"Wow!" Jerome Harris—jazz guitarist, bassist, and composer—stopped talking and listened intently to the rough-mixdown dub of his latest album, Hidden in Plain View: The Music of Eric Dolphy (New World 80472-2 CD) (footnote 1). He'd brought it by my house in order to hear it on another system before pronouncing judgment. "That sounds like us! And I ought to know because I was there..."
It wasn't the first time the Metaphor 2s had totally transfixed a visitor with their accurate portrayal of a musical event. This time, however, they'd done it to one of the participants of that specific performance. It isn't as if it was easy stuff to disentangle, either. Jerome's disc is texturally dense: Marty Ehrlich and Don Byron on reeds, Ray Anderson on trombone, E.J. Allen on trumpet, Bill Ware on vibes, Bobby Previte on drums, and Jerome himself on acoustic bass guitar—occasionally all wailing away simultaneously. The Metaphor 2s have the articulation to sort out all of those interweaving melody and rhythm lines, the frequency balance to render them with astonishing timbral veracity, and the speed to ensure that, even with four drivers in a large enclosure, it all arrives at the same time and with swing aplenty. Does it sound as though I'm describing one hell of a speaker? I think so anyway.
Who are these guys, anyway?—Butch CassidyMetaphor is a young company, one that, in the words of Director Bill Peugh, "arose as much from necessity as from inspiration" (see the sidebar). The Metaphor 2 is the company's first product, although they showed a second, less-expensive loudspeaker at WCES 1995: the $3450 Metaphor 5, which drew raves from many attendees. So what is a metaphor? It's a figure of speech—perhaps the most common and important figure of speech—wherein a word or phrase that normally represents one thing, idea, or action is used to suggest a quality in common with another thing, idea, or action. Metaphors are so common that we use many of them without even recognizing what they are—does anyone ever notice these days that organizations don't really have branches? As the name of a speaker company, the word has particular resonance—for, of course, we aren't listening to live performers but rather to something else (the speaker) that has qualities in common with live music. Well-chosen, lads.
The Metaphor 2s are physically striking. They stand 42" tall and are dramatically tilted back so that the front-panel presentation of the four drivers physically time-aligns the arrival of each element of the sound. The pair that I auditioned were finished in walnut veneer with black accents—the two-tone finish helped them appear smaller in my living room than their actual dimensions would indicate. Each frequency range has its own enclosure, with two separately tuned rear-firing ports, one for the midrange and one for the twin woofers. The crossover is housed in an isolated enclosure inside the speaker cabinet; the only components it has in common with the speaker cabinet are the connecting cables. The crossover rests upon the floor on its own spiked feet within the cabinet, under the woofer compartment. Which makes changing speaker positions a complicated procedure: you can't just "walk" 'em across the floor—you'll need an assistant. (When the Metaphors are shipped, a fiberboard bottom plate secures the crossover to the cabinet base. This must be removed before the speakers are used.) The cabinet is constructed of varying thicknesses of MDF, which both makes the enclosure rigid and distributes its resonance across a broad band, effectively eliminating "boxy" colorations. The two-tone color scheme of the cabinet is, in fact, not merely cosmetic, but a visual representation (a metaphor?) of this multiple-element vibration-control system; the shapes of the panels have been carefully chosen to prevent frequency-specific energy storage in both the vertical and horizontal planes. Out of sight, the cabinet is braced heavily, and rigid ceramic and absorptive damping materials are located strategically to complete the equation.
I used the Metaphor 2s over a period of four months and with a wide variety of other components. I have heard very few loudspeakers that changed character as completely with every equipment substitution (footnote 2). Only the Wilson WATT/Puppy 5, which costs $16,000/pair, has shown a similar lack of character in my system.
I approached the Metaphors with a real show me chip on my shoulder. As longtime readers must have observed, I tend to like small speakers. Not because I'm in love with limited frequency response or dynamic range, but rather because the little guys often do a lot of things right. Having fewer elements, they're generally better coordinated than many of their bigger brethren; and because they are small, they don't tend to smear the sound over a large point in space through cabinet resonance or driver position. First off, I played some big, beaty discs, figuring that, at the very least, I should enjoy what they were designed to do well. I wasn't disappointed. I pulled out Brian Eno II—Vocal (Virgin ENOBX 39114 2, CD), a compilation of the lad's early (and fantastic!) complex, rock-orientated, post-Roxy vocal works. I cranked the system up to 11:00 and cued up "Skysaw," a noisy gob of distortion and riddum originally contained on Another Green World. Paul Rudolph and Percy Jones hammer bass-guitar riffs back and forth at one another, while Eno wails on an ungodly assortment of distorto guitars—damn, that's rock and roll! The twin basses came across with perfect articulation, the cross-rhythms remaining distinct and unsullied. Whoa! How low do these doggies go, anyhow? A quick check of the specs showed that they're rated at 35Hz–25kHz—no plus-or-minus range given. A call to Bill Peugh elicited the explanation that, "Response is room-dependent—in a good room, they'll go down into the 20s, but we chose to cite a number that anyone can get in the real world."
Thus I dawdled my way through my audition of the Metaphor 2s, listening with appreciation to the various components, CDs, and LPs that came my way as a critic. I was in no hurry to complete this assignment—I was having way too much fun. My buddy Rubén came over to listen one night. Actually, I was kind of dreading his visit. You know how you can be really digging something and then your best friend—because only your best friends will do this to you—will bop you across your chops, saying, "What are you thinking?"
Footnote 1: It's a marvelous celebration of the music of one of the most fascinating jazz musicians of the '60s—a man that both Charles Mingus and John Coltrane considered one of the finest players they'd ever known. And (he proclaimed modestly), it features liner notes by yours truly; buy it so that somebody else will give me the chance to commit prose. Footnote 2: "I suppose you see this as a good thing," my wife commented upon reading that statement.
"Well, sure. It shows that they don't impose their own sound on the system," I replied.
"And you wonder why normal people think you're weird."
