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"If it doesn't get a lot more communicative after four days, you should come to my place and hear 'em". Sven Boenicke's parting comment confirmed my personal sentiment at that moment. It also hit upon one crux of reviewing. If a component doesn't blossom fully in situ, it does a writer no good to be assured of a fantastic showing elsewhere.


By the 3
rd day, the W20SE continued to sound exceptionally even, fast and articulate. Without standing out separated, the Raal ribbon (crossed in very shallow to be audible well below 7,000Hz) was fabulously bereft of any metallic or other zippy coloration which its breed can suffer. Boenicke's smaller widebanders had clearly superior upper midrange resolution than the hard-hung 10-inchers in my conceptually similar Zu Essence. What the tone wood speaker still failed to do was communicate with full conviction. It didn't yet reach across space (the virtual stage far behind the boxes) towards the listener on the other side. This has nothing to do with sound per se. I doubt this particular quality of energy transmission has measurable equivalents. Still, it's what ultimately separates interesting from captivating. If for all its measurable and subjective linearity, phase coherence, transient speed and dynamic reflexes, a speaker fails to talk dirty to us, the sonically perfect picture remains too aloof and abstract.


As fully pre-conditioned aka broken-in samples, Boenicke's 4-day period was to account for a different phenomenon. With his place only a 2-hour car ride removed and temps neither excessively warm nor cold during delivery day, one could speculate until the famous Swiss cows come off the mountain: what might contribute to temporary energetic congestion after being transported? Sven has observed it repeatedly but no scientific or other explanation on offer. On wood options, the Spruce Fir of the loaners was his sonic ultimatum. Though the harder dark Walnut might show off more dramatic markings and richer deeper color, the instrument-grade Fir is Sven's favorite for being musically most organic. We're of course dealing not with deliberately thin-walled constructs. This is a massive wooden carcass. At standard room volumes, I detected vibrations only across the entire rear of the enclosure. If sides, top and front resonate, it was below the threshold of any laying on of hands.


The remote-switchable variable gain of my truly fabulous Esoteric C-03 transistor preamp proved instrumental in tracking probable cause for the initial reluctance of transmitting energy. Though my 130-watt Octave MRE-130 monos most assuredly did not require any preceding gain, the sound became noticeably more involving when I switched from 0 through 12 to 24dB of gain (the latter put me down below 10 on the 99-max numerical display). Zero gain with the C-03 does not equate passive lameness. This machine always runs off hot-rodded +/--38V supply rails. Yet steep gain was the ticket and bought image density and fleshiness. Those contributions closed the gap. It put performer presences forward without altering their apparent physical locations one iota.


Dhafer Youssef's 2007 release Glow [Material Records 019-2] made the point. The Tunesian oudist whom existence further blessed with a hair-raising vocal falsetto suddenly pulled on my heart strings. The funk and impact of Matthias Pichler's plucky bass groove on "Babylon" remained tightly sprung, Alegre Correa's percussion work incisive, kick drum accents potent. The lacking energy transmission suddenly restored had thus been centered on image density, a kissing cousin to tone but not identical.


In my review of Franck Tchang's Acoustic System Int. Tango R speaker, I had separated out
certain differences between real (recorded) tone as a function of properly portrayed complete harmonics and their many fine modulations; and faux (playback-induced) tone which might derive from tubes or paper-cone drivers for example. Phase shift limits just how true a component can stay to harmonics. With speakers, minimum-phase designs to my ears always have the advantage in this game. Coming from tube-harvested harmonics which are additionally bolstered by big paper-cone meatiness -- my Zu Essence are perfect examples -- can have migrations to inherently leaner speakers and neutral transistors seem initially subtractive. Subsequently one might find the latter to have rather superior tracking of tone modulations which the former obscured in favor of greater but also somewhat generic meatiness. As always, to get it all is a balancing act.


Boenicke's Model W20 SE uses an 8-inch driver (admittedly paralleled) to cover 20 - 7,000Hz (the Lowther DX-55 in my Rethm Saadhana shifts those figures to 70 - 20,000Hz). This sets the stage for superb timing and thus, also in-line-ment of overtone structures above their native fundamentals. What massive preamp gain accomplished was inner fullness. Plainly audible, it didn't work in the THD domain. That tends to thicken and obscure. Nothing did thicken. Yet everything became more corporeal and curvilinear. By association, it also felt more colorful. Should the speaker itself undergo no further changes, a few seconds on Esoteric's remote wand had already addressed the issue quite successfully. I could hear this plainly but explain why a massive infusion of circuit gain had the described effects I cannot. What I still didn't have was ultimate weight and extension into the lowest octave
.


Scientific objectors will - well, object but, after about six days (I got occupied in-between to lose track) I really was able to remove all the damping without any recurring upper bass/lower mid compaction. Removing the fill had two benefits. One was tonal balance. Without getting dirty or heavy, the lower bass filled out to add black into the color palette. This deepened tone. Two, the speaker was breathing better. Melodic work had more fluidity, decays were more liberated.
All this was with preamp gain at zero. What 24dB of gain had previously added was now accomplished by the 4-day wait. Once I reloaded gain to max, I could -- on superior recordings -- get the kind of tone intensity my old clarinet teacher Hans Deinzer at the Hannover conservatory had sought. One of his practices was to hold a single blown tone steady, then modulate it with bodily adjustments (diaphragm, head, throat) to play the room until that lone note got powerful and penetrating enough to make one sick. The latter wasn't literal of course. It was simply suggestive of a minor force of nature that became intense enough to work on the listener - imposed physicality from one spot in the room to another.