Audiophilepure

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“Things got genuinely spooky when I put on the Electric Recording Company’s new LP reissue of The Country Blues of John Lee Hooker (Riverside/Electric Recording Company RLP 12-838). It was a promo copy, loaned by a friend, and the sound was recording-studio clear in a way I rarely experience from any home hi-fi. Hooker sang dramatically, swinging for expression between loud and whisper-soft. He strummed at his guitar with that signature John Lee Hooker beat. Intimacy, rhythm, and absolute clarity dominated the experience. Hooker’s singing voice had throat and lungs. His vocal inflections were roller-coaster rides. Wow!”

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“But while they have no difficulties describing the scale of the Saint-Saens piece, nor in defining a convincing and easily understood stage for the performers, these speakers don’t escape the confines of their own beautifully finished cabinets as convincingly as they might. Everything that happens on the stage is explained in full and in detail, but it all seems to happen between the two towers. Stereo focus is impressive, but there’s no getting the information to expand much beyond the speakers no matter how much fiddling with positioning is indulged in. There’s great unity and coherence to the Monitor Audio Gold 200s, but there’s relatively little of the wide-screen element some similarly sized speakers can deliver.

Which simply goes to demonstrate that nothing’s perfect (but we knew that all along anyway, right?), least of all in the world of loudspeakers. And whilst the Gold 200s are short of perfect, just like all their rivals, they demonstrate some real strengths and areas of convincing expertise. As suggested earlier, there’s no ripping up of the Monitor Audio rule-book going on here, let alone the wider Loudspeaker Manual – but in terms of finessing and honing a long-in-the-tooth technology the Gold 200s are an unarguable, categorical success.”

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“Change to a big orchestral work, such as Bernstein conducting the overture from his opera ‘Candide’ [Bernstein Conducts Bernstein; Sony Classical SS 89043, DSD64], and the R11s show all their abilities in one 4m 16s track. The opening is explosive and hard-charging, with a great impression of ordered chaos in both the writing and the sound. These speakers swiftly relax into the fluid, romantic middle section, then gather up the power for the closing, charging to the finish with especially notable punch in the percussion. It’s a compact, total thrill-ride – on some speakers it can sound rather thin and brash, but via the R11s, with their solid low-end power, it just sounds big and exciting.

That’s also true in the way the R11s handle piano which, with its combination of potential delicacy in the right hand and room-shaking ability in the left, is always a stern test of any speaker. Play Stephen Hough’s recording of Rachmaninov’s First Piano Concerto, with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra under Andrew Litton [Hyperion SACDA67501/2] and the power of the musical forces, and drama they generate, grabs you in an instant. Yet it’s just as easy to appreciate the balance and definition, and the superb soundstage image the speakers are casting, with the piano full-bodied before the orchestra.”

Read more at https://www.hifinews.com/content/kef-r11-loudspeaker-page-2#AMrYHm9gSUUlrWdG.99

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“I’m a drummer. Percussive sounds always capture my attention. I’m aware, for example, of the difference in sound between felt and lamb’s wool bass drum beaters. Felt beaters create a harder, more direct bass drum sound, while lamb’s wool is like soft cotton swooshing the head, moving its internal air more gently to create a softer sound. On Jersey’s title track, I heard the soft, warm sheen of a bass drumhead being driven by a lamb’s wool beater. The Forte was wonderfully transparent to this detail buried deep within the music.”

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What surprised me was that the two feeds sounded equally clean — I’d thought that the higher resolution via Tidal might result in cleaner sound than an MP3 via Bluetooth, but it didn’t. The Bluetooth stream had none of the objectionable artifacts highly compressed digital sound is often known for. But when it came to dynamics, bass punch and weight, spaciousness, and reproduction of detail, the Tidal stream mopped the floor with the MP3-Bluetooth — Winston’s piano sounded much more like a real piano in a real room. The fact that the Monitor SE 3000Fs — and the rest of this edition of System One — could do this speaks well for the quality of reproduction this system was achieving.”

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“The Prime Pinnacles managed to keep all of the various aural events clear and distinct even during a complex action scene. The sound never became confused or muddled, and dialogue was clear and succinct always. I always caught the one-liners, even if I didn’t think they were all funny. Some bombed jokes aside, I enjoyed ‘Thor: Ragnarok,’ and the Prime Pinnacle speakers turned out to be an excellent platform to reproduce this epic soundtrack.”

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“Once you start listening to really big recordings, from the largest orchestral or choral works to the most extravagant soundtracks, the Kodo system’s characteristics really start to emerge, along with the way they shape the overall character of the sound. That planted sense of musical authority and absolute stability is key, but so too are other aspects of the performance. I’ve already talked about the natural perspective and dimensionality that the Gryphon speakers bring to the soundstage, a soundstage that can extend well beyond the width of the cabinets when called upon to do so, and is both beyond and utterly divorced from them. The Kodo towers stand as if mute and immobile, the music occurring in the space beyond them, but that very separation of speakers and sound imposes its own character on proceedings. Listen across a range of material and it soon becomes apparent that there’s a pervasive warmth to the Kodo’s acoustic that invests it with an inclusive sense of presence but also limits its internal spatial separation. While the stage is wide and deep, and it possesses both a tremendous sense of air and a firmly defined height for the band within it, the warmer balance and the overall perspective are both consistent with a midhall listening position — and a midhall position that’s more Disney or Musikverein than the more structured delineation of Davies or London’s Festival Hall.”

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“Grippy and with the kind of authority and punch you’d expect in high-quality floorstanders, it’s the ideal backdrop to the artful lead guitar and vocal detail every time Simon and his backing singers kick in. Each movement of his fingers up and down the fretboard, each sound as he changes chords takes you right into the studio.

There’s an even tonal balance as the song skips from gentle verse to upbeat chorus. With little audible sound from the speaker cabinets, there’s incredible clarity to the notes and a transparency that quickly makes us fussy about the quality of what we choose to listen to, with the 24-bit/96Khz wireless transmission more than enough to deliver the goods.”