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”!
