Soundlab Audiophile G9-7c: a 30-year odyssey fulfilled
- Thread starter godofwealth
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Point well-taken, but you’re reading my blog incorrectly if you think it’s all about the SL’s. It’s about the entire system, including the ARC 750SE’s, the ARC 6SE and the Lampizator DAC etc. A system is only as good as the weakest link. For most people I think that’s the loudspeakers. Most folks don’t have the space or funds for a 9’ pair of humongous electrostatics, or perhaps to keep domestic harmony, they can’t buy them. I expect most folks wouldn’t like my SL’s because they’re not audiophile loudspeakers. They’re loudspeakers for music lovers. They don’t do boom boom or have a sizzle on top like the big box loudspeakers. They won’t play loud enough to scare all the cats in your neighborhood. I could write a long blog about how bad SL’s are as audiophile loudspeakers. But I hate audiophile loudspeakers. I’ve owned a lot of those. The SL’s are a music lovers speaker. Kind of like the ESL-57s. What they do is incomparable. But they don’t do it all. You have to decide what sort of sound you like or what sort of coloration. I would argue 99% of audiophiles like the boom boom sound. SL’s are not the loudspeakers for them.
It might be more accurate and objective to suggest that SL's are good speakers for the type of music you love. If your musical tastes were more wide ranging my guess is you wouldn't like them as well. It is absurdly demeaning to suggest people that love music you dislike aren't in fact music lovers. I read your posts because you love music that I would never think to listen to. Most if it I don't like but there are enough great nuggets in the albums you share that I do keep coming back.
I think it's fair to state that electrostatics in general are great for listening to music that is recorded in a natural ambience, such as a jazz club, a chamber music hall, a church, or a concert hall. When you get into hard rock and roll that is mixed in a studio with electronic sound effects, then what you hear with an electrostatic might not be what you like. As Peter Walker once said, electrostatics are all about ``documentary sound reproduction". They reproduce more accurately than most loudspeakers what is fed into them. But for hard rock and roll, you might not like what you hear. They'll reveal, in a gentle way with the large SL's, all the problems with the miking. As Walker said once, the "images stick out like sore thumbs". So, at the end of the day, it comes down to personal preferences, like all things in high end audio. You like what you like. There is no point in getting something or hearing something you don't like. Life's too short! I've owned a lot of loudspeakers over the past 40 years, and let's just say there are some that I'll never go back to owning. Also my listening preferences have changed. I am far more of a music lover than a hard-core audiophile. Meaning, I don't sit with my butt glued to the listening chair in the middle and look for a certain type of soundstaging or imaging. I used to do that 30+ years ago, when I read too much of The Absolute Sound. But, as you grow older, you get wiser (eventually!).
What a beautifully constructed & presented response - not dissimilar to how you have presented the albums in this thread - outstanding...
Had four different stats and the MBL 116's over some 3 decades when I was into that sort of thing. Mainly classical and jazz on the menu but I was not remiss when I played other music types as well. But I do agree with your thoughts on ESL sound. Thanks again for your musical summaries.
Today I’m listening to my Quad 2905s driven by solid state Mola Mola electronics: the all-in-one MAKUA preamp with the internal Tambaqui DAC and the Kaluga 400 watt class D monoblocks. The sound is quite different from my SL’s for several reasons, including the design of the Quads, the long narrow dining room where I have my Quads, and of course the solid state electronics. The tonality is brighter, crisper and more vivid. We are listening to a recording by the famous Hesperion ensemble led by the inimitable Jordi Savall. The man is a legend. He takes a particular theme and does incredible research on it. His liner notes are like doctoral dissertations, hundreds of pages long. We are listening to music from the 16th to the 18th century around the theme of Folia, a kind of melody that originated in Portugal in the 15th century and is considered the origin of melody in Europe. Not surprisingly Jordi Savall explores every conceivable variation across several centuries in this 70+ minute album. Here’s a simple example of a Folia.
