Hi Ron!
Thanks, that’s kind of you to say. Yes, I hadn’t expected the process to be that easy, to be honest. I thought it’d be a lot more arduous, travelling to shows, dealers, awkwardly asking fellow audiophiles if I might intrude on their systems and families. I had a short list of gear I wanted to hear (Aries Cerat being one), but was thinking it would be difficult to hear any of it in ideal circumstances, and certainly didn’t imagine I’d get to hear it together, having been set up by the designer and distributor, in a very, very acoustically sorted room in which I could listen to my own music. Perhaps I’m fortunate in that we don’t have a system at the moment, so we’re literally starting with a blank slate and I’m not needing to try and accommodate an existing reference.
I’m guessing your question is: ‘How did the Symphonia handle vocals?’ Am I right?
My personal listening tastes are pretty broad, and I tend to clump around a genre for a while exploring that. Lately it’s mostly been a lot of technical metal and micro-sound/minimalist electronica, with a little bit of modern classical here and there and some Coltrane. So it’s been very little solo vocals (outside of band stuff like, say, the XX’s new album), but that could change tomorrow.
My experience with most demos is that the dealer or show will already have a lot of vocal and classical stuff (as well as plenty of Krall, Barber, Warnes and Cassidy) so I try and take stuff that doesn’t usually qualify as appropriate for demos, but is more representative of what I actually listen to in real-life. And if a system can’t handle Battles or Tim Hecker, then it’s not worth my time no matter how much it might excel on more purist “audiophile” tracks of which I personally have very little comparatively.
Just a note on vocals for me personally… I find a lot of vocalists are over-miked, are too high in the mix, and generally receive too much compression. They end up being extremely breathy, very wide, and with an over-exaggeration of fricatives, sibilants and extraneous sounds from the tongue and mouth. It’s not so much a complaint (as I just take whatever I can get and be grateful for it), but an observation in which using vocal tracks for auditions is made slightly more problematic. Again, that’s just me.
However, we do listen to a lot of female vocal stuff not limited to PJ Harvey, Emmylou Harris, Ane Brun, Björk, Hope Sandoval, Diamanda Galas, Marina Topley Bird, Elizabeth Fraser, Maria Callas, Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, and the holy trinity of Aretha, Ella and Billie, et al. But even then female vocals as a ‘genre’ would possibly make up less than 5% of what we actually listen to. Pavarotti is my favourite tenor as uncool as that might be, with Björling not far behind, and we do have a lot of choral works as well.
The only other vocal track we listened to on Sunday was Loreena McKennitt (though unfortunately I’m not sure of the name of the track). However, though I can’t honestly say we listened to a lot of well-recorded female vocals, there was absolutely nothing I heard on Sunday that would lead me to believe that the Symphonia would treat it any differently than it did solo piano, symphonic works, and heavily-modulated square-waved analogue synths.
And although this is a complete assumption on my part that Michel is free to contextualise, my guess is that if vocals were a large and significant part of your musical diet, I believe, based on what I heard on Sunday and relative to the finitude of my experience, the Symphonia would reveal the character, intonation, phrasing, tone, texture and timbre of whoever you were playing - the how and why of their craft - with more grace, authority, power, delicacy and “breath of life” than any other horn, and possibly - though I guessing, right? - almost any other speaker. Is that caveated enough?
Be well, Ron.
853guy
Yes, that was my question.
Thank you!
(I think the type of music listened to primarily can drive the type of speaker an audiophile selects.)