Floor Loudspeaker Reviews

After extensive experimentation—aided by John DeVore, who visited twice to help me set them up—the Xes ended up 9' 7" apart, center to center, and 7–9' from the front wall (footnote 2). Firing directly down the length of the room, the left speaker had abundant space, but the right was only a couple of feet from a record shelf. I could hear that asymmetry in the soundstaging, but the soundstages of appropriately spacious recordings still manifested not just beyond the speakers but past the sidewall.

I tend to move my listening seat around—it's a lightweight IKEA chair—but did most of my listening to the Xes with my ears 10–11' from each speaker's tweeter and, with their spikes adjusted so that the speakers were aimed slightly down, my ears approximately on the tweeter axes. Toe-in, I found, had less impact on the Xes' tonal balance than it's had with most speakers I've heard in this room. I ended up with the Xes facing straight ahead, no toe-in at all—which was John DeVore's original recommendation.

Differences in the sounds of power amplifiers were easily audible through the Gibbon X. I love the Pass Laboratories XA60.8 monoblocks, which I glowingly reviewed in the December 2017 issue—and not (or not only) because they glow such a beautiful blue. The Xes' sound had many virtues as driven by the Passes, but I got a fuller sound with my PS Audio BHK 300 monoblocks. This surprised me—I tend to attribute much of amplifier sound to such measurable parameters as current capability and output impedance and the interaction of these parameters with the loudspeaker, and the X should be an easy load. I mentioned this to DeVore. "Amplifiers just sound different," he said.

X marks the spot
My Gibbon Nines have a polite high end and modest bass extension; their main virtue is their ability to convey the textures and timbres of instruments. In my Follow-Up on the Nines, I wrote that they sound "woody." That "woody" character brings out the wood and rosin in the sounds of stringed instruments and the buzz in trumpets, saxophones, and bass clarinets in the kinds of music I most often listen to: chamber music and small-ensemble acoustic jazz.

The Orangutan O/96, on which I wrote a Follow-Up in the September 2017 issue, is less reticent than the Nines, but its in-room top-end balance is still well south of what most objectivists, for what it's worth, would consider neutral (footnote 3). That balance gives the Nines more abundant bass and a punchier, more dynamic sound.

The Gibbon X is a different animal. It did not sound reticent or especially warm. I heard the X as a bid for neutrality. It had considerably more energy in the higher frequencies than other DeVore speakers I've listened to, and though its bass went deeper, it was leaner. It gave up some, if not quite all, of that special DeVore character, but gave back much in return.

The X's dynamics could literally startle. I watched that happen twice to visitors while the Xes were here, and experienced it myself on several occasions with loud, especially percussive sounds in quiet passages of orchestral music: a bass drum's whomp, a wood block's thwack. I've found this pretty rare; for whatever technical reason, many loudspeakers seem to compress such extreme dynamics, which makes listening more comfortable but not as exciting.

The X also demonstrated startling realism well beyond what my Nines, for all their musicality, are capable of—indeed, at certain moments with very good recordings, beyond what I'd previously experienced in my home.

The DeVore Nine has, as I've already said, a "woody" coloration; I heard something similar in the O/96. This coloration causes all but low male voices to sound slightly hooded. There was no such coloration with the X—all voices sounded open.

If there's any woman living who's destined to join the pantheon of female jazz singers—Billie, Ella, Sarah, Nina—it's Cécile McLorin Salvant. Salvant has range, accurate pitch, versatility, humor, sincerity, and musical expressiveness—and adds to all those qualities a youthfulness and vulnerability that the recorded legacies of those other singers, for all their mastery, mostly lack. On her new album, The Window (16-bit/44.1kHz FLAC from CD, Mack Avenue MAC 1132), Salvant sings with intimacy in intimate moments, humor in funny moments, and always with absolute command—with the young Sullivan Fortner as technically and musically accomplished partner on piano and organ. Through the Xes, McLorin's voice was unhooded and lifelike, and Fortner's piano was crisp and percussive, with an appropriate balance of body and transient attack.

