here - Ultra High-End Audio and Home Theater Review

communicating such an experience.You also are dealing with the law of diminishing returns. Anyexperienced audiophile knows, to his or her cost, that you paymore and more for smaller and smaller incremental improvementsin sound quality. You do not get a 45-fold increase in performanceby spending $90,000 on your speakers rather than $2000. There isno meaningful way to quantify the level of improvement, but it hasgot to be far, far closer to 15%–20% than to 4500%. Hyperbole isone possibility, but it wears thin because it colors so much reviewingthat it has lost its impact. Being ruthlessly analytic is anotheranswer, but dangerous in a world where almost every product isdescribed in superlatives and objectivity can be misinterpreted as asign the product does not approach the state of the art.So bear with me. I am going to try to explain why this is a speakeryou should consider if you have no effective limits on what youcan spend. I’m also going to try to explain why this is one of thosespeakers you should seek out for the kind of listening experiencethat will help you define your goals if—like me—you are limitedto far lower levels of investment. My words aren’t going to beenough, but hopefully, they will be an appetizer or incentive.Let me begin with the fact that this is an extraordinarily impressivedesign that reflects years of experimentation and effort. This is akey point in terms of pricing. You don’t pay these prices for costof manufacture, any more than you pay an artist for the cost of hismaterials and by the hour for his labor. You pay for the skill andtaste of the designer—in this case, the importer, Mike Slaminski,tells me that he is Hoo Kong Njoo, known as Didi.Didi holds a Masters Degree in Physics from the University ofFrankfurt. He put his education to work at a research laboratorydoing investigations into cryogenics and super-conductor materials.According to the importer, the research was significant becausethe principal scientists were awarded a Nobel Prize for exemplarydiscoveries in super-conductivity. Didi then started a quest to designand fabricate “the most advanced speakers possible to realize theultimate in realism,” founding Venture Audio in 1986.At the same time, you can only understand a product of thisquality and price if you understand the design concepts behindit, and Venture supplies surprisingly little details about them in itsliterature. Fortunately, Mike Slaminski is one of those importers(Venture is made in Belgium) whose commitment to this speakerseems almost as deep as that of its designer, and provided the kindof detail I think is essential in describing a product this expensive.The Grand Ultimates are not supersized compared to somespeakers in this price class, but they do weigh a solid 161 poundseach, and measure 13.8" x 19.7" x 48". Mike made it clear thatthe designer has been refining the use of multiple layers of solidhardwood to build up the outer walls of his speaker cabinets. TheGrand Ultimate has evolved out of this multiple-layer design, pluschanges made in an earlier Classic Series of speakers where headded a heavy damping sheet in the middle of the solid beechwoodmulti-layers. Since that time, “Didi…discovered the advantage ofusing HDF (high-density fiberboard) layers in between the layersof solid hardwood. That later approach was used in the GrandUltimate cabinet with excellent results in reducing unwantedvibration.”I’ve worked with enough speaker designers over the years toknow this kind of enclosure effort is critical in exploring the stateof the art, and far from cheap. Moreover, the importer reportsthat “Didi has experimented with other methods of cabinetresonance control. The use of heavy materials, such as metal orgranite that have their own characteristic sound can induce a ‘cool’or ‘lifeless’ soundprint. As another example, the use of sand inthe speaker walls can result in a ‘dull’ soundprint.” In other words,these examples indicate that most cabinet designs have a way ofmanifesting peaks or valleys in the sound spectrum that complicateand compromise speaker design.“There is another area of cabinet design that is important, andthat is the shape of the cabinet. Didi uses a V-shape, where linearbevels converge to a narrow front baffle, in order to minimize thebaffle surface area and the subsequent sound wave reflections.[The Grand Ultimate uses] a similar cabinet shape, or C-shape,with continuous curves that converge to a narrow front bafflethat also minimizes baffle surface area. Baffle reflections interferewith the wavelaunch of the drivers, causing spurious distortionsof the sound and reducing the coherence of the speaker…Once aquiet cabinet is achieved, the background is darker and the microdynamicsare preserved for superb focus of images and higherresolution of tones and sibilance.”Any photo of the result has to understate the resulting visualaesthetic—and yes, high-end design has to be judged visually aswell as by sound. The Grand Ultimate is finished with a thicklayer of a hard polyester (circa 1300 microns thick), which furtherreduces cabinet vibrations. My daughter was immediately struck by