More than 150 composers over 300 years used the Folia melodic structure in their compositions, so addictive it was. The list includes Vivaldi, Corelli, Geminiani, Lully, Scarlatti, Handel, Bach, Purcell, Cherubini, Salieri, Liszt, Beethoven, etc. A Folia was a style of composition, like a particular sequence of chords in jazz. Composers got addicted to it and it took off. This is typical of what makes a Jordi Savall album great. He doesn’t just play music. He wants to educate you. You listen to one of his albums, read through his exhaustive liner notes, and you feel like you’ve earned a degree in musicology.
He often visits the nearby campus of U.C. Berkeley. Many years ago, I visited Barcelona to attend a scientific meeting. I missed a concert by him by a day. Boy, was I unhappy! This recording is Redbook, which I’m streaming. Savall generally releases all his albums on SACDs with a huge handbook of his liner notes aka Savall dissertation. I picked up a few in Barcelona and struggled home with the huge package of his tomes. This recording is on original instruments. It’s a sharp-edged sound, incisive and vivid. It’s got a jumpy sound, full of dynamic climaxes. You won’t fall asleep hearing it. It’s not a pretty sound, but in the Renaissance, they liked their instruments to sound a bit ragged. It’s not a Stradivarius type of smooth sound. Of course, seventy minutes of Folia can be a bit exhausting. Best consumed in smaller doses.
More than 150 composers over 300 years used the Folia melodic structure in their compositions, so addictive it was. The list includes Vivaldi, Corelli, Geminiani, Lully, Scarlatti, Handel, Bach, Purcell, Cherubini, Salieri, Liszt, Beethoven, etc. A Folia was a style of composition, like a particular sequence of chords in jazz. Composers got addicted to it and it took off. This is typical of what makes a Jordi Savall album great. He doesn’t just play music. He wants to educate you. You listen to one of his albums, read through his exhaustive liner notes, and you feel like you’ve earned a degree in musicology.
He often visits the nearby campus of U.C. Berkeley. Many years ago, I visited Barcelona to attend a scientific meeting. I missed a concert by him by a day. Boy, was I unhappy! This recording is Redbook, which I’m streaming. Savall generally releases all his albums on SACDs with a huge handbook of his liner notes aka Savall dissertation. I picked up a few in Barcelona and struggled home with the huge package of his tomes. This recording is on original instruments. It’s a sharp-edged sound, incisive and vivid. It’s got a jumpy sound, full of dynamic climaxes. You won’t fall asleep hearing it. It’s not a pretty sound, but in the Renaissance, they liked their instruments to sound a bit ragged. It’s not a Stradivarius type of smooth sound. Of course, seventy minutes of Folia can be a bit exhausting. Best consumed in smaller doses.
Science Fiction movies are always centered around the possibility of time travel. Imagine traveling into the future or the past to find out some information that you desperately wanted to know. Of course, scientists are often interested in questions about their particular areas of research. In pure mathematics the greatest unsolved problem has to do with a particular function called the Riemann zeta function. The conjecture is that all its solutions lie on a certain axis on the complex plane, a 2-dimensional plane essentially. Here is the original paper by Riemann published in 1859.
Now, you’re probably thinking what in the world is wrong with these folks. Why does this matter? Well, two centuries of research has shown that this pesky function is everywhere. In particular it is closely related to the distribution of prime numbers. Ok, you forgot high school math. A prime number is any number only divisible by 1 and itself. So, a standard programming exercise is to efficiently generate all prime numbers. Of course it starts with 1. 2 is also prime, the only even prime number. Then we have 3. 4 is divisible by 2, so we skip it. 5 is prime. We skip 6. 7 is prime. 8 is not prime. 9 is not. 10 is not. 11 is prime. 12 is not. 13 is prime. 14, 15,16 are not. 17 is prime. And so on. What’s the pattern? If you figure that out, it’s worth billions of dollars! Why?
Well, every time you buy something online, there’s a cryptography protocol that hides your transaction by applying a code so eavesdropping your financial data is not easy. The secrecy protocol is generated using prime numbers. If you can factor a number efficiently using prime numbers, you can crack a lot of secrets. Well, no one has yet figured out the pattern of prime numbers. We know the general distribution, roughly how many there are between two numbers, and a lot more, but no solution to the Riemann zeta function. A famous mathematician once said that when he finally got to meet God, he’d ask him first if the Riemann hypothesis was true.
