Gentlemen - Enjoy!
Clayton
Russell Reich - X5 Speaker Review Part II
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What I Want
One way to evaluate a speaker is on the tone or timbre of instruments and voices played through it.
Does a violin sound like a violin? Does my wife, who is an opera singer, sound like my wife?
I use these two examples because … familiarity. You likely have your own touchstones.
I lived for years in a Manhattan apartment across the hall from a violin teacher. One thing I noticed from my goings and comings in the hallway was how loud and harsh that instrument can be. It makes a lot of noise—not only more than I expected from an object of its size, but with a tone, even when played expertly, that sounded remarkably complex, raw, even screechy when heard nearby. The opposite of soothing. I didn’t expect that from an instrument I tended to think of as refined and elegant.
This “ugly” sound quality of the violin and other instruments (clarinets come to mind, brass horns, too) can be understood in part by a comparison to our sense of smell.
Perfume allegedly smells good, right? Just as a violin allegedly sounds good.
Well, not so fast. At the foundation of the traditional perfumers’ craft is a substance called civet, a secretion by a wild cat-like creature of the same name from Africa and Asia.
To be blunt: civet stinks. Its odor is strong, even putrid. Dilution helps enormously. Now displaced in perfumery by chemical alternatives—in part because civets transmit the SARS virus, and probably because catching a civet to obtain its secretions is an unpleasant and possibly dangerous undertaking for both you and the civet—civet used as a perfume tincture nonetheless presents an obvious question: Why was it needed?
Well, one theory is that its scent signals danger to our primitive lizard brain: Wild cats can eat you; this is the scent of a wild cat; WAKE UP!
I’ll leave it to some psycho-physiologist’s dissertation to answer why the substance of perfume should arouse sexual attraction while simultaneously invoking a sense of impending, violent death (poets and others of us who have been in relationships might intuit the connection). But just as a perfume that does not invoke danger might not work as well in its arousal function, the reproduced sound of a violin that doesn’t include the raw ingredients produced by a very particular amalgam of wood, glue, horsehair, resin and friction might not be doing its job well, either, musically speaking. It simply won’t strike our minds, hearts, guts and pelvises with the same musical power than it otherwise would.
Many of us might not LIKE the way a violin really sounds because we’ve gotten so used to how it sounds when massed with other strings, at a distance, or through traditional audio systems. But in our accommodations and aversions, I suspect we’ve lost something foundational and elemental in the music—and in our listening.
I read a story of a young boy who had his first sleepover at a friend’s house. He woke in the morning to unfamiliar surroundings and went downstairs, where his friend’s mother had prepared a beautiful breakfast for the boys, including homemade muffins and fresh squeezed orange juice.
The visiting boy took a drink from the glass and grimaced.
“What’s wrong?” the mother asked.
The boy replied, “This doesn’t taste like the frozen concentrated stuff my Mom makes.”
I believe this doesn’t have to happen to us as audiophiles. The Spatial Audio X5s are one antidote.
I’ve been an audiophile for over thirty years, craving this elusive but vital, vibrant, real component to the music. My search parallels a saying I’ve heard from Dennis Prager, also an audiophile, who was speaking of larger things when he said, “There’s always hope; there’s little chance.”
I’m a value-oriented audiophile who can’t or doesn’t have the appetite to spend what the top tier requires. And I don’t believe it’s actually necessary to do so. I’ve heard too many ultra-expensive systems that sound awful, bringing to mind The Emperor’s New Clothes, which I want no part of. I’ve also heard many reasonably priced components punch way above their weight. And I’ve seen inspired engineering from Nelson Pass, Max Townshend, John Siau, Paul Speltz and now Clayton Shaw innovate and refine extraordinary, world-class products that demonstrate the superiority of resourcefulness, creativity, discipline and brains over raw expense and brawn. That’s why I've pursued and bought products like my Pass Aleph 30 amp, my NuForce MCP-18 preamp, and my Anticable wire.
What I Got
Have I found what I’m looking for in the X5s, or any other system?
I have heard it, on rare occasions, in other systems. I heard it at separate audio shows, years apart, from three very different, very expensive systems: Raidho/Audionet, Nola/VAC, and B&W/Boulder. All near- or multiple-six figure systems. I am grateful, but don’t think it’s remarkable, that I found a sense of what I’m yearning for in audio systems costing as much as a house—they should achieve the sublime; I’m disappointed with its rarity and how few multiple six-figure systems even come close to achieving a sense of realism that allows me to relax enough to convincingly hear the music, not the system.
The question for me has always been how to reach that realistic result at a realistic price level.
The X5s didn’t achieve it at first, either, but the quality I was looking for began to emerge after about 75-100 hours of use, along with some upstream system upgrades and tweaks. What I thought was excellent or at least pleasurable and adequate in my system now turns out not to be. The X5s are utterly revealing of what’s fed into them and they have rewarded my upstream improvement efforts. Also, Clayton guides owners to wait up to 250 hours before evaluating and he’s right. My speakers aren’t done yet, they’re still cooking, and performance improvements continue.
But beyond tone and timbre, there is another characteristic that is fully realized, something I’m getting from the X5s that I haven’t noticed in any other system, nor was I looking for it.
It’s a quality of separation between and among instruments and vocalists that’s about as distinct and deep as I’ve heard.
