Art Dudley Listening

Jäckle also designed the amplifiers for the Cinemas' bass enclosures, which share real estate with the speakers' crossover elements: a 7kHz high-pass filter for the treble horn, and a 300Hz low-pass for the midrange horn—both executed with paper-in-oil capacitors—along with 6dB/octave low-pass filtering in front of the bass amplifiers, behind the secondary windings of each input transformer. No electronic equalization is provided.

Crate to plate
The Hommage Cinemas are shipped from Germany in lightweight padded crates; the AcousticPlan power supply is shipped separately, also from Germany, and the Line Magnetic compression drivers are shipped via UPS from Tone Imports in New York. Setup was straightforward. The user fastens the 555 driver to the midrange horn by means of a threaded collet, and attaches the 597A driver/horn to the bass enclosure as described above, then makes the electrical connections to the NT1 field-coil supply. The DC cables are a little over 16' long, terminated with XLRs at their power-supply ends and either O-lugs (treble) or tinned bare wires (midrange) at the ends that connect to the drivers. The fabric-sheathed "pigtails" that go from the bass enclosure's integral crossovers to the midrange and trebles drivers—39" long for the 597A, 27" long for the 555—appear similar to Auditorium 23's enduringly recommendable speaker cable, and are terminated with gold-plated Z-plug bananas at the crossover end, and O-lugs or bare wire at the other.

Though heavy, the bass enclosures are not difficult to move: as mentioned above, the sturdy bronze feet are fitted with stiff felt pads; the user can "walk" the cabinets across carpeted surfaces and, with care, slide them across hardwood floors.

I used my review pair in two different rooms. The Cinemas spent a short while in our living room (27' by 21' by 8'), and a far greater amount of time in the room where I do most of my listening (19' by 12' by 8'). The speakers sounded better in the larger room in several ways: the sound was more coherent overall, surely owing to the fact that listeners didn't need to sit as close to the drivers; and it seemed easier to dial in really superb bass performance, to achieve both temporal and timbral tightness along with good bass extension and excellent bass and lower-midrange color. That said, our living room is our living room, and isn't suitable for serious listening without intrusions from pets, visitors, or life.

In my smaller listening room, I wound up with the Cinemas roughly the same distance from the front wall as my big Altec Valencias—ca 3' between the rear surface of each bass enclosure and the wall—with different distances between the each bass enclosure and its nearest side wall (23" on the left and 27" on the right, both measured from the centers of the sides of the enclosures). Toe-in was generous but not drastic—I could still see the surface of each enclosure's inner side panel from my central listening seat—and I carefully leveled each bass enclosure before installing the midrange and treble horns. And I did indeed position the speakers so that the 597A tweeter horns were mounted on the enclosures' outer edges.

Just prior to the Cinemas' arrival, distributor Jonathan Halpern called with some advice about setting bass levels: The knobs for Volume Woofer 1 and Volume Woofer 2 both go from "0" to "10," and Halpern recommended beginning with both knobs on both speakers set to "5." That proved to be good advice: For weeks, I enjoyed the Cinemas with those settings, temporarily avoiding the temptation to obsess over knob-twiddling. Only two months ago as I write this—around the time I temporarily moved my system into the larger room, then back again a few days later—did I begin in earnest to experiment with woofer-volume settings. I determined that, in the 27' by 21' room, the system sounded best with both Cinemas set to a little over "6" for their 12" woofers (Woofer 1), and between "4" and "5" for their 7" woofers (Woofer 2). In my smaller room, I vacillated between "6" and "7" for both channels' 12" woofers (higher for piano and solo recordings of violin, guitar, etc., lower for orchestral music and bass-heavy recordings of jazz and pop), and gained clarity by keeping the 7" woofer in the right-channel speaker at "4," and the one in the left speaker between "2.5" and "3.5."