Back to music. Time travel in music is easy. We can just listen to a recording of some very old music. I’m listening to Gothic music of the 12th and 13th century. Compared to the above Folia recording is interesting. In the 12th and 13th century, they hadn’t figured out what melody was. Like the ancients didn't know the planets revolved around the sun, not the other way around. We are listening to a great old recording by David Munro and the Early Music Consort of London. It’s eerie listening to this because it’s medieval pre-music. These guys hadn’t figured out how to create a tune. So, they hummed and hawed around a bunch of notes, but it just doesn’t click. They hadn’t yet figured out Folia. It’s like the mathematicians don’t know how primes are distributed. Perhaps in 2300 any kid will have a super cool thinking machine implant that can solve this or any other math problem. Word on the AI street is that some hush hush projects in big Bay Area companies are working on getting AI to solve the Riemann hypothesis. What would Riemann have thought of all this?
To me, music and math have been my constant companions for 40+ years. I got into AI reading a book on math, music, and art, and AI. It’s called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An eternal Golden Thread. It won the Pullitzer price for non-fiction. It’s 800 pages, but a mind-blowing book. Check it out!
Now, you’re probably thinking what in the world is wrong with these folks. Why does this matter? Well, two centuries of research has shown that this pesky function is everywhere. In particular it is closely related to the distribution of prime numbers. Ok, you forgot high school math. A prime number is any number only divisible by 1 and itself. So, a standard programming exercise is to efficiently generate all prime numbers. Of course it starts with 1. 2 is also prime, the only even prime number. Then we have 3. 4 is divisible by 2, so we skip it. 5 is prime. We skip 6. 7 is prime. 8 is not prime. 9 is not. 10 is not. 11 is prime. 12 is not. 13 is prime. 14, 15,16 are not. 17 is prime. And so on. What’s the pattern? If you figure that out, it’s worth billions of dollars! Why?
Well, every time you buy something online, there’s a cryptography protocol that hides your transaction by applying a code so eavesdropping your financial data is not easy. The secrecy protocol is generated using prime numbers. If you can factor a number efficiently using prime numbers, you can crack a lot of secrets. Well, no one has yet figured out the pattern of prime numbers. We know the general distribution, roughly how many there are between two numbers, and a lot more, but no solution to the Riemann zeta function. A famous mathematician once said that when he finally got to meet God, he’d ask him first if the Riemann hypothesis was true.
Back to music. Time travel in music is easy. We can just listen to a recording of some very old music. I’m listening to Gothic music of the 12th and 13th century. Compared to the above Folia recording is interesting. In the 12th and 13th century, they hadn’t figured out what melody was. Like the ancients didn't know the planets revolved around the sun, not the other way around. We are listening to a great old recording by David Munro and the Early Music Consort of London. It’s eerie listening to this because it’s medieval pre-music. These guys hadn’t figured out how to create a tune. So, they hummed and hawed around a bunch of notes, but it just doesn’t click. They hadn’t yet figured out Folia. It’s like the mathematicians don’t know how primes are distributed. Perhaps in 2300 any kid will have a super cool thinking machine implant that can solve this or any other math problem. Word on the AI street is that some hush hush projects in big Bay Area companies are working on getting AI to solve the Riemann hypothesis. What would Riemann have thought of all this?
To me, music and math have been my constant companions for 40+ years. I got into AI reading a book on math, music, and art, and AI. It’s called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An eternal Golden Thread. It won the Pullitzer price for non-fiction. It’s 800 pages, but a mind-blowing book. Check it out!
