphonic revolution brought about by Palestrina. It’s a simpler sound, there are no dissonances to worry about as a single musical line is chanted without the need to manage multiple musical lines. Unaccompanied chiral music,Ike this one is the acid test for a high end system. Few types of music reveal loudspeaker colorations as easily as Gregorian chants .

 

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Another collection of Christmas chants from Medieval Hungary sung by The Anonymous Four, who have made many fine recordings. It’s a huge challenge to reproduce the high treble soprano voices of these four singers. Most box loudspeakers with metallic tweeters go into conniptions trying to get the high treble right, and usually end up shrieking a lot IMHO. In contrast, the crossover less G9-7c reproduce the high treble well nigh perfectly without unnecessary false overtones or brightness. It helps that the partnering electronics are very high quality of course.

 

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We now turn back to polyphonic music,this time from medieval England where a bunch of mostly anonymous composers in Albion, the original medieval name for what later became the UK, were plying their trade in obscurity. This music was composed from 1300-1400, long before Palestrina. Although it lacks the later sophistication of polyphonic music, and sounds more like an early attempt to get their feet wet. The Huelgas Ensemble has made many fine recordings in their native Belgium. This recording was made in Ghent. Hard to top the sound of a small group of singers singing a capella. This is as pure a sound as you’re likely to hear. A loudspeaker has no place to run and hide in reproduction of music like this. Any midrange glare sticks out like a sore thumb. The SL sounds as pure as the driven snow on this recording.

 

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It might be a bit late to talk about why electrostatic loudspeakers sound so good to my ears. In a nutshell, the drive equation is linear. That sounds wonkish , so a brief explanation is necessary. Transducers concert information from one medium into another. Microphones convert acoustic pressure into voltage and current. When you speak into a microphone for recording a podcast, the microphone picks up the bursts of energy from your voice as vibrations and converts them into voltages. We want microphones to be as linear as possible. If you speak softly and then twice as loudly, we want the voltages output to double. If the microphone didn’t register the change in intensity it would be a poor microphone. One of the best demo CDs ever made was the original Stereophile demo disc that featured the founder J.Gordon Holt speaking into a variety of microphones. No better demo disc or test CD has ever been created. It is shocking to hear how his voice changes from microphone to microphone. Some made his voice have a nasal quack. Some made his voice sound brittle. The last few microphones were amazingly realistic. Lesson: whether a recording is great or terrible is largely up to where the microphones are placed and what microphones are used.

As Peter Walker, founder of Quad, famously noted an electrostatic loudspeaker is the exact inverse of a ribbon microphone. An electrostatic loudspeaker converts voltages back into sound pressure waves. If it is designed well, usually using a constantly charged diaphragm as the big SL’s do, it is a basic fact of physics that the drive equation is linear. In other words, twice the voltage translates to twice the acoustic pressure. This is hugely different from box loudspeakers that are horribly nonlinear and need complex crossovers to blend the sound of the woofer, squawker and tweeter. The SL has no crossover, has a linear drive equation, and as long as you don’t overdrive it, hard to do as it can take 600 watts of music power, it’s hard to match in terms of its freedom from distortion.

 

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We move from medieval 13th century Albion (England) to 20th century US to the music of Alan Hovhaness, a strange mercurial composer who seems to be an anachronism in that his music harkens back to an earlier era. This is a high res 88.2khz 24-bit recording from Gloria Dei Cantores, the New England Cape Cod amateur choir that has made many wonderful recordings. The opening track features a full-throated rendition of Cantate Domino complete with organ. It’s a beautiful recording that sounds magnificent on the big SL’s, the voices are natural with no harshness and the organ sounds powerful but not bloated in its low frequencies. Elizabeth C. Patterson who heads this ensemble coaxes beautiful music from them. A wonderful introduction to this most enigmatic American composer. His music does not have the genius of Estonian composer Arvo Part, but it’s marvelous that composers like this still exist in the US.

