The hard floors and unremittingly white walls create something of a visual and acoustic desert, akin to an abandoned modern art gallery built on a gigantic scale. The combination of floating walls and open ceiling voids that allowed sound to travel from one to another, of supposedly separate room created decidedly difficult and highly variable acoustic challenges. Given the perfect storm of an unfamiliar venue and unsympathetic environment, the search was on for the few rooms that managed to rise above what was, in general, a sonically mediocre event. By and large, the bigger the room and the bigger the system, the more disappointing the results. However, there were a few exceptions.
One of the rooms that I stumbled across entirely by chance – but I’m certainly glad that I did – was the one containing the Constellation set-up. For as many years as I can recall, Constellation has built its room around a pair of Wilson Audio speakers, generally the Alexx or Alexia V. This year was no exception except that they downsized to the far more svelte Sasha V, inverting component sizes along the way. Driving the relatively compact Sashas, were Constellation’s massive Statement Monoblock Amplifiers. This solid-state beast weighs in at 113kg/250lbs a side, easily matching the speakers for size and outweighing them into the bargain. If the size parity is the first thing you notice when entering the room, the disproportionately lopsided expenditure is the next. At $378,000 a pair for the Statements, you could take home seven (!) pairs of Sasha Vs for the same money.
The front-end wisely included a vinyl playback system– the comparably affordable EAT Fortissimo S turntable mounted with a Graham tonearm and Jo.10 cartridge. I asked Constellation’s Irv Gross to play Bud Shank’s Holiday In Brazil, a beautiful Impex Records reissue of a really well recorded disc. The sound was impressive: spacious, easy breathing, rhythmically taught and engaging. Despite the size of the amps, it sounded fast, light on its feet and agile, with no hint of the earth-bound or leaden quality that so often affects such monster amps. Indeed, this was the best sound I can recall hearing in a Constellation room in some time. At 1700 watts into 8 ohms, the Statement should drive anything with ease, but the choice of the Sashas was inspired and certainly suited the room. The musically involving and coherent sound aIso suggests the considerable effort that went into the turntable set-up. I’m only glad I had no responsibility for boxing up the amplifiers once the show was over!
Another place that did big but in a very different way was the Gobel High End room, where its new Divin Monarque loudspeakers were being premiered, supported by amplification from Vitus Audio and a full Wadax digital front end, including Reference Transport. At 380 kg (838 lbs.) per side, the Monarque sits second in the line of succession behind the Majestic. As large as that sounds, I can still (just about) see the top surface of the Monarque. Compared that to the Majestic, which I couldn’t even get into my listening room without tearing out the ceiling – or the front wall. But make no mistake, the Monarque is definitely a big speaker and such enormous dimensions, present a royal challenge in terms of set-up, especially where the room boundaries providd in the ACV favour artistic abandon rather than acoustic authenticity. Gobel met that challenge by creating a room within a room, built from a single, continuous run of Molo’s concertina acoustic wall. As big as the system was, it managed to shift scale to match recordings with apparent ease, scaling micro and macro dynamics without constraint, placing performers in a coherent acoustic space and delivering surprisingly even output across its very wide bandwidth. The music was immediate and impressively present, but above all, it was both relaxing and highly enjoyable. Notwithstanding the challenge of presenting in a room full of sharp angles, glass and a ceiling that could suck the highs from the best of speakers, the Monarque was producing some of the best sound in Vienna, short of the Musikverein or Opera House.