The most arresting experience I had with the Gibbon X, though—and where that startling realism came in—was with another, earlier Salvant album: For One to Love (16/44.1 FLAC from CD, Mack Avenue MAC 1095). At some point during "The Trolley Song," when I wasn't paying close attention, Salvant paid me a visit. She was inside the recording, as usual—then, without warning, she stepped out into my room, between and just behind the speakers. I looked up, startled by the realism, and finding that she wasn't actually physically there, smiled, shook my head, and went on with whatever I was doing.

Good as they are, I don't think this would have happened with any previous DeVore loudspeaker.

The Xes also re-created recording venues convincingly. An illustration was the long drum solo by Sonship Theus that begins about halfway through "The Dark Tree," from Horace Tapscott's piano-trio album Live at Lobero, Vol.1 (16-bit/44.1kHz FLAC from CD, Nimbus West NS 2370 C): tons of impact, delicate cymbals, no added noise, all the ambience you could desire. Another was Bosnian singer Amira Medunjanin's album Ascending, with the Trondheim Soloists—a true multicultural collaboration of Balkan folksinger with Norwegian classical ensemble that was released on a Croatian label a while ago and is now available in the US (16-bit/44.1kHz FLAC from CD, Town Hill Colony THC001). It's that rare recording that captures both space and vocal texture very well, and the Gibbon Xes put both on display.

DeVore speakers have always imaged well, but the Xes imaged better than other DeVores I've heard, and exceptionally well in absolute terms. Musical images floated free of the enclosures with great stability and corporeality. With rowdy studio recordings, sounds flashed everywhere, out to the sides and above my head. The images projected by the Xes were also tall, with some vertical separation of sounds. Soundstages were deep—though perhaps not quite as deep and evocative as those carved out by Alta Audio's Hestia Titanium, a bigger, heavier, more expensive speaker with a dipole configuration in the midrange—and dipoles specialize in soundstage depth.

I'm sure that many factors contributed to these qualities of dynamism, realism, and excellent imaging, but I'm convinced that a major factor was the Gibbon X's frequency balance. The speakers produced, as I've said, more high-frequency energy than, say, my Gibbon Nines or the Orangutan O/96es. Yet I heard no extra sibilance. Well-recorded cymbals sounded sweet, not harsh. If there's a downside to the more generous high-frequency energy, it's that the X left little room for errors of audio engineering. Bright recordings sounded bright.

The series of descending bass warble tones on Stereophile's first Test CD (Stereophile STPH002-2) revealed that, subjectively, the Gibbon Xes began to lose some volume around 40Hz, but still produced musically meaningful output at 25Hz, and audible output, even at reasonable listening levels, to as low as 20Hz. Their bass resolution was good to very good, but ultimate bass resolution has never been part of a DeVore design brief; if it were, John DeVore wouldn't let the cabinet vibrate the way he does. He's always seemed to prefer a particular bass sound: a blend of modern and old-school, modern and comfortable—or such is my impression. As he told me at the Gibbon X launch, it has to sound right to him.

The Gibbon X's bass didn't sound much like the Orangutan O/96's bass, but it did have a similar sort of "comfortable" quality. That quality was brilliant with small-ensemble jazz—plucked double basses sounded wonderfully natural—and it sounded good with everything. But when I listened analytically to enough different kinds of music, I occasionally noticed a loss of definition—as in, for example, the plucked double basses in Mahler's Symphony 2, with Benjamin Zander conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus (24/192 ALAC, Linn CKD 452), or the softly recorded bass notes in Bruce Dunlap's "Threedledum" on the Stereophile Test CD.

Conclusions
DeVore Fidelity's Gibbon X is, to me, a Class A performer—highly recommended, with a caveat I'd offer with any recommendation of an expensive, ambitious, full-range loudspeaker: It requires careful matching. Before you buy, make sure it works in your system and your room.

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Footnote 2: There's a bay-window-ish cutout in the front wall, so one speaker was closer to that wall than the other.

Footnote 3: See fig.6 here.