 

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It takes my massive ARC 750SE about 2-3 hours of continuous operation to sound its best. Once it’s cooking, its sound is transcendent. You don’t hear it. It’s transparent, musical, and tonally gorgeous. It’s like hearing your DAC, in my case the Lampizator Pacific, directly driving the speakers. It’s a scary beast with 36 KT150 tubes across both channels heating up your listening room. It’s around 50 degrees Fahrenheit outside. Perfect for running monster tube amplifiers. Inside it’s a balmy 68 degrees. Boy, is it a lovely sounding but hopelessly impractical monster of an amplifier. Don’t buy one. Unless you want the best sounding amplifier ever made. That’s also a huge pain in the you know what to keep running. But, hey, this is after all WBF. You want the best? Well, as the saying goes, if you can’t take the heat (no pun intended), stay out of the WBF kitchen!

 

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Playing a Mosaic special edition box set of Paul Desmond’s 1975 live recordings made in Toronto. Mosaic has always set extremely high standards for its jazz releases, none of which you can stream, and the original CDs or vinyl box sets are usually collectors items. The liner notes are a marvel of thoroughness and clarity with beautiful black and white photographs. In this era of streaming it’s all too easy to forget that companies like Mosaic exist who take extra care in their production. These recordings sound wonderful on the big SL’s played back through an all ARC electronics chain: the Reference CD8 player, the ARC 6SE preamp and the mighty ARC 750SE.

 

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“Nobody wants you when you’re old and gray”, sings Mr Five by Five, or Jimmy Rushing in this absolutely beautiful recording with the Dave Brubeck Quartet. Every song is a treasure. Rushing sings his blues with a wry wistfulness that brings both a smile and tear to your eyes. His gravely voice is caught beautifully on this vintage recording. Brubeck provides a sympathetic accompaniment on the piano on the left channel and Paul Desmond is his usual dry martini self on the right. But Jimmy Rushing is the star of this show. A desert island disc.

 

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Jimmy Rushing sings mournfully in the great tradition of the blues:

“you keep going your way
i'll keep going my way
river, stay away from my door

i just got a cabin
you don't need my cabin
river, stay away from my door

don't come up any higher
i'm so all alone
leave my bed and my fire
that's all i own

i ain't breaking your heart
don't start breaking my heart
river, stay away from my door.”

What a beautiful song. He puts his heart and soul into it. Brubeck does a nice little blues solo. Great track. Priceless.

 

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“Let’s fall in love, why shouldn’t we fall in love?” Indeed, love is what keeps the world going. It’s hard to imagine anyone singing this song with more character than Louis Armstrong. This legendary recording with Oscar Peterson is on the top of many top-10 jazz/popular best selling record lists. This time of year we can always do with some good cheer. No one can do that with more panache than Louis Armstrong. Hearing his gravely voice you realize a beautiful voice is so much more than a “beautiful” voice. His voice is not Karen Carpenter gorgeous. But it’s got so much more soul.

 

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Moving from Louis Armstrong’s gravely voice to Jane Duboc’s sultry smoky Brazilian vibe takes a bit of adjustment. This late Gerry Mulligan Telarc digital recording is one of my favorites. Jane Duboc really sings beautifully, far more so than the constantly out of tune Ana Caram on Chesky Records. Mulligan’s baritone is the perfect foil to Duboc’s sultry Portuguese lyrics. Wisely there’s no attempt made to have her sing in English. I find non-English singers just don’t sing well in English if that’s not their native tongue. The passion is missing. Duboc’s Portuguese lyrics have no translation provided. Shame on Telarc for not providing the translations. Saved them a few bucks. Sloppy. But the recording is beautiful. It’s rendered ever so lovely on the big SL’s with the ARC electronics choreography providing the style. No brightness, just a slight sheen due to the studio recording and the microphones adding a bit of glitz. On this recording the slight sibilance on Duboc’s voice is not out of place.