So this afternoon it was back to the palace of hi-fi bling that is K J West One. Marble floors, shiny brass fittings, salesmen who don't get out of bed for less than £5K, and one of my favourite demo rooms.
The idea was to hear some Martin Logans up against the Sonus faber Olympicas. I was fully expecting to love the Olympicas and find the MLs harsh and fatiguing. Read on …
The system: Copland CDA 825 via SPDIF into Devialet 170.
Martin Logan Ethos
For those not familiar with the ML range, the Ethos is the “entry” model in the Reserve ESL range. It has ML’s trademark tall (1120mm) and narrow (235mm) curved electrostatic panel, bolted onto an active sub. The panel has no crossover as such; it uses a high-pass filter set at 375Hz. Below this it hands over to a sub consisting of an 8” woofer (driven by 200 watts of Class D) and an 8” passive radiator. There is basic DSP functionality, which allows the sub to be turned up or down.
Two things immediately struck me about the sound of the MLs. The first is that the soundstage extends remarkably high above the ground. People talk about the “walk-through” soundstage of MLs. The effect is remarkable: imagine your music as an image on a TV screen about 10 feet wide and 6 feet high. Truly stunning. And it’s in 3D as well. More than that: the ability of these speakers to separate and situate instruments is uncanny. One of my demo disks is Janacek’s From the House of the Dead. In Act I there’s a rat-a-tat argument between a tall and a short character. And there they were, standing toe to toe, but one audibly taller than the other. Quite remarkable.
And then a Beethoven string quartet. I’ve never heard the position of a microphone so clearly, hung just in front of and a bit above the performers, so you actually feel like you’re looking down at the players. Something in me wonders whether this extraordinary accuracy might eventually become intrusive; on some recordings the artificiality of the mic placement might end up being a distraction. But it’s jolly impressive.
The second thing is the transparency. I’d heard MLs before at a show, but nothing had prepared me for the degree of sheer attack and detail these speakers are capable of. The combination with the Devialet is quite amazing. I can’t really describe just how good the mid- and top range are. There’s nothing harsh, nothing brittle, just sheer immediacy.
Once I moved from my classical stuff to some rock/pop recordings this began to be an issue. It wasn’t that the speakers sounded edgy or tiring. It was just that they consistently revealed artefacts in the recordings. The old hi-fi cliché has it that a more revealing system lets you hear stuff you hadn’t heard before: the pianist’s intake of breath, the lead singer picking his nose. To me listening to the MLs was like being inside the electronics of the mastering suite.
Now the MLs do have one problem. Low frequencies sound woolly. They also sound slightly disconnected from the rest of the frequency band. I think of it this way: you have an amazingly transparent electrostatic panel, driven in this case by the world’s best amp, yoked together with a fairly decent dynamic sub driven by an OK piece of Class D. Is it any surprise that the former sounds so much better than the latter, and that there’s a bit of a disjoint between the two.
So how would the Olympicas compare?
Sonus faber Olympica III
I won’t describe the speakers, except to say that they’re a three-and-a-half-way design with a narrow slot port that runs vertically all the way down one side of each speaker towards the back edge. Oh and they look stunning.
To be honest, moving from the MLs to the SFs is difficult. The SFs are lovely speakers; I think they’d come off pretty well in a duel with the Dali Epicons that I liked last week. But compared to the MLs the top end and mid-range of the SFs just sounds woolly and slow. I never thought I’d say that. There’s much less attack and nowhere near the same crispness and articulacy. And that applies from the very top right down to the lower mid-range.
These are big speakers. They provide a sense of scale and atmosphere. The bass is properly musical and lends a great sense of swing and rhythm to music. There’s also that persuasively seamless integration that a well designed pair of three-ways gives. Whereas the MLs seemed to suffer from a gap between the lower mid-range and the bass, there was no sign of that at all with the Olympicas.
The lovely pure timbres of acoustic instruments were in evidence, although perhaps less so than with my Cremonas or the smaller Olympica IIs. Or perhaps it was the comparison with the MLs. Sure, the Olympicas didn’t spotlight any particular aspect of the music; they presented the whole picture in an even-handed way. But they also didn’t give as much in the way of texture as I’d been expecting.
Where the Olympicas were most persuasive was with rock/pop material. This is a little surprising, as SFs have a reputation for scoring highest with classical and jazz. Again, I suspect this is a result of hearing them after the MLs.
