Uncrated, and minus the cold fog, the large, accurately named Sphères bore more than a passing resemblance to that flick's crawling-eye monsters. Indeed, the Cabasses' unusual presence in my listening room creeped out more…
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In an unfortunate coincidence, a few nights before the Cabasse team arrived to install the company's unusual-looking La Sphère powered speaker system, VOOM HD Networks, Monster HD channel, which is exclusively devoted to B horror movies, broadcast The Crawling Eye (aka The Trollenberg Terror), a 1958 black-and-white howler starring Forrest Tucker. I watched.
$140,000 gets you the two speakers, the outboard active crossover and DSP processor, and installation, including computer-coordinated custom room correction. While you have the option of using enough separate, non-Cabasse amplifiers to achieve the required eight channels of power, Cabasse strongly recommends its own Bel Canto–sourced power package, comprising eight fully balanced ICE-powered digital monoblock amplifiers: four 1kW bass/midbass amps and four 300-watters for the midrange drivers and tweeters. That's 5200W for $25,000, and a total package price of $165,000.
You'll also need…
With every familiar LP I played during the months the Sphères were in my room, the absence of time and phase artifacts, combined with amplitude correction that resulted in a subjectively near-flat frequency response in the critical midrange, was the sonic equivalent of finally getting in sharp focus a long, blurry, smeared panoramic photo.
From familiar recordings there were always surprises, and often new information, to be heard. More important, there was a continuous sense of "rightness" about the overall sound. Last night I put on the oft-reviled Mobile Fidelity edition of the…
Sidebar 2: Specifications
Description: Four-way, floorstanding, full-range active loudspeaker. Drive-units: 1.1" (28mm) dome polyether tweeter, 4" (100mm) annular midrange, 8" (210mm) Duocell annular low-midrange, 22" (550mm) woofer. Crossover frequencies: 150Hz, 800Hz, 4kHz. Frequency response: 20Hz–25kHz, ±3dB. Sensitivities: 93dB (tweeter, midrange), 94dB (low-midrange), 96dB (woofer). Nominal impedance: not specified. Power handling: 30W (tweeter), 80W (midrange), 170W (low-midrange), 1kW (woofer). Fully balanced, class-D ICE monoblock power amplifiers: four 300W (tweeters, midranges…
Sidebar 2: Associated Equipment
Analog Sources: Continuum Audio Labs: Caliburn turntable, Cobra tonearm, Castellon stand; Graham Phantom tonearm; Ortofon Windfeld, Einstein TU3, Air Tight PC-1, Lyra Titan i cartridges.
Digital Sources: Musical Fidelity kW SACD player, BPT-modified Alesis Masterlink hard-disk recorder.
Preamplification: Manley Steelhead, Einstein Turntable's Choice, Nagra VPS phono preamplifiers; Musical Fidelity kWP, DartZeel NHB-18NS preamplifiers.
Loudspeakers: Wilson Audio Specialties MAXX 2.
Cables: Interconnect: Kimber Kable Select, TARA Labs Zero.…
Sidebar 3: Measurements
The Cabasse La Sphère is bulky enough (footnote 1), heavy enough, and, with its need for quad-amplification, complicated enough that I felt that, rather than have the loudspeaker shipped to my lab for measurement, I would travel to it. So I paid a visit to Mikey's listening room to take the measurements, which also allowed me to give it a listen. I was very impressed by the speaker when I auditioned it at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show, thinking it had a delicacy that belied its bulk, and I heard much of what Mikey described in his auditioning comments.
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Manufacturers' Comment
Editor: First, I'd like to thank Michael Fremer for the exciting time we had together, sharing our passion for music and engaging sound through numerous tests and comparisons of different components, as well as digital and analog sources. It was a rich experience, although I missed the pleasure of meeting with John Atkinson at MF's place and comparing the measurement process and human perceptions with him as well.
Regarding the measurements, I was surprised to see that my mine were much smoother that the ones John gathered, and in many ways mine were more…
The subject comes up every now and then: Audio reviewers don't write nearly enough negative reviews. One old attention-seeker on Audio Asylum went so far as to characterize Stereophile and our would-be competitors as "happy face" magazines—a joke in which he seemed to take tremendous pride—simply because we hand out a lot of As and Bs. By that logic, assuming that a certain percentage of underachievers is inevitable in any population, our schools aren't handing out nearly enough Fs. (I have a suggestion for where they can begin.)
The fact remains that most of the audio reviewers…
Aesthetically speaking, no one would confuse a Mana table with the work of Gustav Stickley or Harvey Ellis; viewed out of context, I doubt if many people would mistake a Mana table for any kind of indoor furniture at all—and I can't say I blame them. Perhaps I'll have the black paint stripped off of mine some day, after which I'll finish it with a sort of faux-verdigris patina: Then my Mana might at least resemble good-quality outdoor furniture. Until then, I can just tolerate the way it looks.
Give my regards to the Earth's core
Mana Acoustics may be gone, but the demand for…
Three years ago, the idea of a solid-state integrated amplifier that sold for only $1250 yet combined some of the best performance aspects of a Naim Nait and a Dynaco Stereo 70 seemed likely to resonate with consumers and critics alike. And it did: Introduced in early 2005, the British-built Exposure 2010S was an unequivocal hit on both sides of the Atlantic, and remains in Class A of Stereophile's "Recommended Components." Deservedly.
Three years later, the landscape has changed. The US dollar is doing poorly as I write this—the price of the 2010S has crept up to $1395—and…