With nothing left to do but listen to music, I started with a mono recording, the Ahmad Jamal Trio's
At the Pershing (LP, 20th Century Masterworks 350259). I immediately liked what I heard: The BMRs offered an introspective clarity. Images were in their own zones, well-distanced from each other. Decaying notes, lower frequency reverberations, and other ambient information including clinking dishes and conversations among patrons offered a vibrant, richly layered framework of connective tissue that made an event that happened over 60 years ago seem like it was happening all over again.
Ahmad Jamal has a pointed way of hitting the piano keys on this recording that can result in some notes sounding a bit hard and piercing. The BMRs kept the glare in check without glossing over the notes' attacks or rolling off the highs. The RAAL tweeters sounded like what you'd expect from a good ribbon tweeter—not soft, but sweeter than metal, more delicate than plastic, spookily transparent, and naturally extended. Double bass lines were easy to follow and a little rounded, which gave them an ebullient rhythmic swagger. Overall, the sound was fleet-footed and packed with well-sorted information. The BMRs offered such a clear, unencumbered view into Jamal's solos, they were transfixing; even when the finger acrobatics kicked in, the note sequences were so vividly rendered and easy to follow that it was as if I were hearing them in slow motion. Yet there was nothing slow about them; they sounded vivacious and dynamic, as did drummer Vernel Fournier's funky, snappy beats. What the BMR Monitors were providing was something akin to temporal clarity and an articulate speech pattern. "Are you getting all these fancy notes, Rob?" I heard them ask me. "Are you hearing how good the music is?"
"Oh, yes, I am."
It was about then that I began to think that this would be a relatively easy review to write; I'd be able to whip it off to Editor Jim Austin in no time. But then I hit a spatial discombobulation. It happened at the beginning of Roger Waters's
Amused to Death (CD, Columbia CK 47127). What I assumed would happen—took for granted would happen—didn't happen, leaving me momentarily paralyzed in my seat. Mind you, as the CD kept playing and I sat there unable to move, I had no issue with what I was hearing. The sound was
good—but still, what I heard, or didn't hear, needed addressing.
This CD is no sonic blockbuster. It's got its moments, and some of the music on it is good, but when it comes to the sonics, it's the binaural "QSound" effects this release was recorded in that make it stand out and be useful as an audio reviewing tool, especially when it comes to the soundstage. Get this part right on
Amused to Death, and you can be pretty sure your speakers' positioning is locked in. And it's what makes those crickets at the beginning of this record sound panoramic and the ensuing dog bark appear right there on your right and the TV that blinks on sound like it's right there on your left. And that was the thing: Through the BMRs, the cricket sounds weren't panoramic, and the dog bark and the TV appeared to come from inside the right and left speakers, respectively.
Concerned but not deterred, I went into reviewer damage-control mode. I retrieved my Opus3-produced
IsoTek Ultimate System Set-Up Disc and spun tracks 6 and 8—"Soundstage Test" and "360-degree Soundstage Test." Both use the sound of a castanet to provide soundstage cues, and while the castanet in track 6 made its path from left to right in an orderly, believable fashion, the 360° test that should have made the castanet—"with a little bit of imagination," per the track's narrator—appear around me was the sonic equivalent of a balloon deflating abruptly 3' in front of me.
I sprinted into action. I spread the speakers about a foot farther apart and wriggled their toe-in inward and outward a few times until, bingo! With the speakers separated about 98" from their vertices and toed-in about 5° in my direction, the crickets returned in a circular bloom, the barking dog extended farther right, and the TV popped more left.
Amused to Death? More like amused to life.
It was akin to going from looking at a department store Christmas display on a 4K TV to the real deal from the sidewalk. There was now depth, angles, shadow, and motion where before these things were just hinted at. And Ken was right—when I listened off axis from both ends of my couch, the soundstage barely shifted, with the objects in the soundstage remaining where they were. It was not unlike watching that Christmas display from a different section of the window. When I stood, however, the soundstage dropped—in my setup, at least, the wide dispersion effect was more horizontal than vertical.
After I'd locked in the soundstage, objects sounded more fixed in space, padded, dimensional, defined, and spread out, with more distance between them. The sound was a touch sweeter and more relaxed. The guitar solo at the beginning of "What God Wants, Pt. 1" on
Amused to Death blanketed my room's ceiling whereas before it was mostly confined between the speakers. Everything seemed a bit more supersized, harmonically developed, and expressively freer. The female background vocals chanting "What God wants, God gets, God help us all" sounded more texturally explicit and radiant. The circular radius of the pulsating beat in "Perfect Sense, Pt. 1" seemed to have widened by a few miles underneath my room. The synthesizer chords projected on my front wall appeared in larger slabs of alternating chord colors.
And the bass? The low end on this CD is nothing to write home about, but the BMRs made up for it, giving percussive hits an extra dynamic kick when called for, such as when the drum launches "What God Wants, Pt. 1" into the spectacle it was obviously meant to be, with its glitzy production and larger-than-life personality. The BMRs used half my room as a canvas, filling it with big sounds and images and long decays and an engaging sense of musical vigor that made this perhaps the best I'd heard this CD sound. I no longer thought it sounded particularly crappy, a feat the BMRs achieved not by taming the nasty recording bits but by sounding open, impactful, colorful, and dynamically nuanced. Nothing sounded fake. The BMR Monitors sounded unwaveringly truthful.
