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EQUIPMENT REVIEW - Sony SS-AR2<br />
The AR2 is a three-way speaker with two woofers, ported<br />
at the rear of the enclosure. The nominal cut-off frequency is<br />
42Hz. The grilles are easily removed and replaced, and they<br />
should be removed for serious listening. With the grilles on,<br />
the elegant AR2s are a discrete presence, content to fit into<br />
the décor until the time comes for music. And then comes the<br />
“wow!”<br />
For a start, the AR2s have remarkable, glorious, warm, full,<br />
and most of all musical bass and lower midrange. There is<br />
none of the sonic effect of mini-speaker-plus-discontinuoussubwoofer<br />
that is all too typical of floorstanders. Pianists have<br />
strong left hands, as they should, orchestras have real cello,<br />
doublebass, and trombone sections, and rock music has a<br />
bass guitarist that makes his presence felt.<br />
Music is what we are talking about here, in the most positive<br />
sense. The AR2s do not quite go down literally to the bottom of<br />
the audible range the way the AR1s did (in in-room response).<br />
But in practice, this won’t be a problem. The strength—and the<br />
precision—of the bass from the mid-30Hz range on up carries<br />
the music to where it belongs. Only pipe organ enthusiasts<br />
might want a subwoofer. Everyone else will just bask. It is quite<br />
an experience to hear the bass of an orchestra coming out<br />
of a speaker of such moderate size with its real power and<br />
fullness intact. Gratifying, indeed. (Truth to tell, in technical<br />
terms there was a little more energy around 100Hz in my<br />
room than techno-correctness would call for, but musically I<br />
never minded it. Better a couple of dB too much there than<br />
the enervated, eviscerated sound that all too many high-end<br />
speakers of moderate size—and even some really large ones<br />
not designed to deal with the “floor dip”—produce in actual<br />
listening rooms.)<br />
Some orchestral favorites—the Delos Dvorák New World (New<br />
Jersey Symphony, Macal cond.) and the Telarc Rachmaninoff<br />
Second Symphony (Baltimore Symphony, Zinman cond.) both<br />
presented a solid, warm, appropriately Romantic orchestral<br />
sound. If these pieces do not sound like Romanticism on the<br />
hoof, something is wrong. Here it was right.<br />
On up in the frequency range, the speakers sound very<br />
smooth and uncolored overall. (Their exact tonal character will<br />
be discussed later on.) They are also exceptionally coherent.<br />
Even quite close up, the drivers continue to integrate and at<br />
any reasonable listening distance, coherence is complete.<br />
They are, however, sensitive to the vertical position of the<br />
listener, and the most nearly neutral axis is quite low (more on<br />
this later).<br />
The AR2s also offer an extraordinary sense of quietness<br />
behind the music and an associated clarity of detail without<br />
edginess that is very pleasing. On something like that old<br />
chestnut of a test disc for space and imaging, Opus 3’s<br />
Tiden bar gaar, one hears not just the details of the voice and<br />
instrument but also into the acoustic space of the recording<br />
in a very convincing way. One not only hears what one almost<br />
always hears—where the instruments and the voice are—but<br />
one senses also the space in which the instruments are located.<br />
Since there is nothing in that space of course (by definition),<br />
where the instruments are not, it is a little hard to put in words<br />
exactly what this means. The idea is that the instruments exist<br />
not only in locations of their own but in a coherent space that<br />
encompasses all of them. The description sounds like audiobabble,<br />
but the effect is real. And of course it occurs in real life<br />
as well. Spatial coherence and resolution, whatever you want<br />
to call it, is here—unusually so—and quite fascinating to listen<br />
to. Even after one gets used to it and stops listening to the<br />
effect as such, it remains there and contributes to the sense of<br />
being enveloped in the music in musical terms.<br />
People who work on auditorium acoustics are very interested<br />
in this matter of feeling enveloped by the sound. It turns out to<br />
be musically crucial in the auditorium situation. Few speakers<br />
in my experience do this as well as the AR2. Presumably the<br />
technical explanations are a combination of the frequency<br />
response, the way the speaker radiates into the room (with<br />
its fairly wide front and curved sides), and perhaps the nature<br />
of the cabinet itself. In any case, the effect is definitely worth<br />
listening to and for.<br />
This kind of spatial effect occurs a lot with these speakers, and people<br />
do notice it. Even casual listeners remarked on the spaciousness and the<br />
enveloping character of the sound. Symphonic music in particular sounded<br />
more unconfined than usual. This is not really a question of ultra-wide<br />
imaging of an artificial sort as much as a feeling that the sound is detached<br />
from the speakers in an unusual way. If this sort of thing intrigues you, then<br />
you owe it to yourself to listen to the AR2s, whether or not they are really in<br />
your price range, just to find out the sort of things that can happen.<br />
On recordings with convincing ambience, the presentation of space can<br />
be very special. On Reference Recordings’ Rutter Requiem, one feels not<br />
just in the presence of the chorus but immersed in the space of the whole<br />
recording, almost as if one were in the auditorium with the performers. And<br />
while the AR2s do not plumb the very deepest depths of the organ notes<br />
there, they do provide a satisfying warmth and fullness to the overall sound.<br />
Their presentation of the voices is very convincing and indeed beautiful. And<br />
while this recording tends to be gorgeous on almost all good speakers, here<br />
it is especially so.<br />
This recording also illustrates well the ability of the AR2s to resolve detail<br />
without sounding edgy or nasty in any way. The clarity of the words is superb,<br />
for example, with articulation that is at once natural and yet very precise.<br />
And one hears individual voices when one should, but not exaggeratedly.<br />
For reasons that are not clear to me, the focus of images here and on Tiden<br />
bar gaar was not quite as precise as one sometimes hears. This was natural<br />
SPECS & PRICING<br />
Type: Four-driver, three-way<br />
floorstanding speaker, bass-reflex<br />
loaded<br />
Driver complement: Two 6½" aluminum<br />
woofers, one 5½" treated paper<br />
midrange, one 1" fabric dome tweeter<br />
Frequency response: 42Hz–60kHz<br />
Sensitivity: 89dB<br />
Impedance: 4 ohms<br />
Dimensions: 11" x 37½" x 16"<br />
Weight: 84 lbs.<br />
Price: $20,000<br />
Sony Electronics Inc<br />
16530 Via Esprillo<br />
San Diego, CA 92127<br />
sony.com<br />
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