Continuing our time travel adventure, we are now in France in the reign of King Louis XIII, who lived from 1601-1643. If you have visited Paris, you must have toured the famous Louvre Museum, the world’s most famous museum. Well, 400 years ago, this magnificent structure was the official residence of French kings. Not they didn’t have other palaces, like the Versailles. But in ooh la la Pari, they hung out at the Louvre. And every evening it was a place of dance, of music and gaiety. This wonderful recording gives us a taste of what musical life was in Paris 400 years ago for the ultra privileged who could attend the musical soirées of King Louis XIII. It’s a stark contrast to the Gothic era album by David Munro above. In the 12th century, they didn’t quite figure out how to make a tune. In the 16th century, they’d definitely made progress. No, it’s not Taylor Swift yet, but their music has a definite melodic rhythm, and they were getting the hang of it. Imagine if they could time travel and hear a Taylor Swift Eras concert. Then they could time travel back to tell Louis XIII all about this strange music from the 21st century.
This is a high-resolution recording from the legendary Harmonia Mundi label. I’m listening to my secondary system, all solid state, so I do miss the tube richness of my ARC and Lampi gear. But on this music, a bright sheen is probably what these guys were into. This is called the galant period in French history, when they’d figured out how to have a good time. The horrors of the French Revolution and the guillotine were still in the future.
Next time you visit the Louvre to see the famous Mona Lisa painting, which draws so many millions of tourists each year the French government decided to house it in its own gallery, imagine it as a place of music. Leonardo da Vinci who painted the Mona Lisa dragged the painting everywhere he went for decades. It’s a small painting. He would add a flourish, a dab here and there. And then put it aside. Now it’s the world’s most valuable painting, worth billions. A small painting, a few dabs of paint, centuries old, and the world’s most famous enigmatic smile. Worth billions. Makes you wonder….if time travel allowed to you visit da Vinci while he was painting it.
This is a high-resolution recording from the legendary Harmonia Mundi label. I’m listening to my secondary system, all solid state, so I do miss the tube richness of my ARC and Lampi gear. But on this music, a bright sheen is probably what these guys were into. This is called the galant period in French history, when they’d figured out how to have a good time. The horrors of the French Revolution and the guillotine were still in the future.
Next time you visit the Louvre to see the famous Mona Lisa painting, which draws so many millions of tourists each year the French government decided to house it in its own gallery, imagine it as a place of music. Leonardo da Vinci who painted the Mona Lisa dragged the painting everywhere he went for decades. It’s a small painting. He would add a flourish, a dab here and there. And then put it aside. Now it’s the world’s most valuable painting, worth billions. A small painting, a few dabs of paint, centuries old, and the world’s most famous enigmatic smile. Worth billions. Makes you wonder….if time travel allowed to you visit da Vinci while he was painting it.
In the tradition of chamber music, the piano quintet has a special place in a composer’s heart. All the great composers, from Brahms to Dvorak to Faure to Mozart wrote piano quintets or piano quartets. Adding a piano to strings gave you melody and percussion. Like jazz quartets always have a drummer, classical musicians like to have a piano to get some percussion into a piece. A piano is like a drum: it produces sound by little hammers striking. Beethoven wrote a famous piano sonata called Hammerklavier (literally meaning a piano that’s a hammer).
We are listening to virtually unknown Polish composers in a wonderful Hyperion high resolution 24-bit 96khz recording featuring Friedman and Rozycki piano quintets. They are very Brahmsian: richly melodic and in the grand romantic tradition that earmarked the 19th century of classical music before the like of Stravinsky and Schoenberg changed classical music in the 20th century. In their pieces, melody is still cherished. In the 20th century, classical music got atonal. Melody was frowned upon. If you wrote melodies you were looked down upon. I recall hearing Christoph Penderecki’s cello concerto — another Polish composer — being played in a live concert by the San Francisco Symphony. It was a freak horror show. Lots of squealing sounds by the cello and angry outbursts from the orchestra. It sounded like they were having a fight, nit making music. The audience cheered. I was dumbfounded that this could be called music.
Here we are very much in the Romantic tradition of Brahms, Schumann (another composer who wrote a lovely piano quintet), and Dvorak, and thankfully not in the bizarre world of Pendetecki. The sound is gorgeous on the big SL’s, helped by a generous dose of tube richness from the ARC and Lampi electronics. Both pieces were written in the 20th century around the time of World War I (1913 and 1918). Albert Einstein had just published his revolutionary theory of General Relativity that showed that gravity was because space itself was bent by matter, a theory that has held up to every test thrown at it for over 100 years. When you throw a baseball and it curves in space, it’s actually going in a straight line because the earth is curving space near it.
