Audacious Audio

At AXPONA 2022, I eagerly headed to the Esoteric exhibit, where I spoke with Keith Haas, national sales manager of 11 Trading Company, Esoteric's US distributor. When I learned of the forthcoming Grandioso M1X monoblock ($35,500 each), the culmination of a complete revision of the company's top-selling M1 monoblock (now discontinued), I worked with Haas and Editor Jim Austin and set up a review.

The whole idea that different CD transports have different sonic characteristics when driving the same digital-to-analog converter is a vexing problem. It is easy to prove that even the cheapest CD players recover the data stored on most CDs with bit-for-bit accuracy, thus disproving the widespread and erroneous belief that errors in the digital code are commonplace and affect presentation aspects such as imaging, soundstage depth, textural liquidity, etc (footnote 1). If the datastream driving the digital converter is comprised of the same sequence of ones and zeros, regardless of the transport, what other factors could account for the sonic differences between CD drives reported by many listeners?

You've got your 2001: A Space Odyssey speaker, which of course is a tall, black, featureless monolith. Then there's your wooden "Who's buried inside?" speaker, your "R-I-C-O-L-A" speaker, your enema bag or double-inverted enema bag speaker, your menacing hooded-Klansman speaker, your "looks like a robot, praying mantis, or Transformer" speaker (mine), and your "Does it leave a slime trail?" speaker (looks like a snail). You've got your "Is that a room divider?" speaker, your "looks like you stepped on a duck's head" speaker, and your "whipped cream dollop suspended in time" speaker.

What if there was a character in Stanley Kubrick's classic movie 2001: A Space Odyssey who was an audiophile? Aboard the Discovery One interplanetary space ship, what would his system look like? He'd probably have a pair of ultramodern speakers that could pluck sound out of the ether. He'd control the system with something like a present-day smartphone or tablet, commanding the HAL 9000 computer to play his favorite songs. The speakers would stand unobtrusively in a white room with 1970s modern-minimalist furniture, no rack of components to drive them, no wires connecting them, no shelves of physical media to play. And they would fill the room with music.

I am sitting earthbound in my living room almost a quarter-century beyond the year 2001, living a similar scenario with the Focal Diva Utopia streaming amplified wireless speaker system. My living room is not at all reminiscent of the Discovery One with its rotating central interior (footnote 1). But with the Diva Utopia system, I feel more in a sci-fi future young me might have imagined than with any hi-fi component I've reviewed so far. About the only thing the Diva Utopia has in common with the stereo systems I grew up with—and with my current reference system—is two floorstanding cabinets and diaphragms that move air to make sound.

Considering that the crates they're shipped in are each as large as a Manhattan studio apartment, once they'd been set up in my listening room, Focal's Maestro Utopia III speakers weren't as visually overpowering as I'd anticipated. The elegant dark-gloss front baffles, the gloss-gray side panels, and the fact that the speaker's three subenclosures are vertically arrayed so that the top, midrange section is angled down, significantly reduced their apparent size.

I reviewed JMlab's Mezzo Utopia loudspeaker in the July 1999 Stereophile (Vol.22 No.7). By chance, the Mezzos had followed a pair of B&W">http://www.stereophile.com//loudspeakerreviews/207/">B&W Nautilus 801s into my listening room, and the substitution had proved rather interesting. For all their many fine qualities, the 801, with its 15" bass driver, was distinctly bass-heavy in my room, whereas the 11" drivers of the Mezzos seemed just right in this regard.

As founder and chief designer of Sonus Faber, Franco Serblin designed and manufactured many loudspeakers of acclaimed high quality, mainly in box form. Nevertheless, he remained painfully aware that such conventional rectangular parallelepiped constructions inevitably possessed an inherent and hard-to-suppress resonant signature characteristic of box-form cabinetry, significantly differing from that for a musical instrument. Franco had long obsessed over the sound and construction of classical string instruments, violins, violas, and cellos made by grand masters over centuries. He valued highly those richly resonant, expressive, complex sonic signatures.