Audacious Audio

It's funny how we discover some music in unexpected, twisting ways. A friend recently sent me the real estate listing for a beautiful home in Deer Isle, Maine, about an hour from where I live. I gawked at the pictures and calculated I'd need to work for Stereophile for another 127 years before I'd have enough dough to buy it. Then I noticed something unusual on one of the walls of the place: lots of gold records. Google helped me figure out that the house had belonged to the late singer-songwriter Dan Fogelberg. I knew the name but was unfamiliar with his music. Minutes later, I was playing the studio version of "Nether Lands," seemingly named after my country of birth. A beautifully orchestrated piece with restrained woodwinds and soaring strings, it reminded me of the best of Van Dyke Parks and of some post–Pet Sounds Brian Wilson songs. I played it straight through three times.

Part of the reason I was so smitten with the recording lay in the engaging, naturalistic presentation it received from the handmade-in-Switzerland Piega Gen2 811 floorstanders ($30,000/pair) that had just made their way to my listening room.

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.

There was a period in the 1970s when many pop ballads that should have had understated arrangements instead turned grandiose and even maudlin. Take Gilbert O'Sullivan's sensational single "Nothing Rhymed" (a track that went deep for a pop hit, referencing famine, duty, and morality). Soon after the start, O'Sullivan's piano is overshadowed by a loud, saccharine string section.

Another example is "Lotte," German singer Stephan Sulke's portrayal of a dying love affair. The devastatingly wistful chanson is burdened by a mawkish orchestral track—the equivalent of glitterbombing an Edward Hopper painting.

Contrast this with Roberta Flack's definitive version of Ewan MacColl's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face." Apart from Flack's voice and her emotional delivery, the gently strummed guitar and quiet piano do all the heavy lifting. An unhurried double bass and a couple of minimally bowed string instruments leave swaths of negative space, helping to give her interpretation its hushed, reverent character.

I reflected on all this after spending several months with Balanced Audio Technology's REX 500 solid state power amplifier ($25,000), which has more in common with the Roberta Flack track than with the bombast of "Nothing Rhymed."