Audacious Audio

That is not a typo. The company is named Soulution—as in soul commitment to designing and manufacturing the finest audio gear it knows how, as in souldiering on in the face of skeptics who can't imagine why a power amplifier that puts out 130Wpc into 8 ohms or 260 into 4 ohms should cost $45,000, or weigh as much as a small pickup truck.

Almost 14 years have passed since a review of a Soulution product appeared in the pages of Stereophile. Given the Swiss company's steady ascent in the high-end pantheon, it is high time that we again reached into the German-speaking region of Switzerland north of the Swiss Alps to evaluate another of the reference products from a company equally renowned for its sonic achievements and refined and elegant design aesthetic.

Enter the full-function Soulution 727 preamplifier ($74,975), whose optional MC/MM phono section ($11,975) will be evaluated in a future issue. Because Soulution claims that the 727 "sets benchmarks in terms of noise, phase errors, common mode rejection and distortion," one would hope that there's far more than 62lb of classy casework and an easy-to-handle lightweight remote to account for its price.

Designer Dr. Roger West got his first taste of electrostatic transducers many years ago during a stint with Janszen (remember the Janszen tweeter?). To realize the potential of the full-range electrostatic loudspeaker (ESL), he and Dr. Dale Ream formed a new company dedicated to ESL research and development. West describes this company, Sound-Lab Corp., as "the electrostatic speaker specialists."

Photograph: TONEAudio Magazine

High-end audio exists at the intersection of art and science. Either discipline can produce a good product, but it takes both to create the very best. The Sonic Frontiers gear I auditioned many years ago, for example, was technically sound, nicely built, and sounded good—just never as sublime as products from, say, Audio Research or VTL. On the other hand, an experienced, insightful designer such as Quicksilver's Michael Sanders can create wonderful products from humble circuits and parts, but be ultimately limited by the underlying technology. But when brilliant design, uncompromised execution, long experience, and artistry all come together, the results can be staggering.

The sound of the Stenheim Alumine loudspeaker—its openness, transparency, and freedom from temporal distortions, not to mention its good bass extension for such a small enclosure—reminded me at once of my favorite small loudspeaker from the late 1980s, the Acoustic Energy AE1. On reflection, the comparison is extraordinary: The two products are as different as night and day, the AE1 being a wooden loudspeaker with a metal-cone woofer, the Alumine a metal loudspeaker with a pulp-cone woofer. I suppose one can skin a catfish by moving the knife or by moving the fish.

In my enthusiastic 2022 review of the Stromtank S-1000 ($16,900), I described the Stromtank as a computer-controlled lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO₄) battery array that, coupled with its AC inverters and all the trimmings, supplies clean, constant, stable off-grid AC power to hi-fi components. By softly depressing a single button on the front panel, Stromtank owners can easily switch from wall-connected mode (when the Stromtank's dimmable front-panel meter is blue) to a disconnected, battery-only state (when the meter is green). At the end of a listening session, users can return to blue mode to recharge the battery array.

Saying that Sutherland Engineering builds a nice line of phono stages is like saying that the Porsche 911 Carrera is a nice line of sports car. The Sutherlands all share common design philosophies, features, and sonic attributes—but just as ramping up from Porsche's classic Carrera Coupe ($78,000) to the GT3 ($115,000) or the Turbo S Cabriolet ($172,000) increases the level of performance and distills the Porsche experience down to its essence, ascending the Sutherland line from the PH3D ($1000) to the 20/20 ($2200) to the Hubble ($3800) buys more of what Ron Sutherland is all about.