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Room lock occurs when a set of loudspeakers reproduces the deep-bass notes of a pipe organ powerfully enough that the sounds can be felt as pressure waves. On Day 2 of the 2007 Home Entertainment Show, in one of the Sound By Singer rooms, our own John Marks played his recording of organist James Busby performing Herbert Howells' Master Tallis's Testament through a pair of Fremont loudspeakers from Escalante Design. The sustained bass note at the end of the passage took my breath away—the stand-mounted Fremonts sounded as open and dynamic as anything else I heard at HE2007. I wondered if they…
The Fremont's rated voltage sensitivity—substantially above the average range of B-weighted speakers reviewed in Stereophile—allowed it to produce very high SPLs with no sign of clipping or compression up to peaks of 112dB when powered by a pair of 1000W Bryston 28B-SST monoblock amplifiers. I also drove the Escalantes with the 25W Mark Levinson ML-2 monoblocks, which produced the sweetest upper midrange and best-defined bass at reduced volume levels that I'd heard in some time. Even so, the Fremont's high voltage sensitivity allowed the ML-2s to crank out clean sound levels and hit…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Four-way, stand-mounted, reflex-loaded loudspeaker. Drive-units: 1" (25mm) ring-radiator tweeter; two 12" treated-paper/carbon-fiber composite-cone woofers (one internal, one external). The 4.35" dustcap on the external woofer is said to act as the midrange radiator. Crossover frequencies: 80Hz, 500Hz, 2.5kHz. Crossover slopes: 18dB/octave acoustical (between woofers), 6dB/octave electrical (between all drivers). Frequency range: 18Hz–50kHz. Sensitivity: 93dB/2.83V/m. Nominal impedance: 8 ohms. Minimum impedance (at low frequencies): 6.5 ohms. Power…
Sidebar 2: Associated Equipment
Analog Sources: Linn Sondek LP12 turntable with Lingo power supply, Linn Ittok tonearm, Spectral moving-coil cartridge; Day-Sequerra Classic FM tuner.
Digital Sources: Krell KRC-28 CD player, Sony SCD-C555ES multichannel SACD/CD player, Slim Devices Squeezebox music server, Bryston B-100DA D/A converter.
Preamplification: VTL TL-6.5, Krell KCT preamplifiers; Bryston 10B-SUB electronic crossover.
Power Amplifiers: Bryston 28B-SST, Mark Levinson ML-2 monoblocks; Krell FPB 600c, Mark Levinson No.334.
Loudspeakers: Quad ESL-989, Revel Ultima Salon…
Sidebar 3: Measurements
As LG noted, the Escalante Fremont is considerably more sensitive than the norm, my estimate (measured on the tweeter axis) coming in at 92.5dB/2.83V/m. This is within experimental error of the specified 93dB. However, the speaker's impedance is significantly lower than specified, falling to 3 ohms for the entire midrange and remaining between 4 and 6 ohms for much of the rest of the audioband, which, in combination with a relatively large electrical phase angle some of the time, suggests that the Fremont will need a high-current amplifier to play at its loudest…
PJ HARVEY: White Chalk
Island B0009972-02 (CD). 2007. PJ Harvey, John Parish, prods., mix; Flood, prod., eng., mix. ADD? TT: 33:34
Performance *****
Sonics ***1/2
White Chalk contains no trace of the blues-drenched rock of Polly Jean Harvey's first four astonishing albums, or the lean, restrained, almost dignified (in comparison) pop of the three that followed—which, for all their taste and craft, somehow never sounded as necessary as Dry, Rid of Me, 4-Track Demos, and To Bring You My Love. Instead, with her eighth album, PJ Harvey has started over. Which is not to say that White Chalk…
After reviewing a long series of minimonitors, I am now working on what may well be an equally varied selection of large floorstanding loudspeakers. This trend began with my review of the Sonus Faber Cremona Elipsa in the December 2007 issue, and continues this month with the Series 2 version of the KEF Reference 207, until recently the flagship model from this English manufacturer (footnote 1). I reviewed the original Reference 207 in February 2003, and was very impressed by what I heard.
"Midrange to die for!" I concluded in that review, deciding that the big, beautiful-…
With big speakers, it's fair to demand big-hearted bass, and the KEFs weren't lacking in this regard. The low-frequency warble tones on Editor's Choice (CD, Stereophile STPH016-2) were reproduced in full measure down to the 25Hz 1/3-octave band, and there was still some useful output at 20Hz. The half-step–spaced tonebursts on this CD were reproduced evenly, with minimal spurious tones but with good rather than great leading-edge definition in the crossover region between the woofers and the lower-midrange unit.
On organ recordings the 207/2s effortlessly loaded up the room at low…
Sidebar 2: Measurements
I use a mixture of nearfield, in-room, and quasi-anechoic FFT measurement techniques (using primarily DRA Labs' MLSSA system with a B&K 4006 microphone calibrated to be flat (footnote 1) when used on-axis up to 30kHz—see "Follow-Up," October 1991, Vol.14 No.10—plus an Audio Control Industrial SA-3050A 1/3-octave spectrum analyzer with its own microphone) to investigate factors that might explain the sound heard. The impedance phase and amplitude of the speakers were measured using the magazine's Audio Precision System One.
The Westlake's impedance…
JENNY SCHEINMAN: Jenny Scheinman
Koch KOC-AD-4483 (CD). 2008. Jenny Scheinman, Tony Scherr, prods.; Scherr, eng. AAD? TT: 53:26
Performance ****
Sonics ****
Koch KOC-AD-4483 (CD). 2008. Jenny Scheinman, Tony Scherr, prods.; Scherr, eng. AAD? TT: 53:26
Performance ****
Sonics ****
Out in Brooklyn, New York, the place where all of New York's musicians not named Marsalis or Hewson now live, and the up-and-coming band capital of the western world, there's a little hole-in-the wall club called Barbès. Depending on your need for space, Barbès is either a cramped dump with low ceilings that has no business hosting live music, or a dauntless melting pot where the skills of players from different genres…