Audiophilepure

https://www.stereophile.com/content/marten-mingus-septet-statement-edition-loudspeaker

ome weeks after I set up the Martens, I paid a visit to Rockport Technologies’ new industrial facility in Westbrook, Maine. Rockport has been moving in slowly, and they recently set up a listening space. It was largish, rectangular, with walls of—I think—PVC cladding, which is somewhat sound-absorbing. Speaker positions were still being fine-tuned, but the speakers were well out into the room, perhaps 10′. After a quick tour of the factory-to-be, we sat down to listen.I noticed the soundstage right way. It extended a few feet beyond the sidewalls and very far back—it was deep—but it ended precisely at the front wall. I already knew that moving speakers out from the wall would expand image depth, but the precise correlation with the position of the front wall was new.Inspired, back in New York, I moved the Martens a couple of feet farther out from the front wall. I moved the listening seat back by about the same amount. After some fine-tuning, the speakers ended up just under 11′ apart and 10.5′ from my ears, precisely level, and toed in toward my ears. I’d never listened with speakers so far out into the room before, with any speakers—mainly because it was now impossible to sit at one of the places at the dining table.The sound, though, was transformed. Yes, the transformation was mainly in soundstage depth, but this had corollary payoffs, which I’ll discuss below in more detail. Well-recorded jazz combos now seemed more or less natural-sized, as if filling a stage at a jazz club from a seat perhaps 10′ from the stage—about the distance from the speaker plane to my listening seat.