Absolare = Absolutely Riveting
When I entered the room, one of my former editors, Clement Perry of Stereo Times, was having a ball listening to a reportedly unavailable track of Sarah Vaughan live in 1968. Inspired, I followed suit with one of my reference recordings, the JVC XR-CD transfer of the sassy Ms. Vaughan’s 1981 recording of Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns” with the Count Basie Orchestra.
The Divine One sounded gorgeous. Everything was therethe guttural lows, the pinched but mesmerizing highs, the occasional edge that crept into the longtime smoker’s instrumentin short, the truth of her voice and the full measure of her interpretive genius. The sound was warm, clear, fully controlled from top to bottom, and rich without ever becoming overly euphonic. Trumpets blasted, and percussion slammed with a tightness that most people attribute to solid-state. If this had been a home system, and I had received an open-ended invite, I would have remained until bedtime.
Absolare and Echole’s Kerem Küçükaslan explained that the Echole cabling included three Echole Obsession Signature interconnects ($7500/6 ft pair), eight Echole Obsession Signature powercords ($6900/6 ft), and Echole Passion speaker cable ($6000/8 ft pair). Put it all together, and in an air-walled conference room that wrecked havoc with most set-ups, and you had the kind of system synergy and performance that we all long for. Bravo, or in the case of Ms. Vaughan, Brava!
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