A couple of weeks down the track living with the 20.7s (they do take up a fair part of the house so we are living with them) and now with about 150hrs up the constant joyfully shocked and bewildered expression on my face has subsided into just a content permanent grin.
The beloved behemoths are settling in and even at their most bad hair moments they are still extraordinary.
I thought about Jonathon Valin's review and how it was done with the stock 1 ohm resistor on the tweeter and the stock bridge on the mids without even a good set of stands.
If he loved them like that he would not believe how good they sound on a decent set of feet and running them naked with a transparent set of jumpers instead of the stock bridges or resistors.
When I put the Shunyata Cyclops in I could hear exactly how grungy the stock bridges are compared to the Empirical Design jumpers. Still not a hint of glare or hardness throughout the range since day 1.
My 76 year old mum came over for dinner tonight, she doesn't know much about hifi but she does know good music when she hears it.
The expression on her face when I cued up a hi-res studio master of Dame Janet Baker singing the Sea Slumber song from Elgar's Sea Pictures was priceless... there was Dame Janet beautifully before us in the room her voice just soaring, and when Barbirolli swelled the orchestra the strings completely filled the air with resin and bloom, the LSO in full scale right across the room and stretched back in rows somewhere into the distance.
Only 150hrs up... I didn't even have to say the speakers are just burning in... just no excuses needed.
Mum is a bit fond of Nora Jones so on went some 24/192 Feels like me and she looked at me and asked is that much bass normal. I smiled. She said she really liked how you could see where every instrument in the band was and just how good Nora could sing... the room was just alive with resonance. When I put on Wispelwey and Lazic and the Brahms cello sonata we both agreed that the piano sounded just like a real Steinway and that cellos do sound that deep, and that you could just about see both and no, that the bass level was indeed quite normal just not what was expected.
When on went Third Round - Manu Katche, brilliant jazz drummer and percussionist, the high hats where just shimmering across the room with the irresistible rhythm and all the feet where tapping, then later with one of Naim's best recordings, a 24/192 of Antonio Forcione & Sabina Sciubba's Meet me in London... and when Sabina sang Caruso my mum finally stopped looking surprised and just gave in and fair fell into the music.
These are genuinely a music lovers dream, the speakers of a lifetime, and the panels haven't even really started to free up yet.
Last edited by audiot servant; 07-01-2012 at 11:09 AM.
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