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

[LL21]

A remarkable body of work you are writing here about not just your Soundlabs but about music...it's history, the narrative of the music and in a number of cases, what to listen for.

Thanks for taking the time to do this...definitely can see how much the SoundLabs have inspired your music listening!

 

[LL21]

There are times in your life when nothing but Mozart will suffice to enrich your evening. I’ve been listening to a beautiful recording of Mozart’s most sublime pieces for the clarinet, the concerto and the quintet. Safe to say, these compositions are as revered today as they may have been in Mozart’s era several centuries ago.

Many recordings of these legendary compositions exist. This high resolution recording was made in 2021 in France when the world was reeling from the Covid pandemic. Add to that tragedy, the clarinetist was involved in an accident that left him unable to play for an extended period. To complete the picture iof doom and gloom, the conductor of the concerto passed away after this recording, his last.

It’s a beautifully recorded album, and Mozart shows us once again why his music was touched by the Gods. It’s filled with moments of sheer beauty, pathos, and jollity combined in a way that only Mozart seemed capable of. Sounds magical on the large SL G9-7c’s, even with the budget Eversolo DMP-A8 driving the class D D-Sonic amplifiers.

View attachment 142917

A remarkable body of work you are writing here about not just your Soundlabs but about music...it's history, the narrative of the music and in a number of cases, what to listen for.

Thanks for taking the time to do this...definitely can see how much the SoundLabs have inspired your music listening!

 

[godofwealth]

Finally got back to listening to my Minnetonkas, as I affectionately call my monster ARC 750SE’s, with the remarkable Lampizator Pacific and the ARC 6SE preamp. There are some recordings that just grab you by the throat and you listen with your jaw on the floor. This recording I’m about to discuss is one of them. Wow, is it a doozy?

This album explores the music of Gabriel Faure and Robert Schumann, both inspired composers, arranged for the harp and cello. The first piece is the Faure Elegie Opus 24 arranged for harp and cello. It’s a beautiful haunting piece. The cello is rich and has a deeply resonant sound in this fairly closely miked high res recording. The second set of five pieces is Robert Schumann’s Five Pieces in a Folk Style, originally for cello and piano, here the harp replaced the cello.

Five Pieces in Folk Style - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

There’s a rare beauty about chamber music like this when it’s filled with such melody. The harp is one of the oldest instruments known to man. It’s a lovely instrument capable of crazy dynamics. The cello cones closest to the sound of a human voice among all stringed instruments. Driven by the giant ARC 750SE’s with all the tube richness of the Lampizator Pacific, this recording transports you into another world, imagining you’re sitting in Robert Schumann’s living room with his brilliant wife Clara Schumann who was a piano prodigy and a fine composer in her own right. Sadly Schumann was committed to a mental institution where he later died, but not before he wrote many dazzling pieces like this one. Clara provided a sounding board for the great Johannes Brahms, and he often sent her his scores for her feedback.

The sound of the cello is rich and resonant. The whole room lights up with its afterglow, like a lovely fire that keeps you warm in cold winter nights (I think the 750SE’s are my winter fireplace!). Highly recommended.

 

[godofwealth]

This recording includes Schumann’s Three Romances for oboe and piano, Opus 94, here rearranged for cello and piano. It’s one of the most lovely pieces in classical music. I’ve heard it live and the sound of the oboe on this piece can make you weep. The cello is a great substitute and it sounds equally mournful and haunting. One listens to a piece like this and wonders how a human could write such music. Highly recommend listening to the original and above all, try to hear it live. It will send shivers down your spine.

Three Romances for Oboe and Piano (Schumann) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[godofwealth]

Over the past forty years, I’ve traveled the four corners of the earth to give invited lectures on AI, the hottest technology on the planet currently. One benefit was being able to listen to an enormous variety of live music in many venues, from fancy opera houses to small chamber venues. Live music has this ineffable quality that it sounds gorgeous regardless of your location, center stage or off to the side, on the orchestra floor or up on a balcony. It is said that the fiercest critiques in the famed opera house La Scala in Milan are those who are high up in the gallery in the cheap seats. Heaven help the composer, conductor or singer who risks their wrath fur the loudest cheers or boos cone from there. In effect, being up in the rafters is no problem: sound in a live concert treats all fairly no matter how much money you spent on your ticket.

