Download 6Moons test report. July 2013 (PDF). - German Physiks

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$THE UNLIMITED |\/|K|| - German Physiks$

Fringe benefit. If you use Spotify+ or similar streaming services to discover new music, you'll appreciate that 320kbps feeds are tonally crippled. Not so over the HRS-120. Using Spotify's new discover feature—it mines their data base to suggest things based on your recent activities—I was told that having listened to Taksim Trio 2, I might like Erkan Oğur's Yazi Tura soundtrack. Loving this Turkish guitarist's Bir Ömürlük Misafir album, but being unaware of this one, I hit play. I guarantee your shock at being told it was a lowly MP3. Dimensionality and textural wetness didn't let on at all. If you're too snobby to even know about Spotify, you could care less. Fine. Otherwise you'll agree. It's far from marginal. So be pragmatic. If this acoustic room response has you listen longer and to far more varied and outright forbidden fruit, how could it possibly be a bad thing? Flipside. AsiaBeat's Spirit of the People is a percussion-intense Malaysian music project with densely woven beat patterns called bols, echoes of Balinese Gamelan, happy synth melodies and a fun playful and often cyclical overall vibe like a multi-armed multi-legged Indian deity dancing. Since nothing can escape the German Physiks acoustic makeover, tight drum rolls and other rapidly alternating staccato sounds become texturally less distinctive as though someone smudged over a not altogether dry signature in ink. That's why you wouldn't play top-level flamenco in a heavily reverberant church. Unless you didn't mind streaky arpeggios and blurry footwork. That's a bit overwritten and also a function of how far you separate direct sound from its reflections with setup distances. Still it's the flipside of richer wetter decay-enhanced tone. Think watercolors, not pixel count. As typical for hifi it's about picking your compromises. The narrow-dispersion front-radiating speaker is a deliberately dry mastering studio. An engineer gets paid to hear deep into a recording for flaws. The polyradial speaker is a deliberately wet performance venue. It beautifies tone, maintains tonal consistency regardless of seat or frequency and minimizes a collapsed stereo perspective when leaving the center. For the non-audiophile pleasure listener who enjoys company, the preference should be crystal. For someone graduated from audiophile listening who wants to trade seats with the mastering engineer, this true omni might not be dry enough. It's really a soul search. What do we expect of our hifi? As a former Pilates instructor I still do Joe's abdominal floor work on a narrow camping mat in front of my hifi. In this unusual position—doing supine audio worship against piss-poor downward radiation, extreme off-axis response and a complete lack of focus as a result—I was shocked to for once hear a properly developed soundstage without any hole in the middle. That's on the floor between the speakers, their up-angled drivers one meter above my ears. It's admittedly a strange bonus but still. And because I do my routine late in the evening, playback volumes must be very low. Here too the HRS-120's very effective room gain paid out big. I heard more with less. Audiophile discourse routinely skips over whisper levels. It reports on extreme SPL which no civilized or sane user selects. The more complete and full a speaker sounds at low volumes, the more you will actually use your hifi. Here the German Physiks beat up on the hi-eff crowd. Their 96dB+ on-axis voltage sensitivity is not as practical as the HRS-120's ~93dB fullspace loading. Given my preamp's volume control position that latter figure seems about right to explain why my 10wpc monos didn't shrivel up.
The HRS-120 acted as though it had very clean impulse response. Digging deeper into their website I found this on their Borderland model, a bigger version of the HRS-120. It's a graph from a German review. Whilst inverted it's very clean and settles rapidly. This gave me the idea to invert polarity on the amplifier. Gallo's Strada 2 is very sensitive to proper as opposed to absolute polarity from the amp. This type of time-accurate speaker can sound noticeably better one way than the other. What will be the better polarity isn't predictable. It must be tried and isn't the same as inverting source polarity Using "No Ha Podío Ser" from Gerardo Núñez' spectacular Travesía Flamenco guitar album as the decider, 'wrong' polarity was clearly right. It was an easy tell too. This seemed to support my suspicion. Like its bigger brother the HRS-120 must have a very clean impulse response. Otherwise the wire reversal wouldn't have been as obvious. That's the takeaway. This speaker is accurate enough in the time domain to be sensitive about such matters. My admiration for what on sight appeared to be a very simple design that shouldn't cost this much grew even more. When executed properly, simple can be very good. Here it includes a treatment of the inner walls with Hawaphon, "polymer sheets containing a matrix of small cells filled with very fine steel shot originally developed as anti-surveillance measure for military and government buildings". Hawaphon affords up to 50dB of noise reduction from surfaces it's been applied to. For a speaker enclosure that wasn't deliberately designed to actively shed à la soundkaos, Ocellia or Harbeth, quiet walls are key. With a hexagonal cross section the HRS-120 already exploits far narrower hence stiffer panels than the square footprint cheaper Unlimited Mk II. Horizontal braces and steel-shot liners complete structural damping, dense fiber fill does it acoustically. Given the DDD's speed, accelerated very clean woofer response was vital for textural continuity. This outlawed popular port loading. It's sensible to view the HRS- 120 as a bass-augmented widebander with no crossover where our hearing would be sensitive. But which widebander has full bandwidth omni radiation?
Page 1 and 2: Reviewer: Srajan Ebaen Financial In
Page 3 and 4: The actual review pair at HighEnd M
Page 5 and 6: Setting the HRS-120 up where all ot
Page 7 and 8: As a reviewer I couldn't capitulate
Page 9 and 10: Still looking for the optimal setup
Page 11 and 12: Another very happy observation was
Page 13 and 14: On natural tone multi-polar speaker
Page 15: My original setup as a reminder. Th
Page 19 and 20: My own takeaway from this experimen
Page 21 and 22: If there's one item its own propaga

Download 6Moons test report. July 2013 (PDF). - German Physiks

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