Floor Loudspeaker Reviews

T+A's James Shannon stopped by a week later to check in and help with setup. I'd already, on my own, moved the speakers back a couple of feet and out about 7" farther, and I was happy with how things were progressing. Jim's impressions were the same as mine: that the speakers and room were working together well, the system was detailed and articulate, and the transitions between the drivers were essentially inaudible.

But we also agreed that the system was bass-shy, so that's where we started. By the end of the day, we'd moved the speakers back another 2', toed them in a bit more, moved my chair 1' 7" farther away from the speakers, and set the bass switch to +1.5dB and the midrange and treble switches to –1.5dB. A bit more adjusting and aligning, and things were set. In the end, the speakers were 3' 8" out from the front wall, 3' 4" in from the sidewalls, and toed in a bit. My chair was another 13' 7" into the room, so about a foot past the 2/3 point. Spiked and leveled, the centers of the S 530's tweeters were 31.5" above the floor, the front baffles tilted slightly back. At the listening position, the volume of test signals dropped off sharply below about 2' and above 5', putting my ears, at 38–39" from the floor, toward the middle of the speakers' vertical dispersion pattern, well into that cylindrical-propagation range.

Listening
As I progressed through this setup procedure, it became apparent that the Solitaire S 530s were going to be something special in how they created space, but I wasn't prepared for how good they'd eventually be. Imaging, soundstage, the recreation of a performance space, ambience—the T+A's checked all the audiophile boxes and then some. Not once during the whole audition—and I had the speakers for months—did they identify themselves as a source of the sound or even hint at their physical presence. Instead of placing the musicians in the room, these speakers took me—the listener—to the recording venue.

I've struggled to find an adequate way to describe the difference between this experience and what I'm used to with conventional speakers. This is the best I've come up with: It's like the difference between looking at a painting with apparent, painted depth and looking at a sculpture, an actual 3D object. Of all the speakers

I've heard and remember, the Solitaire S 530s did the best job of evoking the je ne sais quoi of a live performance. And recreating the spatial aspects of a performance was the single most important variable in that equation.

The S 530s were stunning in their recreation of an engagingly unvarnished 1995 recording of Steve Earle, Townes van Zandt, and Guy Clark playing "In the Round" at the tiny Bluebird Café in Nashville, from Together at the Bluebird Café (American Originals Records, AMO-4006-2, CD). I had the good fortune of seeing a couple of the Bluebird's "In the Round" shows around that time, and I have a vivid memory of how they sounded and felt. The Solitaires nailed it.

They did a superb job, too, on much larger shows, including on the opening cut from Jackson Browne's Running on Empty (Asylum Records—6E-113 LP). The audience sets the stage on this cut, literally, as the band is getting set. What really impressed me with the T+A's was the clarity and precision of my location with respect to people around me, the stage, and the venue as a whole. A similar thing happened—having a very clear sense of my location—with some of the cuts on Jimmy Buffett's album Encores (24/96 FLAC, Mailbox Records/Qobuz), which I chose as one of my Records to Live For in the February issue.

I was always envious of the sound engineers at rock concerts. Their seats were better than the best—inside the cocoon of a sound booth, dead center, 1/3 of the way back on the floor and about 6' above the teeming mass of humanity. It was immediately apparent that the Buffett recording was mixed by someone in the sound booth because that was exactly where I was sitting, looking out over the audience sweeping from in front of me down to the stage. Yup, I was right to be jealous.

The Seraphim recording of Delibes's opera Lakmé, with Mady Mesplé, Charles Burles, and Roger Soyer playing Lakmé, Gerald, and Nilakantha, respectively, and the Orchestra & Chorus of the Opéra-Comique, Paris, Alain Lombard, cond. (Seraphim SIC-6082 LP), tells me a lot about how well a component portrays a complex and dynamic arrangement of things having wildly different sizes and characteristics. Looking back through several years of notes, I noticed that I frequently described great speakers as reproducing a level of detail that beautifully portrays the performer and their movements within a coherent space. But such words didn't even occur to me when I listened to this Lakmé through the Solitaires. The performers were just there, on the stage, and of course there was a single coherent space. What else would there be?

