UHF No 70 (Net).indd - Ultra High Fidelity Magazine

Listening Room
ironic twists. The Equations seemed to
understand it all.
The music was helped by the fi ne
detail emerging from the Equations.
We could hear way, way back to the
rear of the hall, and the fi nesse of the
reproduction also gave plausibility to the
instrumental timbres. “Even the snare
drum manages to sound lyrical,” said
Gerard.
We continued with Gossamer from
Amanda McBroom’s West of Oz directcut
album. “It’s just as you said about
the snare drum,” said Albert. “Even
the percussion is musical” As for the
singer, she was like a spectre emerging
from the shadows and walking toward
us. Eerie…and wonderful at the same
time.
Another of our recordings demonstrates
dramatically how much raw
acoustic energy can be produced by a
single grand piano. Chopin’s Scherzo
No. 2 (on an RCA Japan direct-cut LP)
can sound startlingly realistic, and that’s
how the Equations made it sound. “You
can follow all those tiny little notes in
among the powerful chords,” said Reine,
who plays Chopin herself and knows
this piece well. “If he were here in the
room, this is exactly what you’d hear.”
The others two nodded in agreement.
We know that what most people identify
as “clarity” can actually be an artifi cial
hardness, but that wasn’t the case here.
Can the Equations rock?
In a room like the one our Alpha
system is in, they sure can. We slipped
the original pressing of Pink Floyd’s Dark
Side of the Moon onto our Audiomeca J-1
turntable, to determine how the speakers
handle power.
You may recall that using this recording
has in the past shown up limitations
in our previous reference speakers, the
3a MS5’s. Though the 3a’s are matchless
in reproducing deep bass and impact,
they are less convincing in the midrange,
where the top layer of music hides the
40 ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine
other layers…and Lord knows there are
lots of layers on that famous recording!
We had heard how the Living Voice
speakers could “peel back” the layers
so we could hear what was underneath.
The Equations are good at this too. A
lot happens back there, and not much of
it remained a mystery.
This recording also contains plenty
of powerful bass, some (though not all)
of it from synthetizers. It’s easy for that
stuff to take on an artifi cial “hi-fi ” character,
or even to boom like an empty beer
barrel. The percussion did not have the
sheet impact it had with the 3a speakers,
but it certainly wasn’t thin, nor was it
anemic. The sound was spacious, full,
and even vast, seeming to extend way
beyond the room’s physical boundaries.
Reine appreciated the voice effects
for their clarity. Gerard found the voices
a little too bright, and even surprisingly
sibilant, but the overall effect was…well,
impressive!
Switching from the turntable to
our CD player, we listened to the celebrated
Stravinsky Firebird on Reference
Recordings. We fi gured the Equations
would handle the fi nale all right, including
that now legendary bass drum, but
what we wondered was whether it could
render the ethereal magic of the soft
passages.
It could, and it did. We held our
Summing it up…
Brand/model: Equation 25 MkII
Price: C$9790/US$7390
Dimensions: 151 x 30 x 26 cm
Sensitivity: 89 dB
Impedance: 7.2 ohms
Most liked: Clarity and magic
Least liked: Dynamic limits greater
than the size would suggest
Verdict: Give it the right-sized room,
and expect great things
breaths during the sequence that sees
the Firebird rise up from its ashes. “You
can see the bird,” said Reine.
We ended the session with Karina
Gauvin’s astonishing Alleluia from
her Analekta CD of Vivaldi motets
(FL 2 3099). There wasn’t much to say,
beyond the long-known fact that Gauvin
has an awesome voice (in the true sense
of that overused word). The Tafelmusik
orchestra sounded majestic. Albert
thought that the height of the speakers
helped Gauvin sound as though she were
in the room rather than shut into a little
box.
By now you know that fi nally we did
not select the Equations as a new reference.
They are, fi nally, too large for our
room. What’s more, this is a room with
a dormer window, which means the top
part of the outer wall is canted. The
ceramic tweeter in the tall Equation
was rather close to that canted wall.
Indeed, the height of the speakers kept
us from placing them the way we would
have liked. We brought back the Living
Voice speakers, and we were unanimous:
the Equations are very good, but they
weren’t quite right for the room.
But how would they do in a larger
room? “You know,” said Albert, “if we
hadn’t been considering them as a possible
Alpha reference, we never would
have brought them into this room.
We really need to listen to them in the
Omega room. They’ll be more at ease
there.”
Not quite, as it turned out. If the
Alpha room is small for them, the
Omega room is a little on the large side
(about 4.9 x 10 meters, with 3 m ceiling).
For the fi nal session we pulled out
three SACDs, which we ran through our
Linn Unidisk player. The fi rst selection
was Needed Time from Eric Bibb’s Spirit
and the Blues (Opus 3 CD19411). The
Equations did well, though with a bit
less bottom end than our Reference 3a