As for break-in, the Cinemas made very noticeable gains after just 12 hours of nearly steady use—before which they were extremely midrange-prominent, and their trebles were an odd combination of very muted and slightly brittle. By day two the trebles were fully audible, smoother, and of a kind with the mids—and the woofers went from sleepy to wide awake. Break-in was accelerated with the aid of another suggestion from Jonathan Halpern: To make the diaphragms of the compression drivers work harder than usual in the mechanical sense, use deliberately low DC voltage settings for the field coils—5V or less. Even now, it seems to me the Line Magnetic 555 drivers in particular continue to improve. Perhaps that's the reason why, every three or four weeks, I have found myself turning up the field coils another 0.1V, to the point where I now run them at 6.4V—a level that, a few months ago, seemed to provide just a bit more explicitness of detail than I cared for. (For the longest time, I cruised at a steady 5.9V.)

In a more recent conversation with Jonathan Halpern, he reported exceptional performance when powering the Cinemas with a dual-mono pair of Line Magnetic PR-22 Tungar field-coil supplies ($3750/pair). (Tungar was General Electric's trade name for the gas-filled rectifier tubes they made in the late 1920s, said to be well suited to outputting low voltages; each PR-22 has three of those big, hot tubes.) While no one can deny the appeal of spending less money for something that offers both potentially greater sound and distinctive styling—the oddly shaped Tungar tube would not have looked out of place on the creation-scene set of Bride of Frankenstein—consider that bringing a pair of PR-22s into a smallish room already filled with tubed electronics is bound to raise the temperature to an extent that is both measurable and, in all but the coldest locales and times of year, uncomfortable. I haven't heard, let alone seen, these alternate power supplies (I write this in late August, a time when the humidity levels dampen my enthusiasm for such things), but if I can keep the Cinema review samples for a few more weeks, I'll try to get hold of a pair of Tungars and report back.

Midrange, not mudrange
Before swapping them out for the Hommage Cinemas, I sat down for a good listen with my Altec Valencias. I mention this only because my system, thoroughly warmed up for the occasion, sounded especially good, in a key way: It was keeping my attention focused not on the sound of the hall or the artifacts of the recording technology, but on what the musicians were doing. One evening in particular, I found myself nearly mesmerized by how conductor Adrian Boult shaped every line in his recording of Elgar's oratorio The Dream of Gerontius, with tenor Nicolai Gedda, the New Philharmonia Orchestra, and the London Philharmonic and John Aldis choirs (2 LPs, EMI SLS 987).

A day or so after I installed the Cinemas, I began jotting down notes on how well they played a variety of records. To return to those notes six months later is to be reminded that, as a critic, the praise I give those things that most impress me seems mild and with little fire compared to the remarks reserved for products that impress me in the here and now but do not change my point of view. And the Hommage Cinemas changed my point of view, simply by being the most thoroughly competent, contemporary, high-efficiency speakers—estimated sensitivity 105dB, estimated nominal impedance 20 ohms—I've had in my home.

And if competent doesn't sound like a terribly exciting word, consider that literally every other single-ended-triode–friendly speaker I've tried has been beset by one or more failures that my ears have had to squint not to hear: lack of bass, lack of treble, lack of coherence, screechiness, edginess, mechanicalness (ie, lack of musical flow), lack of spatial information, grossly skewed frequency response, and, worst of all, gross inability, despite their efficiency, to communicate the wonderful things that are on my records, not to mention the wonderful things the rest of my system does to uncover them.

Over the years I've had them, I've come to know the sounds of the various amplification and source components I'm lucky to own; with the Cinemas in place of my Altecs, while music was supremely coherent and unfussy and artistically satisfying, I found that it was also easier than ever to identify the products upstream. The differences in musicality between my Garrard 301 and Thorens TD 124 turntables were heightened, not glossed over. My EMT OFD cartridges were even juicier and more dramatic than ever. My Shindo Haut-Brion sounded more like a Shindo Haut-Brion, my Fi 421A more like a Fi 421A: the former was primary-colorful and richly textured, tending to emphasize the attack components of notes, while the latter was more pastel in its approach to colors, with clear-water clarity and head-spinning momentum and flow.

