Any day that a truck backs up and delivers 2 VMPS speakers, a Bryson amp and preamp, is a pretty good day.
It stayed good even while unpacking (grunt!) the two massive (oof!) RM/X speakers, even though one of them turned out to be upside down on delivery. (I'm 6' tall and solidly built, and moving these things around is intimidting.)
Big, black, gleaming, physically gorgeous devices. Shiny. And in need of some wires and power. Which I gave them, about as fast as humanly possible.
Here's what we have:
2 RM/X, silver wire, TNT caps, new mid-bass system.
Bryston 6b-SST, about 300w/channel, 2 chanels in use
Bryston SP1.7 preamp
Denon DVD-2900, modified by ModWright (SACD capable)
short lengths of monster cable, which I picked up just for this quick smoke test.
Eventually, this system (with some friends) will go into my sound room. Right now my sound room is unfinished construction which was recently under an inch of water, and the speakers are going nowhere near it until I'm certain that I'll never see water in there again. So for this review, the speakers were placed about three feet apart in my living room, with no real regard for positioning or imaging, no adjustment of putty or pads. I just wanted to make sure everything survived shipment. I sat a few feet away, and hit the On switch.
I started with Shadowfax/Shadowdance, because that's what was in the player. This is new age music before it was called new age, and not brilliantly recorded, but it's got a range of frequencies and dynamics, and I was looking for obvious holes (ie, damaged drivers) in the sound.
No problems there, but no real challanges either. So I threw on Pink Floyd/Dark Side of the Moon (SACD remix).
When the clock came ticking in over the heartbeat, I probably stopped breathing.
Dear mercy, the accuracy...
Then the voice came in, and something was wrong. Something was out of whack. I looked up. Oh, yeah. I'd forgotten to take the protective tape off the top tweeters.
I peeled that and started again. And got blown away by even greater accuracy. This was crystalline sound, diamond-etched on a jet black background. I was getting good imagining even with an ill-considered, play-them-where-they-land positioning of speakers, and voices 30db down (Pink Floyd loves to do that) were sharp and clear. There was some congestion in Us and Them, but I was still picking out details I'd never
heard before. The sound was synthetic and otherworldy, which is exactly how this album should sound.
Norah Jones/Come Away With Me went on next. Where PF likes to layer it on, Ms. Jones keeps it simple and open, and nothing has any place to hide. Every breathy rasp and coo is offered up to be dissected.
The speakers delivered her, naked and on a platter. More comment is not needed (and wouldn't be, um, seemly.)
Dire Straights/Love Over Gold was the album that sank the RM/x in their first audition. It sounded much better here, but the bass guitar just didn't have the authority it should have. I checked the preamp, and it was faithfully sending the full frequency range to the RM/xs. I hooked up a subwoofer and poked around with the settings, and got a missing piece filled in. This tells me I have some tuning to do - what bass there is, is sharp and detailed, but I'm going to need to fuss with it to get the proper presence.
The speakers do not strain under load. I was at 90dB(c) before anything sounded "loud". They were still coping just fine at 100dB. I turned it down, not because it was fatiguing - more volume just seemed to equal more detail - but because I usually listen at about 80-85db and I don't want to get into the habit of ear-bleed volumes.
The combination of Bryston and the RM/x is uncolored and pitliessly transparent. You'll hear what's on your disc. If the sound engineers rolled off the high end, you're going to know all about it. It can be disconcerting to listen to a piece and be able to work out what trade-offs the guys were making in post-production, to be able to tell when someone wasn't miked quite right. That's the kind of clarity we're talking about here.
Now I just need to get the sound room finished. Then I can give them some space to fill, get them properly pointed, padded, and get the room treatments set up. Then I think I'm really going to have something here. Give me a month and I should know exactly what. Auditions will be possible, when that time comes.
A few notes on things other than acoustics. These speakers are vastly heavy, and two big guys is the minimum to move them. They came packed in styrofoam strips and cardboard, and swathed in heavy plastic, and they got through shipping with only minor scuffs, but I think form-fitting styrofoam casket liners, in a solid wooden box, would be the way to go. The speakers are worth it, plus you'll have a handy casket to use when someone touches your speakers, and needs to pay the ultimate price for his lack of judgement.
The binding posts are simple hand tightened knurled nuts, which means you either terminate your cable with spade lugs, or skip that and just wrap naked copper around the post and tighten down. Bring a purist who doesn't like extra metal-on-metal transisitions in any signal path, I do the latter. Which means I get to worry about stray strands of copper bridging the terminals. These speakers cry out for high quality 5 way binding posts, with a barrier strip between them.
In terms of style... the things look like some weird alien tech. Pictures don't do it justice. The shiny blackness, the smooth curves, the long vertical sweep, and the eye on top - yes, I know it's a tweeter, but just have one staring down at you and you'll think of eyes, too - makes them look vaguely... purposful. Even... alive. They will dominate any normal-sized room they are put in. WAF is zero - luckily, my wife has atypical opinions on decorating. None of this is a negative. People
should stop and stare when you have speakers like this, and I think it's a vastly cool look. But they aren't blending in with anything you own, unless your furnishing comes direct from the Andromedia galaxy.
Happy, happy, happy. Broke, but happy.