Music is always at the core of many scientist’s hearts because of its deeply mathematical structure. Einstein loved playing his violin. He did like his vinyl records. There’s a deep connection between music and math. Bach’s fugues are mathematical objects. Here we are enjoying two beautiful piano quintets that need to be heard by a wider audience. Piano gives it rhythm and strings the melody. Like space and time. Each needs the other. Einstein unified space and time, but not quantum theory and gravity. That’s the hardest problem in physics now. Black holes cone out of Einstein’s theory but he hated the idea. As physicists like to joke, who ordered that? The universe is what it is. You have to enjoy it, black holes and all.
We are listening to virtually unknown Polish composers in a wonderful Hyperion high resolution 24-bit 96khz recording featuring Friedman and Rozycki piano quintets. They are very Brahmsian: richly melodic and in the grand romantic tradition that earmarked the 19th century of classical music before the like of Stravinsky and Schoenberg changed classical music in the 20th century. In their pieces, melody is still cherished. In the 20th century, classical music got atonal. Melody was frowned upon. If you wrote melodies you were looked down upon. I recall hearing Christoph Penderecki’s cello concerto — another Polish composer — being played in a live concert by the San Francisco Symphony. It was a freak horror show. Lots of squealing sounds by the cello and angry outbursts from the orchestra. It sounded like they were having a fight, nit making music. The audience cheered. I was dumbfounded that this could be called music.
Here we are very much in the Romantic tradition of Brahms, Schumann (another composer who wrote a lovely piano quintet), and Dvorak, and thankfully not in the bizarre world of Pendetecki. The sound is gorgeous on the big SL’s, helped by a generous dose of tube richness from the ARC and Lampi electronics. Both pieces were written in the 20th century around the time of World War I (1913 and 1918). Albert Einstein had just published his revolutionary theory of General Relativity that showed that gravity was because space itself was bent by matter, a theory that has held up to every test thrown at it for over 100 years. When you throw a baseball and it curves in space, it’s actually going in a straight line because the earth is curving space near it.
Music is always at the core of many scientist’s hearts because of its deeply mathematical structure. Einstein loved playing his violin. He did like his vinyl records. There’s a deep connection between music and math. Bach’s fugues are mathematical objects. Here we are enjoying two beautiful piano quintets that need to be heard by a wider audience. Piano gives it rhythm and strings the melody. Like space and time. Each needs the other. Einstein unified space and time, but not quantum theory and gravity. That’s the hardest problem in physics now. Black holes cone out of Einstein’s theory but he hated the idea. As physicists like to joke, who ordered that? The universe is what it is. You have to enjoy it, black holes and all.
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And now we hear one of classical music’s most loved composers, the Czech composer Antonin Dvorak with one of his most famous compositions, his Piano Quintet. The recording is by classical music’s royalty: the legendary Emerson Quartet with piano superstar Evgeny Kissin. Even better, it’s a live recording at New York City’s most famous concert hall, Carnegie Hall made in 2018. Even though it has the dreaded yellow label (Harry Pearson didn’t include a single DG recording in his Super Disc list), DG has made many fine recordings. As they say, don’t judge an album by its cover. This high resolution recording delivers the goods in spades. It’s gorgeous tonally and the music is divine. The performance is of course nonpareil. These guys are superstars, so they play in ways mere great musicians can only dream of. Dvorak wrote profound music, full of beauty, and his Piano Quintet is one of his greatest works. You haven’t lived if you haven’t heard this piece. I have it on vinyl too, a rare double album by DG. Confession: the vinyl sounds “better” on my SME 20/12 with a Koetsu Onyx Platinum cartridge. But here I’m listening to the 24-bit 96khz streaming version. Boy, does it sound gorgeous. A desert island disc. Wish I could have heard the live performance. I’d have paid a lot of money to be there.
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