LOUDSPEAKERS

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go to: Contents | Features | Bookshelf, Stand-Mount and Desktop | Floorstanding | Editors' Choice Awards EQUIPMENT REVIEW - PSB Imagine T2 Similar things happened with larger-scaled music. John Eargle’s recording of the Shchedrin arrangement for percussion and strings of music from Bizet’s Carmen [Delos] presented the percussion in particular as totally detached from the speakers and indeed from the listening room. Of course, all well-set-up stereo speakers do this to some extent. But the T2s do it rather better than almost all others I’ve reviewed. And on this Delos recording, the dynamic power of the T2s came to the fore. There is a good deal of banging around in this percussion tour de force—along with, in other spots, many delicate subtleties. Everything came through remarkably well, the banging and the subtleties both, with the speaker maintaining a relaxed, clean, apparently distortion-less sound even at the more extreme moments, and an unforced clarity in the quiet spots. I mentioned above how smooth the speaker was off-axis. Now what all that techno stuff is likely to add up in listening terms is that the speaker will be quite neutral in almost any reasonable room environment. Of course any speaker will change sound in rooms of different liveliness, in a hard room versus a soft room. As it happened, I tried the T2s at length in both my living room—an ordinary domestic room of medium liveliness— and my audio room, which is heavily damped and less lively in the top end than an ordinary room. The T2s did well in both. But it was in the less live room that the T2s really came into their own. The sense of sound-from-no-speaker was intensified, and the tonal truthfulness was extraordinary. A Few Limitations No speaker is perfect and all have certain limitations. The T2’s list of negatives is short and not very emphatic but here are a few points: First of all, the bass and mid/treble do not entirely coalesce at very close listening positions. The bass drivers are spread out and contoured for a purpose—the arrangement minimizes floor interaction problems as already discussed. But the physical separation and transitional crossover mean that the T2s do not work well as “nearfield monitors”—at extremely close range they sound like a small mid/treble speakers with bass attached separately. At normal listening distances, this ceases to be an issue at all and things become remarkably integrated. Second, the speakers are very smooth but not totally flat, having a slightly contoured sound in the upper mids. (There is, as noted, the high treble peak, but this is too high to affect timbre in the usual sense, though removing it by EQ smoothes the sound subtlety.) The T2s are in measured and listening terms slightly pulled back around 1–2kHz, relative to the frequencies just below. This does not affect perceived neutrality so much as cause a slight “backing off” of the image, an effect much to the good on a great many recordings. Musically, this is a desirable choice to my mind. With its near perfection of pattern, an ongoing PSB design criterion especially well done here, the T2 is one speaker that is definitely DSPcorrection-ready—not that it needs very much if any correction, you understand. And one could argue in this case that it really did not need any or benefit much from any that was tried, depending on the room. In the bass, only a rare, fortuitous room/speaker combination does not benefit from a bit of DSP touch-up. But in the midrange broadly conceived I did not really want to change anything. Few speakers get to that point on their own, but here is one. Being as I am, I did experiment with EQ settings, but flattening the speaker out literally across the 1–6kHz region was not clearly an improvement in listening terms: slightly more accurate tonal character, but only slightly, and rather less natural imaging behavior. Overall, I tended to skip the EQ of anything in the midrange. And even the slight bass emphasis from the room seemed musically to the good, though of course the bass would have needed correction to be measurably perfect. I seldom say this, being inclined to meddle and in most cases finding things I think I can improve, but in this case, letting well enough alone seemed the way to go, except perhaps for getting rid of the high-treble peak if you are so inclined. In the live room, close to the walls of necessity (the room is fairly narrow), with no corrections, one heard a little midrange coloration, whether from the slight 400–500Hz prominence or the baffle step or something else it would be hard to say for sure. But in the larger and deader room, this went away. One could really just revel in the realism of the sound on good recordings. My old standby, the Dallas Symphony/Mata recording of the Rachmaninoff Symphonic Dances on ProArte sounded remarkably convincing and rather more spacious than with most speakers—really (dare I say it) like an orchestra. The Big Picture Like their PSB predecessors, the T2s are exceptionally well-designed and represent extraordinary value at the price. Their performance in terms of their fundamental design