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.

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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.