My Long List of Amplifiers and My Personal Review of Each!
Yves Beauvais . by Stereophile Sorry .I just had to share this . It is a long read , but ,VERY interesting,IMO, to say the least. https://www.stereophile.com/content/yves-beauvais |
Hello WCSS, I'd but, as you probably imagine, the Rowland M925 at my personal top, with M535 closely behind it.... I know what you are saying about an amps ability of conveying the "feeling of the music"..... Because this is exactly what M925 and M535 do for me.... Let me elaborate a little..... Mere precision in the rendering of the audible frequency band and reasonably low distortion conveys the nutshell of the music, but might in itself be insufficient to move us emotionally... We might find the system to sound somewhat unemotional.... WHere the emotionality of the component may come in is in its ability of reproducing extremely fine detail in the music, as well in the extra musical information.... THus vibrato in strings, articulation of harmonics and enharmonics in cymbals, fret work in electric guitars and plucked basses, sound of the mechanics in a piano, the subvocalizations and breathing patterns of a performer.... At some point we are transported into the world of the performer.... We hear the music from the inside of the music makers.... We seem to grok the intentions of what the composer "heard" in their mind, and what the performer has grokked of that musical thought, and their success of transfering those wordless ideas into the live performance..... Yes, this is rare enough an experience, and I have not heard it in too many systems. Some rare amps, like M925 and M535 seem to go beyond this... They can uncover a deeper layer.... The layer of what the performer and sometimes the author are conveying unintentionally... Details in the sound they produce that may be a deeper layer of revelation of their passion, or even their hesitations and their misgivings..... You can hear this in very small details of note attacks and decays, where a finger might be barely trembling in hesitation, or instead the highlight of a harmonic structure that reveals to us that the pianist or the vocalist have intuit a new implication in the structure or subtext of the piece.... M925, and M535 in a subtly different way, all give me these. Here are some quotes by the conductor and music educator Benjamin Zander.... He summarizes these ideas very powerfully during his master classes to his top music performance students: "It isn’t how he’s playing, it is how he is being" "Don’t play the cello as an instrument, play the cello as something to be with." “Perfection is great, but is not enough… Give it everything you got… And then watch the ripples!” Benjamin Zander [On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1_KOJ8h9qY] If an audio component can offer us what Zander is saying, regardless of the type of music that we enjoy listening to, we might be on the right track.... M535 and M925 do it for me. Saluti, G.
Hope this helps, G.
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WC, I understand what you mean--the Block is so transparent that you have difficulty isolating the treble, etc. This is similar to a description of love for another person. You don't want to analyze your feelings, you just submit to them. However, it is true that the midrange is by far the most important region of the freq spectrum that we respond to, and the Block may have the best midrange. I still believe that the original Quad 57 electrostatic had the best midrange of any speaker, even if other aspects were flawed. But I want it all, so let's see if the Titan, Rowland give it all--overall transparency plus the sparkle of the Plinius. I get the feeling that the Block doesn't have quite the sparkle, but you love its other qualities so the sparkle may not matter as much to you at this point. |
Guido--interesting thoughts. I met Benjamin Zander at a preconcert lecture, found him inspiring, and thanked him for helping to make me a better person and doctor. I still find that at first I may have emotional wonder at the beauty of a performance. Later, I listen to the record again and again, and discover the details of how I came to react emotionally--subtle characteristics of tone, rhythm, dynamics, tempo, etc. Sometimes we listen in a relaxed way for the overall emotion, and other times we listen analytically. Both ways are useful for enjoyment of great music. |