A lot of audiophile loudspeakers don’t sound nice when you are off center or in an adjacent room or up close to them. A great advantage of my Soundlab G9-7c is that due to its enormous radiating surface, over 3000 square inches per loudspeaker, it comes closer to the sound of live music than any other loudspeaker I’ve heard. By that I don’t mean it gets as loud as live music. No, it has that ability to sound great as you walk around and even as you get close, like one foot away.

Take the piece I’m listening to now, Gabriel Faure’s Sicilienne, Opus 74. You can walk right up to one of the Soundlab’s and it’s like you’re sitting next to the cellist. You can hear every breath, every rustle of the instrument. It’s spooky. Or you can listen from an adjacent room. It’s like listening from a balcony. It retains all the tonality and harmonic richness. Because there’s no crossover and it’s all one membrane (divided into vertical strips), there’s a seamlessness to the sound. Just like live music.

 

[godofwealth]

A remarkable body of work you are writing here about not just your Soundlabs but about music...it's history, the narrative of the music and in a number of cases, what to listen for.

Thanks for taking the time to do this...definitely can see how much the SoundLabs have inspired your music listening!

Thanks for your kind words, I’m enjoying writing about Soundlab and music.

 

[godofwealth]

Listening to spinning discs today courtesy of my ARC Reference CD8. This is a lovely holiday CD from Reference Recordings featuring the San Francisco Choral Artists. It’s a Keith Johnson recording, so you’d expect a high standard. You’re not disappointed. The chorus sounds magnificent. The organ in the second piece comes in so low that I briefly worried about a seismic event, being in the Bay Area where we live with constant earthquakes. The bells in the third movement sound really crystalline. The voices in the fourth Cantate Domino sound like they’re suspended in front of the loudspeakers. With their huge radiating surface, the SL G9-7c has you dropped into the actual recording venue, the Saint Ignatius church in San Francisco.
Although this recording was made in 1986, almost 30 years ago, you wouldn’t know that from listening to it. Keith Johnson knew his business. The recording sounds superb and a testament to his skills.

 

[godofwealth]

Here’s the Saint Ignatius church in SF, which I visited in September 2019, when I spent a day in SF before heading off to Europe on a lecture tour. Great venue for this Keith Johnson recording

 

[godofwealth]

Living the Bay Area, we are spoiled for choice in terms of getting wonderful wines. I live in wine country. Here’s a lovely red wine I’m drinking now that seems to enhance my appreciation of this lovely Keith Johnson recording.

 

[godofwealth]

It’s interesting how different composers seem to fall in love with different instruments. Bach loved the organ, not surprising given that the church was his employer. Beethoven loved the fortepiano. Well, the composer of this next recording loved the clarinet. Bernhard Crusell wrote some popular clarinet concertos. Here we are listening to his clarinet quartets. This recording was made in a church again and the front picture shows exactly how the mikes were positioned. The clarinetist is on the right behind the right speaker. The principal violinist is on the left channel. The cellist and violist are in the center. So much is obvious from the picture. But the sound of the clarinet is what matters. Johannes Brahms, the great Viennese composer and heir to Beethoven’s throne was in retirement till he heard the clarinet played by a master, and came out of retirement to compose his sublime clarinet sonatas and quintet for it. Mozart was smitten and wrote his legendary clarinet quintet and concerto.

So, the clarinet has a sound that attracted the greatest musical geniuses in history. Why? When you listen to this recording, you understand how it augments the strings. It’s not just melodic like the strings, it’s sexy. It has this uber cool fluid sound to
It that’s so enchanting that it made these great composers swoon. It’s like listening to a 300B triode. Once heard never forgotten. Some of the best live chamber music concerts I’ve been to featured the clarinet. It’s too easy to make the clarinet sound like a squealing pig. It takes a master to play it so it sounds warm like this recording.

On the big SL’s, the violins have a bit of a bite that sounds natural. The clarinet is all gooey and sugary. It’s like those holiday desserts that you’ve had too much of and now you need to shake off the extra calories by hitting the treadmill.

 

[godofwealth]

Ok, time for some abstract mathematics. I am an AI researcher working on the next generation of AI technology. One fascinating question is how quantum computing will change everything we know about our computing world, from the internet to streaming. Ok, what’s the big deal with quantum computing. I’m going to illustrate the problem with string diagrams made famous by two Nobel prize winners, Richard Feynman, the inventor of quantum computing, and Roger Penrose, the mathematician who invented a lot of the math used to study black holes where time and space don’t exist.

