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It's nearly axiomatic. Most women have better high-frequency hearing than most men. There's a related consensus. They don't like to listen as loud nor enjoy as much low bass. Just how these three items are related seems generally lost on the male populace. Here's a male's attempt at a sketch. High volumes inside a constrained space create air compression. Low bass at high volumes produces even more so. Compressed air damps high frequencies. If you're sensitive because you perceive fine harmonics and how they're being squashed, you'll turn the volume down until it no longer overloads the room and frees up the harmonics again. Or you pick music with less bass. Overloading in this context needn't mean obvious in - er, masculine terms. It means inappropriate for a given space's (in)ability to equalize the air pressure and maintain relative equilibrium. Audiophile slang calls it 'mud'. Women tend to notice it far sooner and are much less tolerant of it. And, there are different degrees of mud. To leave mudville and its wider outskirts is also a journey of sensitization. It's just as many other pursuits in life. They require honing of skills as we're directed by our own interests and how much we dedicate to them.


To increase this particular sensitivity, take a slow walk through your entire home while saying an endless string of ones. "One, one, one, one". Notice where your voice changes. Stop there and slowly turn in a circle while you speak in all directions. Continue until you have mapped your entire space and segmented it into zones of stability, more resonant or hollow areas and overt trouble spots. Then observe room geometry, wall construction, the presence of hollow cavities like closets or stair cases, reflective surfaces, asymmetries and such.


Next play a simple piece of music on endless repeat -- say cello and piano -- while all the interior doors of your house are open. Again take a slow meandering walk and observe how the sound changes. Soon you begin to intuit why certain spots are troubled. Then you can begin to do something about smoothing out your acoustics so they interfere less.


My growing experiences with the acoustic resonators in two different homes now have me convinced. Without them, complete harmonic liberation and the tangible breathing quality of the music I tried to describe earlier are impossible. Super damping a room with absorbers and diffusers won't do. If it could, you'd see concert halls outfitted like an anechoic chamber. We don't need excessive damping for this harmonic liberation. We don't need ultra dry. We need an antidote to undue room pressurization given that most of our listening spaces aren't cavernous enough. They all tend to suffer some form of compression at the levels we want to listen.


The upshot in this context is simple. To hear the Tangos at their best requires a resonatored space. Yes, the Tangos already include six resonators. Depending on your setup and room, you'd might need additional ones however. Lest you suspect a cheap trick -- like, a DSP crossover can make even a miserable speaker sound good -- let me disabuse you. Even within a resonatored space, speaker differences remain obvious; just more so than before. If a speaker or system suffers poor time domain performance for example, harmonic purity is lost. You'll hear the veiling effects of phase shift, the suffocation of air on top and the shifts in timbre. The resonators can't fix that. They'll simply point it out cleanly.


It's vital then to view the Tangos in the appropriate context of their evolution. They're another expression of Franck Tchang's resonator technology. The two are intertwined. More so, the Tangos are really co-dependent on this technology. They have been conceptualized and created in such an optimized environment. And that's what it takes to hear them at their best. It only makes sense.


The other potential shadow side is their triple-8" bass system. It's very potent. Remembering that undue in-room air compression kills off harmonic development and decays; and that most such pressurization occurs from high-amplitude low-frequency agitation; it's obvious that should the Tango's bass overpower your room, you'd completely miss the reason for owning them. It'd be like the proverbial sports car with the under-inflated retreads.


But with stupid men, it's always the horsepower wars. The bigger engine wins. Not here. You'll lose. The Tango will move very substantial air. Like any such beast, it needs room to stretch its legs (or wings as it were). Legion are the remarks in the forums, of big speakers in small hotel rooms during hifi shows and the awful expensive sounds they made. If you don't want mud, don't get too much speaker for the room. The Tango, though very attractively dimensioned, is a big speaker. Do not disconnect that fact from the magic or you won't tap all or any of it.


If on the other hand your room is copasetic (which it won't be without deliberation and certain addresses unless you're plain lucky), the other Tango specialty is the bass. Unlike with ported systems, there is no ringing bloat or noise. And I'm not referring to port chuffing but the far more insidious noise from port resonance when the tuning activates. Unlike with sealed systems, there isn't that highly damped, super-springy bass character either. Again, this bass is like a dancer, not a boxer. As Tao master Chuang-Tzu would have said, easy does it.


When I said earlier that the Tango's five drivers are singing in unison, I was also pointing at this continuous character. Unlike hybrid systems where the treble/midrange might be horn-loaded (high efficiency, little effort) while the bass is sealed (low efficiency, high effort); or the bass is ported while the treble is sealed or dipole or something else again; the Tango's drivers use the same loading, transducer type and radiation. They're dynamic domes and cones without internal damping but acoustic pressure release holes and front-firing directionality.


So, let's wrap by asking who the ideal Tango owner might be. Most importantly, you should be sensitive to the very high frequencies. If you can't hear what the resonators are doing when expertly set up (more than a few reviewers can't hear any difference), move on. Relatedly, you have to treasure tone modulations. How musicians deliberately alter timbres. That's the Tango's special providence. It lets you hear the slightest shifts and turns inside a tone's harmonic makeup. If your primary trigger is slam or dynamic jump factor for example, you might not fully appreciate the Tango's forte. Other speakers might serve you better. And so forth. Having listened to many speakers and owned my fair share, I will simply say that of those, the Tango is without peer in the particular qualities described.


