Vivaldis Take Off The Mask
Tom Hoffman of Audio Artistry says the Vivaldis' resolution is accomplished by unmasking. Conventional speakers, he says - especially dynamic box speakers, as distinct from planars, ribbons and electrostatics - have enormous interactions with the enclosure and with the room. Room resonances and reinforcements fill our ears with all sorts of extra sound, and we just can't hear the delicate highs and overtones that give music its flavor and distinguish one sound, one note, one instrument or voice from another. The Vivaldi, like Audio Artistry's more expensive Dvorák and forthcoming Beethoven statement speaker, is designed to minimize room effects. Hoffman claims the dipole design directs the sound to our ears, rather than at the room.
Hoffman and Siegfried Linkwitz must know something. They are using Vifa drivers and a Vifa silk-dome tweeter (the only part of the system that is monopolar) that are used by many other speaker builders. But Audio Artistry's results seem to me superior. Some of this may be Linkwitz' crossover design, and some may be from the use of eight-inch midrange units - larger than many use for woofers - to move the necessary air with smaller excursions. But the Vivaldis seem to keep their essential tonal character regardless of where they are placed in the room, so perhaps the dipole design is indeed the key. It may also be the key to the Vivaldis' excellent bass. The Vivaldis use the same two 12-inch woofers as the Dvoráks, but they do not go as low as the Dvoráks, with their larger, separate bass cabinets (both speakers are also dipolar in the bass). These are not tub-thumping subwoofers, they yield a large amount of accurate and tuneful bass, real music in the bottom octaves. Once again my test is a mediocre recording of great music, the Bach Cantatas For Pentecost EWV 68 and 172 (Nonesuch H-71256), with spectacular German singers and players. As the great basso Jakob Stämpfli sings of God's glory, the drums and continuo stride behind him with absolute rightness. The Stages captured his voice and the trumpets; the Vivaldis added a more solid continuo foundation. They also disentangle the horns and oboes, but the bass is the most striking difference from the Stages. Its addition is heard in every piece of music, seeming to make each phrase and movement more rhythmic.
A good part of the Vivaldis' rhythmic bounce is due to the excellent dynamics that are one aspect of their resolution. Notes that were accented either broadly or subtly retain those accents, much more than on most speakers. Try either of three sets of string quartets: the Beethoven of the Italian Quartet on Philips, or the late Haydn of the Takács Quartet on London and the Kodály Quartet on Naxos. Without drums, brass or large numbers, the string quartet can impart a sense of tremendous dynamism - famously, as in the finale of the Beethoven Op. 59, No. 3 ("Rasoumovsky"). But this rhythmic drive depends upon the perceived dynamics that can be produced by 16 strings on four instruments. The Vivaldis, with their dynamic resolution, are a revelation.
On popular music, try the wonderful Will The Circle Be Unbroken (UAS 9801) - bass lines whether string or electric are part of the music, rather than the tuneless thump, mushing together with the bass drum, that is common with systems that try too hard to produce too much bass. The room doesn't shake, nothing falls down. It is music. There is not the physical sense of skin being struck that is the natural sound of the drum in the concert hall. But the deep strings of Colin Davis' small-force Messiah (Philips C71Ax300) come swelling up with power and absolute conviction.
Real bass - actually, a dramatically lower perceived balance of frequencies - is one of the major differences between live music and audio systems. The Vivaldis supply a lot of the musical bass that is missing from the Stages, not to mention many speakers less good. This is bass that, once heard, you are most reluctant to surrender.
The Vivaldis do not, however, tilt the entire frequency spectrum (as the Stages do); the treble stays as bright and full as your signal sources and amplification will supply. Precisely because the Vivaldis do not act as tone controls, they also do not sound like live music in the concert hall. At the end of Don Giovanni, when the survivors are picking up the pieces and pairing off, Mozart gives us a moment, a short swelling of unutterable sweetness from the cellos. I have heard systems that give us every scratch of the bow across the strings, and the Vivaldis do this. But they do not, with my associated equipment, yield the sweet sounds of the opera itself. And that raises an interesting question as to the obligation of an audio component.
What Is Accuracy?
All this points us toward the heart of the mystery: what is it that a system is supposed to do? For decades we have assumed that a high-end system is supposed to reproduce with maximum accuracy - what? If the aim is to reproduce the original sound, the absolute sound, then how are we to compensate for the multitude of changes made in recordings by the thousands of mostly faceless engineers who have made or edited our recordings over the last 50 years? These technicians have introduced massive distortions, intended to make up for the limitations of the recording and reproducing process, as those were perceived at the time. Compensating for those distortions would require a complex and comprehensive set of sound-shaping circuitry and controls (not to mention an excellent trained ear): exactly what the high end has rejected as a spurious corruption.Even with the most modern recordings, using the most sophisticated technical means, there are serious questions. Recording engineers - they are after all engineers - devote enormous effort to capturing the frequency spectrum flat from 20Hz to 20kHz. But I suspect that the great concert halls (at least midway in the orchestra and back) do not bring sound to our ears with that flatness. Especially they muffle the more discordant squeaks and brays, while somehow letting the music come through with seemingly effortless clarity. Composers (at least before the mid-Twentieth century) wrote not for recording but for the concert hall. They were writing with a direct ear to popular opinion and financial success, and we have to assume that their choice of voicings and instrumentation was made in consideration of how the music would sound to its listeners - that is, in the hall, church or chamber. Most recordings give it to us with a flat balance that I believe is much brighter and sharper than the composers intended us to hear.
Even assuming recording by extremely sensitive and musical engineers, with which we are blessed remarkably often, audiophiles have left virtually unaddressed the full extension of Ivor Tiefenbrun's first-things-first principle: that everything depends on the microphone. In the many hundreds of equipment reviews that have appeared in the absolute sound and Stereophile, not to mention Stereo Review and High Fidelity before them, how many have been of professional recording microphones? How much critical analysis has there been of their flaws and quirks, to push their designers to improvement? More important than reviews are the imperatives of the marketplace. Even high-end speakers may sell in the thousands, amplifiers and disc players in the tens of thousands. But professional microphones can hope to sell at best in the hundreds. There are not the same revenue possibilities to attract and pay for the same engineering investment. Moreover, microphones, like all transducers, are art as much as science, and the electrical engineers who have dominated American audio design seem more comfortable with science than with art. That is why we have a choice of hundreds of amplifiers, why new digital converters appear every month, and why (even in the heyday of analogue) we had a relative paucity of phono cartridges, most of them from Japan and Europe.