criteria—in particular, neutral smooth response on- and off-axis—is so extraordinarily good that there is not that much obvious competition near the price range, if these are the things that count for you (as they are for me!). But, whereas the PSB T6s I reviewed earlier were so inexpensive that there was really essentially nothing I could think of at the price that would be competitive in a full-range speaker, the T2s cost enough that there is actually is some competition in the same price range: the Gradient Evidence and various BBC-related box monitors (e.g., Harbeth M30.1, Stirling Broadcast LS3/6, etc.) come immediately to my mind, but there are quite a few others. Once speakers reach a certain level of neutrality, then one begins to have to listen for one’s self as to which exact choices please the most. Can the T2s really be all that good Well, what can I say In many fundamental ways—ways which often escape other speakers, even those at very high prices—the T2s get things right. Paul Barton has been designing speakers for a long time. But he just keeps getting better. The T2 is a speaker to listen to carefully before you buy anything else—even things that cost a lot more. Or you could wait for Paul Barton to produce a big statement speaker, price-no-object and domestic compatibility ignored (I am waiting for this myself). But what you already have in hand with the T2 is one remarkable transducer. PSB has a lot of dealers. A stop-in at one is definitely recommended, with open ears and open mind and forgetting about the modest price. I think you will be not only impressed in audio terms but also deeply attracted to their sound in musical ones. 64 Guide to High-Performance Loudspeakers www.theabsolutesound.com previous page NEXT page
go to: Contents | Features | Bookshelf, Stand-Mount and Desktop | Floorstanding | Editors' Choice Awards Vienna Acoustics Beethoven Baby Grand Symphony Edition High-Value Hi-Fi Ron Doering It all started with trains. Toy trains that is. Toodling around the Christmas tree way back in 1970. Instead of the “proudly made in the USA” Lionel trains that some of my friends had, giant things which were seemingly large and powerful enough for the smaller children in the neighborhood to ride on, my little choo-choo could fit in the palm of your hand and was foreign-made. As small as it was it impressed me even as a five year old. The engine, modeled after a pre-war German steam type, was delicately and accurately detailed. The colors were varied and authentic, as were the tiny inscriptions that would appear in a full size train as serial numbers and warning placards. Mechanically, it ran with the precision of a sewing machine and the accompanying directions sheets and brochures had an exotic flavor, punctuated by umlauts, and funny looking symbols like Ø. It was a small kit, only an engine, three cars, maybe eight feet of track, but as I found out much later this was quite a dear Christmas present—read “expensive.” That train set was made in what used to be called West Germany by the Märklin Company. I still have the set and will probably give it to my grandkids once I’m through playing with it. This was my first experience with what seems to be a Germanic flair for injecting something special into even very ordinary things. My train was a little gem in its astonishing level of craftsmanship and, to an American, exoticism in the sheer “European-ness” of the packaging and design. The same could be said about the Volkswagen Beetle, which in the 1960s and 1970s seemed to occupy the driveways of every third house in my town. Yes, it was like any other car in having four wheels and seats, but beyond that the “Bug” was a design unmatched in every other respect. Somehow it was more than cheap transportation. The Beetle made a statement; it pulled at the heartstrings and went down its own path. The “A” students in geography will rightly note that Vienna, the home of Vienna Acoustics, is in Austria and not Germany. Fair enough. Nonetheless the qualities that I alluded to above— practicality, superb design, unexcelled fit and finish, distinctiveness—surely were incorporated in the Vienna Acoustics Beethoven Baby Grand Symphony Edition (BBG-SE from here on) loudspeaker reviewed here. For loudspeakers it’s not an easy thing to be truly distinctive, especially at this price point. I could accurately (if not faithfully) summarize the BBG-SE as a compact, three-way, bass-reflex floorstander, which would also describe hundreds of other loudspeakers. But this would be like categorizing a Mercedes E350 as a mid-sized V-6 sedan. While to a certain extent this is true, as you and I know that’s not nearly the whole enchilada. To understand what makes the BBG-SE distinctive is to know that at the design helm is one laserfocused Peter Gansterer, head honcho at VA, who could probably go by the nickname “Dr. No” for all the off-the-shelf drivers he approves of. Grand total: none. Instead, Gansterer designs his own drivers and has them manufactured to his specifications, 65 Guide to High-Performance Loudspeakers www.theabsolutesound.com previous page NEXT page
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