Audiophilepure

I then put on “Bid you goodnight” from the Blue Coast Music album Producer’s Choice Volume 1. This track is a splendid example of how much care and attention the inimitable Cookie Marenco puts into her recordings. I have heard this track many times before on various loudspeakers, but I am quite certain that it did not sound this good on any sub US$7,000 speaker that I have heard before. The sheer intimacy embedded in the voices of Keith Greeninger and Dayan Kai, was present in spades with Keith’s gravelly voice tugging achingly at my heartstrings. The lovely guitar work on this track is also rendered with truly accurate tonality with the attack and decay of every guitar pluck coming through with impressive realism.

Next up was “Fur Elise – Klavierstuck Woo 59” played by the very talented Edna Stern and featured on the Beethoven Sonate Appsionatas album. The piano is one of the most difficult instruments for any speaker to reproduce accurately, because each note can have an almost infinite number of variations in terms of loudness, weight, duration and decay time that the piano player can chose from. This is why few instruments allow the musician to embed as much emotion into the performance as a piano.

I know from first-hand experience, that in the hands of the right musician, a piano can be manipulated to express love, sadness, loneliness, melancholy, anger, rage, love, hate, fear and every other human emotion, with aplomb. This makes it a real challenge for a recording engineer to capture all these emotions by choosing the right microphones, placing them appropriately and then mixing the sounds so that the full depth of the emotion is captured for posterity. It is equally challenging for the speaker to then reproduce the recording in a way where none of the emotion is lost. The Gold 300 6G reproduces piano performances with more finesse than most of the other speakers that I have heard in its price range.    

I finished the audition with the timeless classic “Stairway to Heaven” on the Led Zeppelin IV album. This is a great track to evaluate a speaker’s ability to deliver on various sonic fronts and the Gold 300 6G excelled in most of them. The PRaT and transients were spot on, the sound stage depth, layering and imaging were gloriously holographic, the percussions were crisp and the air between the different instruments were there in spades.

I was in audio heaven! The TLA electronics’ midrange is outstanding in timbre, tone color, and freedom from grain. I really enjoy listening to female vocalists so I put on Lady Blackbird’s outstanding recording of “Fix It” from her Black Acid Soul (Qobuz). The TLA combo has an uncanny ability to transport music in an ethereal way. I was shocked by the intense level of purity, immediacy, and solidity of her spellbinding, rich, smoky textured hypnotic voice. I felt as though she was in the room.  

The TLA SSA-350 mono power amplifiers and SSP-1 preamplifier worked flawlessly during the entire listening period and are super quiet. There is no hum or any tube noise to speak of and the components are super reliable, without a single glitch. The marvellous sound delivered by these exceptional electronics are world-class in every way this audiophile deems important. Both units are a perfect matching combo, designed together as one.

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With the braided power cord, hall reverb and ambience on the Previn recording was increased in an almost Technicolor way. Lower treble notes were pushed forward slightly, but in a pleasant way. This was the type of presentation that might initially impress listeners in a showroom, but the accentuated ambience did not sound at all natural. I had just returned from a trumpet conference at the Eastman School of Music, and of the school’s three recital halls, the Kilbourn Recital Hall had the best mixture of direct and reflected sound. The conference presented many recitals in that hall, and I noticed that the soloists’ direct tone in the hall mixed with floor bounce off the hardwood stage. The hall’s reverb began from behind the soloist and then wrapped around the audience from the side walls of the hall. This integration of reverb and direct tone is what the Theta NR did so well in the Previn recording and what the inexpensive power cord power strip missed.

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The turntable proved equally convincing with less-than-audiophile recordings. Jonathan described how on “Bohemian Like You” from the Dandy Warhols’ Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia, the drums as well as the overall musical energy had “explosive power,” and also that the level of detail conveyed and the “separation of individual musical strands” were beyond reproach. Playing Somethin’ Else by Cannonball Adderley, Jonathan found that the Model 35 sounded “beautifully balanced across the entire frequency range,” in turn delivering natural instrumental timbres while laying bare every nuance of the musicians’ performances.