So, three lessons from today’s demo:
1. This was never going to be straightforward.
2. All speakers involve compromises.
3. Martin Logans do work with Devialet.
:O
Matt
The idea was to hear some Martin Logans up against the Sonus faber Olympicas. I was fully expecting to love the Olympicas and find the MLs harsh and fatiguing. Read on …
The system: Copland CDA 825 via SPDIF into Devialet 170.
Martin Logan Ethos
For those not familiar with the ML range, the Ethos is the “entry” model in the Reserve ESL range. It has ML’s trademark tall (1120mm) and narrow (235mm) curved electrostatic panel, bolted onto an active sub. The panel has no crossover as such; it uses a high-pass filter set at 375Hz. Below this it hands over to a sub consisting of an 8” woofer (driven by 200 watts of Class D) and an 8” passive radiator. There is basic DSP functionality, which allows the sub to be turned up or down.
Two things immediately struck me about the sound of the MLs. The first is that the soundstage extends remarkably high above the ground. People talk about the “walk-through” soundstage of MLs. The effect is remarkable: imagine your music as an image on a TV screen about 10 feet wide and 6 feet high. Truly stunning. And it’s in 3D as well. More than that: the ability of these speakers to separate and situate instruments is uncanny. One of my demo disks is Janacek’s From the House of the Dead. In Act I there’s a rat-a-tat argument between a tall and a short character. And there they were, standing toe to toe, but one audibly taller than the other. Quite remarkable.
And then a Beethoven string quartet. I’ve never heard the position of a microphone so clearly, hung just in front of and a bit above the performers, so you actually feel like you’re looking down at the players. Something in me wonders whether this extraordinary accuracy might eventually become intrusive; on some recordings the artificiality of the mic placement might end up being a distraction. But it’s jolly impressive.
The second thing is the transparency. I’d heard MLs before at a show, but nothing had prepared me for the degree of sheer attack and detail these speakers are capable of. The combination with the Devialet is quite amazing. I can’t really describe just how good the mid- and top range are. There’s nothing harsh, nothing brittle, just sheer immediacy.
Once I moved from my classical stuff to some rock/pop recordings this began to be an issue. It wasn’t that the speakers sounded edgy or tiring. It was just that they consistently revealed artefacts in the recordings. The old hi-fi cliché has it that a more revealing system lets you hear stuff you hadn’t heard before: the pianist’s intake of breath, the lead singer picking his nose. To me listening to the MLs was like being inside the electronics of the mastering suite.
Now the MLs do have one problem. Low frequencies sound woolly. They also sound slightly disconnected from the rest of the frequency band. I think of it this way: you have an amazingly transparent electrostatic panel, driven in this case by the world’s best amp, yoked together with a fairly decent dynamic sub driven by an OK piece of Class D. Is it any surprise that the former sounds so much better than the latter, and that there’s a bit of a disjoint between the two.
So how would the Olympicas compare?
Sonus faber Olympica III
I won’t describe the speakers, except to say that they’re a three-and-a-half-way design with a narrow slot port that runs vertically all the way down one side of each speaker towards the back edge. Oh and they look stunning.
To be honest, moving from the MLs to the SFs is difficult. The SFs are lovely speakers; I think they’d come off pretty well in a duel with the Dali Epicons that I liked last week. But compared to the MLs the top end and mid-range of the SFs just sounds woolly and slow. I never thought I’d say that. There’s much less attack and nowhere near the same crispness and articulacy. And that applies from the very top right down to the lower mid-range.
These are big speakers. They provide a sense of scale and atmosphere. The bass is properly musical and lends a great sense of swing and rhythm to music. There’s also that persuasively seamless integration that a well designed pair of three-ways gives. Whereas the MLs seemed to suffer from a gap between the lower mid-range and the bass, there was no sign of that at all with the Olympicas.
The lovely pure timbres of acoustic instruments were in evidence, although perhaps less so than with my Cremonas or the smaller Olympica IIs. Or perhaps it was the comparison with the MLs. Sure, the Olympicas didn’t spotlight any particular aspect of the music; they presented the whole picture in an even-handed way. But they also didn’t give as much in the way of texture as I’d been expecting.
Where the Olympicas were most persuasive was with rock/pop material. This is a little surprising, as SFs have a reputation for scoring highest with classical and jazz. Again, I suspect this is a result of hearing them after the MLs.
So, three lessons from today’s demo:
1. This was never going to be straightforward.
2. All speakers involve compromises.
3. Martin Logans do work with Devialet.
:O
Matt
), I'm thinking ML is the way to go. Is this crazy?
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