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

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Listening Room have a certain liveliness, but a total lack of warmth.” We moved to a second LP, with a female voice, Mary Black’s No Frontiers. Something still wasn’t right. The richness of detail was breathtaking, and the song’s message came through well, but Black’s voice was hard and cold. Yes, the bongos and the other percussion instruments were gratifyingly lifelike, but there had to be more. Should we change the speaker placement? We We tried, but the dimensions and shape of the room don’t give us a lot of of possibilities, and nothing we tried helped. We gave up, and decided to schedule another session with the Curves…in the much larger Omega Omega room room this time. And we quickly concluded that this was where these speakers belonged. For 46 ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine one thing, they have the dynamic capability even for this very large room, and at no time did we hear the Curves sound as though they were straining. They had clean and nearly endless punch. They still didn’t sound right when we positioned them the way we run our Suprema reference speaker, but a little experimentation allowed us to fi nd the sweet spot, nearer the wall. We pulled out some LPs and other recordings, and listened again. We began with The Song of Bernadette from Jennifer Warnes’ celebrated LP of Leonard Cohen songs, Famous Blue Raincoat. This wonderful recording can easily turn shrill, and that was what it did. Warnes’ voice was hard, the highs Drop by The Audiophile Store It’s a service of UHF, and unlike most stores offering recordings and accessories, it has a difference. Everything in it comes recommended. If we wouldn’t suggest it to our best friends, we won’t suggest it to you. rather too prominent. One good mark came from Reine, who preferred the way that the Curves reproduced the piano. We then returned to the Façade recording that had largely disappointed us in the smaller Alpha room. It was still brighter than we we would have liked, but both Reine and Gerard found positive aspects. The The counterpoint between the fl ute and the clarinet was breathtaking, and the recording’s sly humor came through through unimpeded. “I got right into the music,” said Reine. Albert was less happy. “It’s like reading a book in which somebody has underlined all the interesting passages.” We turned to our SACD player, and slipped on the second last movement of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6 (Pentatone 5186 107). We quickly realized we had been wrong to suppose, after the brief session in the Alpha room, that the Curve might be weak in the extreme bass. On the contrary, the lower strings and the tympany were startlingly realistic even at very loud level. There was not a trace of the annoying low-end “bloom” we often hear, the result of cabinets storing energy and smearing what comes after. One result was that the rhythm of this agitated symphonic movement was quick and unimpeded. Nor were we able to venture anywhere near the speakers’ dynamic limits, short of risking structural damage to the building. Yet the lower midrange remained too discreet, we judged, robbing the music of its warmth. The brass was impressive in its power, though with some sharp edges. We would have liked more substantial lower midrange, if we could have had it without also getting the opaque muck that speakers with lesser enclosures contribute. We were nervous about trying our
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