After six months of using the Hommage Cinemas with such a wide variety of amps and cartridges, I came to know the Auditorium 23 speaker as a distinctly coherent-sounding thing. Its mid and treble ranges sounded as if cut from the same cloth: It was difficult to tell—and, given the satisfying end results, difficult to care—where one left off and the other began, so much so that, every time I put my ear up to the 597A horn, I was mildly startled to hear any sound coming out of it at all. The bass range, for its part, was also of a kind with the mids, but the attack components of notes didn't sound quite as taut as I'd expected: the edges of bass notes were slightly rounded, although without any suggestion of slowness. I've listened to countless piano recordings through the Cinemas, and musical timing was never less than perfect—and the sheer presence and musical will of the player always came through 100%, as on Samson François's singularly emotional 1963 recording of Chopin's Prelude 2 in a (mono LP, UK Columbia 33CX 1877).

Perhaps more important than sonic coherence are two defining qualities that the Cinema also had in spades: physicality and ease. The former was evident every time I played that François collection; I delighted in hearing his often deliberate, startlingly forceful touch reproduced so convincingly. Physicality was no less apparent—or appreciated—with subtler recordings, such as Julian Bream's The Golden Age of English Lute Music (mono LP, RCA Soria LD-2560): the music exited the loudspeakers with the full force of Bream's original performance, no less and no more.

I'm sure the almost uncannily good sound of the Bream record through the Cinemas was also a product of the speakers' exceptional ease—that too-rare quality in which music is neither shot nor squeezed, toothpaste-like, at the listener, nor left hanging stagnant, half a world away. With record after record, music simply happened; although there's no way to know for sure, I was always left with the sense that the force behind its remaking was on a par with the force behind its making.

Drawbacks? Treble extension was noticeably less than one associates with modern loudspeakers, manifesting in lessened air and sparkle with some recordings. (That didn't bother me often. When it did, it was with 1960s and '70s multitracked pop recordings, on which voices had already been dulled by excessive studio fuckery.) Bass notes were, again, a little more rounded than I think is absolutely neutral: the oft-heard E-flat3 in the first movement of Mendelssohn's String Quartet 1, for example, as performed by the Eroica Quartet (CD, Harmonia Mundi HMU 907245), was just a shade too rich and plummy. (But that didn't bother me, either: I like plummy, as long as it doesn't affect timing—and through the Cinemas, timing was tight as a nut.) Although stereo imaging and spatial depth weren't bad at all, I doubt whether the Cinemas would please those folks who insist on being able to hear that Jacintha's left tonsil is bigger than her right. And as far as the price goes . . . well, with my daughter in college, and being as close as I am to at least semi-retirement age, I don't imagine there are any $50,000/pair loudspeakers in my earthly future. That said, given the work and materials that have gone into the Cinema, the price seems fair—and I know of no similarly or lower-priced alternatives that offer this combination or strength of qualities.

Nothing happens till it happens twice
Years ago, when I returned to college and earned a degree in elementary education, I was taught the concept of the spiral curriculum: the notion that most subjects are presented to the student more than once during his or her time in school, always in greater depth and with greater nuance than the time before. Thus the first-grader who knows that Lincoln freed the slaves becomes the fifth-grader who knows the Gettysburg address by heart and the 10th-grader who knows all about the relationship between slavery and the technology of agriculture in the 19th century. (And if the student is athletically gifted, he or she may become the 12th-grader whose coach pressures the social-studies teacher to award a passing grade without the need to know any of those things. Look out, voting booth, here they come.)

I remember one of my professors drawing a parallel between the spiral curriculum and the image of a falcon that spirals away from the falconer in ever-greater circles—the same image that W.B. Yeats used to great effect in his poem "The Second Coming." At the time, I also couldn't help thinking of that poem's second-most-famous line, the centre will not hold—although whether I did so as an informed pessimist or merely as a cynical crank is something I no longer recall.

It seems to me now that revisiting the same topic every x number of years works only if the topic in question is something the learner wants to know about; otherwise, the experience is one of deeper and more nuanced levels of indifference—a dissolute if not quite apocalyptic conclusion to one's career as a learner. Thus my tendency, and surely that of every other passionate reviewer, is to tiptoe around my favorite passions, and to sneak them into the dialogue every few years or so. The main reason being: Given the slow and gradual nature of my own audio education, I wonder if I would have gotten wooden horns and Western Electric compression drivers at age 42 instead of 62. Probably not.

In the Hommage Cinema, Auditorium 23 has given us what may be the best and easiest opportunity to experience once again a class of loudspeakers that dead engineers forgot to keep making. As second chances go, it's a hell of a thing.