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.