The picture below shows a string diagram illustrating what we take for granted in classical computers. We can copy stuff. Download a music file from thousands of miles away in bit perfect fashion. On the left, the diagram shows that you can take two music files X and Y, splice them together and duplicate them. Think of X and Y as two songs in an album. On the right it shows you can duplicate X by itself, Y by itself, and then swap the tracks. It shouldn’t matter if you splice before you copy or copy first and then splice. Seems obvious.

But, alas, in the quantum computing world, you can’t copy information as your fancy takes you. There’s no such thing as a quantum xerox machine. Oops. Why not? Well, it turns out that in the quantum computing world, every object like X or Y has a doppelgänger. A Mr, Jekyll to a Mr. Hyde. Let’s call the dual objects X* and Y*. If such dual objects existed and you allow perfect copying, all hell breaks loose. Nature doesn’t like it.

As Richard Feynman put it so well, Nature is a quantum computer, and if you want to simulate Nature, you better make it a quantum computer. He also said by golly, it doesn’t look like an easy problem. And it’s not. But Google and IBM and many other companies are racing to build quantum computers. Why? Because they can think in the metaverse! Classical computers think in our universe. Quantum computers think in parallel in many universes. It’s wild and crazy. They don’t obey the laws of conventional probability. If you toss a coin, and it comes up heads, the next toss has no bearing on the previous toss. It could be heads or tails with equal probability assuming a fair coin. In the quantum computing world, independent events have a probability that doesn’t sum. It’s weird interaction. But it’s the future.

 

[godofwealth]

Back to music. I’m listening to my Quad 2905s tonight driven by the Mola Mola electronics. They make a great match. The 2905s are roughly half the width and half the height of the Soundlab G9-7c. That works out to a quarter of its radiating surface. In an electrostatic the size matters. Still, it’s a lively sounding speaker on the smaller scale than the SL’s. I’m listening to a lovely album on Qobuz by Chandos that was unavailable for a long time after I enjoyed listening to it a lot. That’s the drag with streaming. Your playlist disappears without warning.

The high resolution recording features a saxophone quartet playing various arrangements. It sounds really quite nice. The Quads emulate a point source, less strictly than the smaller 2805s as the middle four panels in the 2805 are combine with two bass panels at the top and bottom. The 2905s project with considerable more authority than the smaller 2805s but have a higher tendency to glare on some poorly recorded material. Not this one. They found gorgeous although the scale is reduced from the big SL’s, not surprisingly. Highly recommended recording that is sure to please with its sound and music.

 

[godofwealth]

One of the greatest challenges facing humans in any field is immortality. How do you ensure you are remembered? We remember great painters like Leonardo da Vinci centuries after they died because of their famous works like the Mona Lisa, a relatively small portrait that da Vinci worked on for decades carrying it with him wherever he went. If you see it at the Louvre museum in Paris, be prepared for a mob of tourists all snapping away with their cameras and phones for that Instagram post that I saw the Mona Lisa. Or if you want to see Michelangelo’s famous frescoes in the Vatican, be prepared for a long wait. Where does that leave the rest of us mere mortals?

These thoughts come to me as I’m listening to a chamber music by the French composer Henri Bernini. His Nonetto sounds delightful. But does anyone listen to him? He’s forgotten even though he was highly regarded in his day. The Nonetto sounds to me a lot like Hummel’s Military Septet. It’s sad how once famous composers fade into obscurity. I’m reminded of the opening scene in Amadeus when Salieri meets the priest in a lunatic asylum where he’s placed for attempting to take his own life. He tries vainly to get the priest to remember one of his melodies to no avail. Then he plays Mozart’s Eine Klein Nachtmusik. Instantly the priest recognizes the tune. That’s the challenge. How do you get remembered? Woke you ponder that, listen to this lovely piece by Bertini. It’s a dramatic sounding piece. No, it won’t displace Hummel or fur that matter, Spohr, who write some charming nonets. But it’s worth a listen.

 

[godofwealth]

We move from an obscure French composer to an obscure Italian one. Benedetto Platti was born in Italy in Padua in 1697 but spent most of life in Germany where he was employed in Wurzburg at the court of a local nobleman. It’s interesting because about 5-6 years ago, I gave a three hour lecture on how to build imagination machines at an AI conference in Wurzburg. Small world.