Usually, this quality is referred to as space or soundstage (Spatial Audio, duh!), but what I’m talking about is really a subset of those descriptors. Specifically, it’s the sense that the singer is THERE—a 3-D human of flesh, blood and spittle, with body depth as well as height and width—in his own space as distinct from the skin of a drum that’s over THERE, and the body of a guitar that’s THERE, and so on. Presence is a good word.
You’ll hear this unmatched precision of placement on the X5s with, for instance, Michael Jackson’s hit Billy Jean. You know the lyric: “Just remember to always think twice.” And you know what happens next; he repeats the lyric as a kind of shouty echo: “Do think twice. Do think twice.” But here’s what I didn’t know until I heard this song through the X5s: The first time Jackson sings it as part of the main mix, he’s dead center. The first repetition, he’s far left. And for the next repetition, he’s center again, louder but further back than before. It’s not subtle; he is THERE. Then he is THERE. Then he is THERE. It happens quickly but it’s unmistakable, incredibly distinct.
I’ve never heard this degree of spatial resolution on any other system and it makes a huge perceptual difference. By separating out the parts so completely, the synthesis of the music no longer happens in a pre-mixed, artificial homogenization of the sound within a speaker box. It happens outside the speakers, in your own mind and imagination as the listener. You put it together in your head. You complete the experience.
This is what live, unamplified (and therefore un-preprocessed) music is like; you see the players, the instruments, their locations and distances … you relate to them bodily through your multiple senses, and the information from your eyes, ears and skin allows you to synthesize all that into a musical experience. It happens inside you as much as outside; you are an active participant.
An example from the theater world might be helpful in illuminating this concept. A guideline I learned in my days as a stage director was to give the audience all the dots they need, but never connect all the dots for them.
When Julie Taymor was selected to direct a theatrical version of the film The Lion King for Broadway, there was a lot of speculation about how she would adapt the movie’s animation to the live stage. Her solution was not to put the performers in animal suits, a la Barney and Friends—that would have been a clear example of connecting too many dots!
Instead, she went for ellipsis—deliberately synthesizing less so the audience had a bigger role to play. She did this by giving the audience a choice of watching the costumed performer OR the character’s puppet apparatus that the performer was simultaneously operating.
This separation, and the choices it enabled, engaged the audience such that the completion of the idea happened in mind of each audience member. In a way, they created the characters as much as the performers did.
This participation of the senses is what art should aim at, and it’s what the X5s do with music.
I heard it, for instance, when I played Paul Simon’s familiar Graceland—a collaborative buffet of musicians and musical styles if ever there was one. The X5s extracted the parts from the whole so I became more aware of the musicianship, the interplay, the relationships between the elements than I had heard before in the many years I’ve enjoyed this album. Again: I had more of a participatory role in synthesizing the music. New levels of enjoyment and appreciation were the result.
Thanks to Roon’s Radio feature, I discovered a remarkable piece of music called Season Shift by Niklas Paschburg on his Svalbard album. Not easily classified, this atmospheric and percussive music bears some resemblance to the piano-based work of Ludovico Einaudi, but with a darker, sharper and more electronic edge. If you play this and you’re not utterly transported beyond the experience of listening to an audio system, then you’re not hearing it on Spatial X5s. Just as a good waiter makes himself unseen, and a good parent (eventually) makes himself unnecessary, the X5’s virtue of humility and invisibility in service of the music is on full display with this piece. No speakers, no recording; it’s just the music and you.
For another example of that corporeal thereness of a performer I wrote about earlier, try the wonderful song Next Time by Laura Marling on the album Semper Femina.
Finally, to impress your friends, play Sting’s Fragile from his recent My Songs album. You’ll all hear a familiar tune with uncommon and surprising depth, precision and realism that will shock and delight from the first note.
What don’t the X5s do? Well, as serious audiophile instruments, X5s are for those who dedicate themselves to listening actively and attentively, and they reward focused commitment.
Translation: sit down. These are not speakers for Walk Around Audiophiles. If you like to get up and dance, if you like to sing to yourself in the mirror while your favorite music plays, the Xs won’t sound optimum in those scenarios and you’d do better with the M-series Sapphires. This is due to the difference between the wider dispersion achieved with the domed sapphire tweeters which open up the listening field, and the focus provided by the tweeter waveguide on the Xs that diminishes the complicating influence of side reflections in the room. Both are values are valid ; pick one. Note that this tighter listening field will be less noticeable in a large room when you can get further away from the Xs and the mix of sound has more space to propagate and to project higher and wider.
Aside from that, other differences between them are much more subtle. Based on my exposure to the M’s at an audio show, the two series sound very similar, definitely close siblings. They both adhere to the general sound priorities of their creator, so it’s no surprise they sound so alike.
The Xs (and Ms) do so many rare things so well because they have been designed from the start to solve for so many problems of a traditional speaker approach.
· The box presents design challenges and manufacturing expense; the X5s eliminate the box and deliver superior sound at lower cost.
· The room imposes an unknowable and complex influence on the sound; the X5s diminish the impact of the room while adding dipole dispersion and so provide a more direct conduit to the music and recording venue.
· Difficult speaker impedance curves and low sensitivity ratings constrain the range of suitable amplifiers; the X5s have a sky-high sensitivity of 97db, suitable for virtually any amplifier.
· Multi-driver speakers present integration issues; the X5s have a rare and remarkable, wide-range AMT tweeter that extends into the mid-band, making the critical transition between mids and highs far less noticeable.
For these reasons and more, the Spatial Audio X5s look and sound like the future.
Russell
