Warsaw Audio Show 2024

A chance after-dinner encounter with Jacek Grodecki, owner of Warsaw-based Closer Acoustics, impelled me to visit their room. So did my memories of the positive listening experience I had with Closer Acoustics in 2023.

This time, highs sounded a bit too tinkly, but the system's midrange was positively seductive. Because the quality of musical selections was a major cut above much of what played on repeat in many rooms at the show, I stayed for some time.

Spinning on a Polish J. Sikora Reference turntable with 9" KV9 entry-level tonearm and an Aidas Durawood Bee CU series cartridge with adamant boron composite cantilever, Polish violinist/composer Adam Bałdych and pianist Leszek Możdżer's LP, Passacaglia, held my attention. I was equally taken by David Sanborn's Straight to the Heart, a Polish pressing of a recording by the Swingle Singers, and the same recording of organist Karl Richter playing JS Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565, that I heard on Devon Turnbull's mammoth system in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

I didn't discuss the Closer Acoustics electronics, focusing instead on the Closer Acoustics' "OGY plus 2 x BOBs" speaker set. The OGY, Closer Acoustics' first bookshelf loudspeaker, seats an EMS LB5 driver, designed by Michel Fertin, in a transmission line cabinet built from birch plywood with sandwich box construction. The OGY's external panels are covered with acrylic stone. The BOBs are bass open baffle units. Sold two per channel, one stacked upon the other, they are intended to mate with the OGY. Together, they create a speaker with an 8-ohm impedance, 91dB efficiency, and a claimed frequency response of 40Hz-18kHz. I'm afraid hotel room acoustics militated against the bottom line of Bach's "Toccata and Fugue" but everything above it sounded quite fine.

Sun Mountain AV in Colorado Springs is the U.S. source for Closer Acoustics speakers.