Audiophilepure

https://www.soundstageultra.com/index.php/equipment-menu/1221-yg-acoustics-peaks-ascent-loudspeaker

I suppose I should trot out some classical stuff right now to get the taste of testosterone and stale cigarette smoke out of your mouth and tell you how civilized music sounds on the Ascents. My three-LP box of the Végh Quartet’s cycle of Béla Bartók’s string quartets (Telefunken SKH 25083-T/1-3) is a challenge—all sharp edges, elbows and knees sticking out at odd angles. So it takes a while to find the tune. I sat there, mouth agape, as the Ascents spread out a semicircle of musicians, each perfectly locked in position. This was true midrange magic. Again, the images were slightly larger than I’m used to—the wider positioning likely the cause—and just slightly ahead of the plane of the speakers, but so fully formed that I found my eyes darting left and right, looking for the musicians that I could clearly hear.

Back to the bass once more, because it gave me trouble at the beginning. I think it’s important to let you know that it was my room, not the speakers, that was fighting me. Throwing one of my old chestnuts onto the VPI told me worlds about the Ascent’s bottom end. Chet Baker’s Chet (LP, Riverside / Analogue Productions APJ 016) is just awash in tube juice—the entire album sounds like wet sex. Paul Chambers’s double bass sounds physically huge on this LP, and it’s easy for a speaker to miss out on the crisp leading edge that stops it from turning into mush. The Ascents handled this difficult instrument with the perfect balance of accuracy and extension. That single woofer cranked it out crisply on “If You Could See Me Now,” reproducing that initial bite while still retaining the room-enveloping bloom—the comfy pillow on which the track rests. Most importantly, there was no overhang whatsoever.

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