Does that make it 'world's best'? That's a completely irrelevant question from the horsepower crew again. The Tango is simply one man's manifest idea on what's important. Might his idea overlap with yours? That should be pretty easy to tell. Just reconsider the qualities described and the sequence they were mentioned in. If what's important to you has been barely touched upon or not at all, there's your answer. I deliberately restricted my commentary to what struck me as out of the ordinary. After 9 years of reviewing, I have not before come across a speaker which is such a microscope on harmonic content as to be the perfect reviewer's tool and simultaneously such a musical pleasure machine. What it elucidates so well hits the bull's eye of what matters most. To me.


My audiophile speaker journey has, without conscious volition or as a matter of credo, included mostly 1st-order or no-order (crossover-less) designs. While others continue to claim that 'time coherence' is inaudible, I've discovered otherwise. I've heard a few ribbon tweeters and marvelled at their airiness and freshness. But I also reacted to metallic colorations (Raal ribbons excluded but I haven't yet heard one in my own home). I loved muRata's tiny golden half sphere in the Kotaro speaker from Japan. But that speaker had no bass. I listened to high-efficiency horns and had their dynamic overdose jacked straight into the vein. That was great fun and very exciting. But it also lacked this finesse. Admittedly, that's of a quieter sort. And, I'm older now so perhaps that factors into it too. A life-style change in how one listens and what for perhaps?


Finally, it's wildly popular to punctuate any review conclusion with a "my new reference, they aren't leaving" sentence. Is the fact that one
particular guy owns a particular product really such an endorsement as to be loaded with meaning and relevance for complete strangers? My making room for these speakers by selling off others should mean something only to those who have followed my writings for a while. To those who sympathize with my proclivities and routinely discover something of themselves in my remarks. And to those who trust that while flowery language does often get the better of me, I always speak my mind truthfully. If you're amongst those... well, then yes, this might have your attention. Then it could become meaningful. But since we're dealing with an expensive product, let me reiterate: to even contemplate ownership really demands prior familiarity with the resonators.


If set up improperly, they're subtle at best. If set up by an expert, they're not subtle at all. But, they do primarily work in a subtle realm, that of the upper harmonics. If you can hear and appreciate the resonators with your current speakers, you might already get a big enough improvement to be perfectly content. Your story might end there and you'll be off to tango in your own way. Also, remember Franck Tchang's admission. When he first began taking guitar lessons, he was mostly deaf to harmonic modulation. Unlike hearing which has no prerequisites other than having functioning ears, listening is ultimately an art form. Franck's alloy-based resonator work is highly unorthodox. Though his German importer has by now treated more than 600 rooms with resonators, there remain plenty of critical listeners who proudly proclaim to hear nothing (as though, by implication, those of us who do are delusional)*.

*___________________________
About which, I can get fierce head aches when my Swisscom router's WiFi is on. That things is powerful enough to penetrate through a number of massive concrete and brick walls. But no head aches with the resonators installed. None. Imaginary? I let you continue to believe so. My wife and I both refuse to live without resonators for a variety of reasons. We even take some with us when we travel so we can have some of the ultrasonic purification effects in hotels abroad. There's a lot more to this than meets the eye. I'll give you another hint. Brain waves -- i.e. thoughts -- occur at very high frequencies. The right resonators have an effect there. Conversely, if you use them wrong, they also do. There are applications for sleep, for meditation, for better concentration and more. But since it is all imaginary, I let you just - imagine it all. It'll make for tremendous discussions.



So, find out first how you respond to the resonators, preferably at the hands of a trained person. If susceptible to their charms, experiment on your own. You might then repeat the mantra of Thomas Fast, Franck's German importer: "No resonators, no music." As your hearing sensitizes over time, you might yearn for more, hungering for more of these particular qualities. If so, I can nearly guarantee that you'll end up with time-coherent speakers and electronics that use simple circuits with very few gain stages and low or no feedback. And perhaps, your particular journey will eventually lead you to a place where you can audition the Tango. Maybe you will hear the things I tried to describe. Maybe you will delight in them as much as I do. All things considered, that's quite a number of ifs.


If -- there goes another -- this outro appears unusually cautious, it's simply because our industry has been thoroughly desensitized by unqualified raves. Those have led many consumers to many disappointing and costly decisions. There's due diligence to be done; corresponding sympathies between writer and reader to be assessed and
tested for consistency over time; changes in taste and priorities to be factored in on both sides; and suitability of one's own environment. And then finally, the personal audition. Which is not how the usual raves end.


But this one does. (P.S: The Liveline cables are another eventual adjunct for full tangofication. Hence Acoustic System.)
Quality of packing: Big card-board boxes, with plinths shipped in separate one.
Reusability of packing: At least once.
Ease of unpacking/repacking: Preferably takes two.
Condition of component received: Perfect.
Completeness of delivery: Speakers, plinth, custom footers. No grills.
Quality of owner's manual: n/a
Ease of assembly: Mount plinths. Easy, but to protect the high-gloss lacquer, use common sense and care.
Website comments: What website? There isn't one. Yet.
Human interactions: Prompt and forthcoming on all info requested.
Pricing: This is a statement product. It's priced as such but perusing the present market, you can easily find far higher priced speakers that don't come close.
Final comments & suggestions: Brilliant implementation of new ideas on acoustics and speaker design. Don't let the conventional appearance and driver assortment fool you. This is not a conventional speaker. If you 'get' what it is about, little if anything else will satisfy. Also a tremendous monitoring device.

Franck Tchang's email