We are listening to Platti’s cello sonatas. It’s played on original instruments, so it doesn’t sound like a modern cello. It’s a bit more raw in tone but suits the music perfectly. It’s like hearing Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier on the piano and then the harpsichord. My goodness, does the piano sound clunky and ponderous compared to the light as a feather harpsichord! One understands why Bach wrote the WTC for the harpsichord. Here Plato is accompanied by a harpsichord and an organ. It sounds very melodic in the 17th century style.

Back to Wurzburg. I was surprised to learn when I visited that it’s the wine growing region of Germany. I didn’t think Germany had the right climate since it’s so gloomy and cloudy all year long. Like Britain. No, Wurzburg is not ever going to as famous as Napa or Sonoma or Paso Robles or Santa Clara, all great wine growing regions close to me. But if you end up there, check out their wines!

 

[godofwealth]

Continuing on the theme of immortality, in academia when an elderly professor retires, his or her colleagues organize a Festschrift — a book of sorts that highlights the professor’s influence. Here’s the equivalent of that in the jazz world.

Gerry Mulligan, one of my favorite artists died in 1996. His friends and colleagues participated in this album as a tribute. I’d rather hear Mulligan himself but I appreciate the gesture. It’s a nice recording featuring his final rhythm section.

 

[godofwealth]

I had to go back to a true Gerry Mulligan album after hearing the Tribute album last night. This one is my favorite. The playing is sublime. Mulligan’s baritone sax sounds so rich and warm on the Soundlab G9-7c helped immeasurably by the tubed electronics trio combining the Lampizator Pacific, the ARC 6SE presto and the nightly Minnetonkas, the ARC 750SE’s. I’m reminded of a famous saying by a Mughal emperor who ruled India several centuries ago. He visited the beautiful area called Kashmir, sadly now enmeshed in a territorial dispute between India and Pakistan (which didn’t exist in this emperor’s time). He said in the original Persian dialect, Farsi (now attributed to the poet Khusrau). It summarizes my sentiment exactly in poetry better than words ever could.

Farsi Couplet:
Agar firdaus bar roo-e zameen ast,
Hameen ast-o hameen ast-o hameen ast.


English Translation:
If there is a paradise on earth,
It is this, it is this, it is this

Amir Khusrau, The Writings of Amir Khusrau: 700 Years After the Prophet: A 13th-14th Century Legend of Indian-Sub-Continent

 

[godofwealth]

Speaking of heaven on Earth, this next album by Ben Webster is so rich, warm and full of sonic bliss that listening to it on the big SL’s is better than having your favorite Christmas treat. It’s an indulgence to hear his warm saxophone come pouring out of these magnificent 9-foot monoliths. You can walk right up to one of them and bask in the sheer sonic splendor of his sax. It’s a hedonistic pleasure.

 

[godofwealth]

Astrud Gilberto shot to fame when she gave an impromptu vocal backup to The Girl from Ipanema, the breakthrough jazz samba album by Getz and Jobim, which won the Best Recird of the Year Grammy in 1965. Here she is on her own in a compilation album. While she doesn’t have the magnetic sax of Getz to shine on this album, the accompanying instruments do a fine job of giving each song a nice tempo. Her voice sounds suitably smoky and sultry through the big SL’s driven the fire-breathing ARC dragons the 750SE’s. The strings are rich and warm despite the older recording. I prefer her singing in Portuguese to English, but I suppose her Brazilian accented English could be viewed as charming in a way.

 

[godofwealth]

Wes Montgomery is my favorite jazz guitarist. His Tsubo recorded live in a jazz cafe at Berkeley, about an hour from my house, is one of my favorite albums. Here he’s featured with a trio. It’s not as dynamic and bouncy, but it’s got plenty of Wes’s brilliance at teasing out meaning and depth from his guitar. It’s been remastered at 24bit 192khz, so it’s a high resolution analog recording. A particularly interesting novelty is the organ, which is atypical in jazz. This was recorded originally in 1959 when he was 36 and revolutionizing the guitar in jazz. One would have thought the guitar is not ideal for jazz. It’s not got the fluidity of notes that a saxophone has. But Wes shows in the hands of the right artist, a guitar is every bit as expressive. Cool to hear an organ in a jazz trio.

 

[ChrisSoundLab]

Many thanks to godofwealth for the music selections.
I just thought to interject if anyone might have any interest, I wish to emphasize that not all Sound Lab models are huge (imo) and that some of the very slim models are just right for smaller rooms (again imho).
For a visual and just a simple reference please feel welcome to visit the channel with various examples.
For example the G7-3Cs in 2 videos linked here are only 50c wide.