Visit to Jeroen's system in 2020
Yesterday I had the brief but intense pleasure of visiting Jeroen in his lovely home, thanks for the invitation!
Jeroen is living in a beautiful home in a very nice neighborhood and can consider him lucky to have an excellent dedicated listening room for his amazing system.
I was anxious the whole day to hear his system and see what the bigger brothers (or rather great great granddad?) of my own speakers are capable of doing. Rest assured, I was not disappointed.
His system is well documented here, so I spare you additional infos and photos, though i can assure that in person it is even more impressive.
https://whatsbestforum.com/threads/audioquattr-system-from-a-to-z.27192/
We only listened to digital.
I asked Jeroen to start with some of his music recommendations, which were mostly very good Jazz trio / quartett recordings, something I enjoy myself very much. As soon as the first note started, you are there with the musicians.
I heard an enormous soundstage, reaching well outside the room walls. The musicians were standing firmly within that soundstage, having body, weight and a "face", bringing the illusion of witnessing a real live concert. The speakers were able to project sounds well into the room, compared to the Alsyvox speakers at Taiko the music is more "they are here" rather than "you are there", something I know and value from my own system. Don't take that too literally though, usual hifi-lingo does not capture the experience in full.
Tonality wise I was surprised to hear a very pleasant (not to be confused with sweet) rendition of all tracks, no sharpness, no glare, no thinness or flatness, essentially nothing I negatively witnessed on several exposures to big Cessaros in Munich. Jeroen clearly has tamed these beasts and created a system to which you can listen for hours, keep you engaged big time and won't induce listener fatigue - It just sounded right.
I then asked Jeroen to play a few of my reference tracks, Kenny Burrel ("Mule") for musicality, Leonard Cohen ("Amen") for voice and The Stimulators ("new years eve on the waterfront") for stage rendition.
On Mule, I was immediately set back to '63, zooming out for the whole track and just enjoyed what the musicians were performing. The Stimulators showed incredible texture on the bass, very realistic voice rendition and bringing maybe the greatest micro dynamic shading I ever heard from a system. The bass felt perfectly integrated and seamless!
The Leonard Cohen recording also was immensely enjoyable, but showed the only area where I thought it is not perfect: On the same perceived volume level as before (and only on this track) I reached out for the remote to turn it down lower than I would have liked, as I felt a bit room overload - not really a fault of the system though.
My takeaways:
- Cessaros are great speakers which react to the slightest (and i
mean slightest) change in the playback chain (I kind of knew that already from home)
- Alieno are fantastic electronics, something I might want to look into myself
- Music reproduction is such a diverse field, you can achieve incredible results with many different approaches
Thank you Jeroen for an incredible experience, I think I can confidently call your system one of, if not
the best system I have heard.
Christoph
BUT, there is no doubt that with completely different systems/rooms and different listeners and different types of music there are going to be different preferences. 
