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Nevertheless, for all their purity, the presentation of the Quads was
a little too specialized if not limited for my tastes. I gravitate
towards speakers better able to handle the complexity, dynamic range
and frequency extremes of a much wider variety of source material. And
while I love a silky, spacious presentation because I listen to so
much jazz, classic rock and symphonic music, I much prefer the emotion
and immediacy of more [or less] traditional dynamic box
designs. And there were any number of rooms where, in my estimation,
those did a much better job of splitting the difference between silk
and steel. Speaker designer Carl Marchisotto of Alon by
Acarian was showcasing his Alon Lotus Elite Signatures
($7999/pr), which feature twin eight-inch drivers in their own
separate, sealed chambers, with a dipole dome tweeter and a
cast-frame, tri-laminate midrange with Alnico magnet mounted on an
open baffle in a visually striking mirror image array.
These three-way speakers were driven to perfection by some very sweet
sounding, surprisingly dynamic deHavilland tube
gear: The thirty-watt per channel Aries 845-G SET monoblocks
($5995/pr), and the 6SN7 equipped UltraVerve preamp ($2995), with some
very fancy silver ribbon PranaWire cabling from
their Cosmos line upping overall resolution into Olympian realms of
the economically daunting and the musically sublime. What made this
audition such a particularly homey experience for me was Carl's use of
a digital front end comprised of the Sony SCD-777ES SACD driving an
California Audio Labs Alpha 24/96 Tube DAC - which just so happens to
have been my reference front-end source for a number of years until
the Sony went bye-bye, thus affording me a familiar, dependable ground
zero with which to speculate on what I was hearing. This genially
extended system easily handled everything I threw at it, with
exceptional snap, crackle and pop, remaining clear, coherent and
dynamic even when pushed to higher volume levels, to effortlessly
portray a warm, capacious soundstage in this crappy little hotel
room. The Elite Signatures were just real easy to listen to and drive
with these low-powered SET amps; silky, spacious and laid-back; oodles
of ambient information, yet alive with full-bodied impact and midrange
detail - an exceptionally musical speaker. Again, major props to the
deHavilland amps for overall system synergy.