To resolve detail, a line source must eliminate vertical dispersion, something speakers of a certain age didn't do all that well. The S 530 does. Bypassing the numbers and cutting to the chase, the height of the Solitaire's dispersion pattern at the listening position was essentially the same as the length of the driver. It wasn't surprising then that their resolution of detail matched that of speakers I consider to be excellent in this regard, but they did it differently. As conventional speakers get better at combining the dispersion of their drivers in space and time, the scale of the picture they draw gets finer and more precise, and more details become audible. Take the opening cut on Neil Young's Tonight's the Night (Reprise Records REP 54 040 LP). The best conventional speakers produce a wealth of fine detail. I notice things like subtle rasps in his voice as the angle of Neil Young's head changes and that there are two people standing off-stage and talking. When I switched to the Solitaires, I didn't notice rasps or specific things happening around the two people. Those people were just there, 3D and solid, animated in a way that seemed completely natural.

It's difficult to describe the Solitaire's tonal balance simply or comprehensively because it's so adjustable. ±1.5dB can often change a performance and venue from warm to cool, and with crossover points at 180Hz and 1.8kHz, those controls can make noticeable changes to individual instruments. 180Hz is the heart of where male vocals, celli, and guitars lie, as well as the bottom half of the piano—all large elements of much of what we listen to. 1.8kHz is particularly notable in that only the piccolo, violin, and piano have ranges that can project a lot of power above this point.

The way my room was built and set up, getting acceptable levels of low bass and impact with the S 530 required having the speakers near the corners, the bass switch at +1.5dB, and the midrange switch either flat or at –1.5dB. On Encores, when I switched the mids from flat to –1.5dB, Jimmy Buffett went from warm and robust to thin and pale, his Martin guitar from resonant and golden to kind of washed out, as if its strings needed changing. String quartets were rich and gorgeous with the lower midrange setting, but if I was being honest with myself, a bit too much so, with violins sounding a bit like violas.

I used both the –1.5dB and flat settings with the treble as well. The former worked better with recordings that were inherently thin or that perhaps had been indifferently produced; they were edgy and sibilant with the flat setting, or maybe a bit over-aggressive. More often, setting the treble flat gave instruments and voices a better balance between the opposite ends of their ranges. Buffett's guitar was a good example here as well. It was gorgeous with the treble set to –1.5dB, and it had more weight, spatially and tonally. But when I compared the two, it was clear that the treble cut was shortchanging the transients of the strings and the bright, ringing tone Martin guitars are known for.

The midrange adjustment was a bit different in that its effects were less specific but had a large effect on the overall character of a performance. The simplest way to describe the midrange switch is to liken it to a combination of the contrast and saturation settings on a digital image. Increasing it relative to the other two instantly brought a performance to life. The performers woke up, the pace of the music increased and became more precise, tonal palettes became denser and more varied, ... the list goes on through the audiophile and digital-darkroom vocabularies. The changes were unfailingly audible and initially positive. What about long-term? In some cases, it was a slam dunk. In others, a niggling voice told me that the changes were a little too good to be true, not quite honest. In still others, I went through the classic progression, first equating spectacular with better but eventually reaching a point where spectacular was too much to handle.

Summing up
I loved my time with the S 530s. They reminded me why I was sold on line source and planar speakers so many years ago. My experience with these speakers went a long way toward demonstrating that the shortcomings I thought of as inherent in a line source design aren't inherent at all.

Hearing the Solitaire S 530s made me regret that I wasn't aware of T+A speakers sooner. The S 530 is every bit of what I'd expected, based on what I knew about the company and their digital components: a super-premium product that, while certainly handsome, was more about technology, execution, and performance than beauty for its own sake. I'd love to have heard previous Solitaire models like the fully active OECs, with their glowing tubes, or the fully active, fully digital AD4, to better understand the R&D path that led to the S 530s.

Wherever it came from, the S 530 is an outstanding speaker, one that anyone given the chance should hear. Definitely recommended.