The Tweak from Heaven...or Hell?
I was going to contribute to the thread m669326 started yesterday about “warm or colored speakers,” but then decided to just start another. I’ve had lots of good speakers in my home (B&W, Martin Logan...), and currently own too many: PSB Synchrony One, Von Schweikert VR4 Jr., and—still my favorite—Scientific Fidelity Tesla. The Teslas were savaged by Corey Greenberg in Stereophile when they first came out (1992), and that was pretty much the end; that’s why you’ve never heard of them. In contrast, the PSB Synchrony One were listed by Stereophile in 2012 as a starred “Class A [Restricted Extreme LF] Loudspeaker Recommended Component,” along with speakers costing up to $80,000 in that category, and as a “Recommended Reference Component” by Soundstage Hi-Fi —again, in competition with vastly more expensive speakers. The latter review described them as “among the most neutral speakers ever reviewed” that “sets a new standard for tonal accuracy, clarity and detail,” and a later rave remarked that, in the anechoic chamber of Canada’s National Research Council, they measured lower levels of distortion “than any speaker at any price we’d measured up till then.” But of the speakers I’ve just listed here, they are my least favorite: dull, bland, soulless. And I play cello and guitar, my wife plays piano, my daughter violin and piano, and we have lots of musical friends and a home that hosts “house concerts.” I’m quite familiar with the sound of live, acoustic instruments, solo and in small ensembles—and in fact, I know their sound in the very same environment where my audio system resides. So I have to conclude that, for whatever reasons, “objective” performance and subjective impact are only vaguely correlated, if at all. Millercarbon has harped on this in half his posts, urging that we use our ears and not acoustics labs. Fair enough!
And so, my question. A respected friend who has vastly more experience than I have in the high-end audio world swears by the BBE Sonic Maximizer as his all-time favorite audio component!
I haven’t purchased one yet, but I will. They’re not expensive; compared to the crazy money we spend even on cables, they’re practically free. And I trust my friend’s experience and judgment. But…
How can it be that this simple tweak—whether or not it does what it does for the reasons BBE claims (and I’ve read engineer geek threads that say the claims are mostly mumbo jumbo)—how can it be that I’d want to add this thing to an expensive system from which I’ve compulsively excluded any kind of “distortion”?! What if I like the result? That, frankly, is the outcome I’m worried about.
Bottom line: does anyone have experience with this device? Can you speak in favor of it, or against it, from experience? For what it’s worth, Stereophile founding editor John Atkinson disparaged it in a discussion thread, saying that it did nothing else than add “second harmonic distortion on a dynamic basis,” concluding that it was “a tone control rather than high fidelity.” But this is the same John Atkinson who loved the PSB Synchrony One, writing that it “offers surprisingly deep bass for a relatively small speaker; a neutral, uncolored midrange; smooth, grain-free highs; and superbly stable and accurate stereo imaging”!
