It’s all very well talking about or claiming extraordinary attention to detail, but such talk is cheap. Spying a digital level on one of the shelves, I ran it over the racks and speakers. Yep, those racks are definitely level, as is all the equipment standing on them. But what was really surprising was the speaker rake angle: Not just similar, but identical! To two decimal places!! When they said they spent time on the nuts and bolts, they weren’t kidding. Which is I guess, kind of reassuring given the cost of the equipment involved…
So, with the preliminaries covered and the kit duly inspected, stroked and coo-ed over, it was time to hear what it’s all about. RG has been working with the P10 too, so knowing there’d be one available in the listening room, he brought with him a few of the discs that will feature in his impending review, starting with Sibelius and Colin Davis’ account of the Second Symphony, on Philips (taking advantage of the Philips curve that the P10 has added to its range of EQ options). First impressions: now this 
is what it feels like to sit in front of an orchestra. Reviewers, myself included, are apt to talk about imaging, sound-staging and such matters, and many systems I’ve sat in front of make a good effort at recreating the scale and spread of a large ensemble, but compared to what I’m hearing here, they are merely valiant attempts at the truth. Here and now, I’m sat before a wholly convincing stage with a symphony orchestra laid out before me. This is like sitting in the first few rows of the stalls – close enough to get the visceral impact and place individual instruments not simply groups of instruments. Actually, it’s how I imagine it might sound from the podium, everything laid out and available for inspection, at will. Compared to this, most systems I’ve heard are more like the experience from the front row of the dress circle – slightly impressionistic, blocks of sound that don’t resolve down to the level of granular detail I’m hearing now.
Impressive as that is, it’s just a means to an end, evidence that nothing got broken during retrieval of the signal. Crucially, musically it’s also pretty much beyond reproach: Davis’ account gets deep into the shape and the pulse of the piece, one senses the flow, and the sheer physicality of the music, and as the system clearly demonstrated, a lot of this is down to the ability to select the right EQ. But once you’ve extracted the music from the disc, getting it into the room is the next job and here, the M10s and the Göbel loudspeakers are supreme: Textures, phrasing, nuance, musical and performance choices, all those micro-dynamic subtleties that differentiate great music from merely good music. There’s absolutely no question that this system’s extraordinary imaging capability and spatial resolution is helping here, taking you beyond the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’, making it effectively irrelevant. Its fluid, unobtrusive way with pace and timing lets you simply forget about those challenges to reproduction entirely. But it’s also the effortless ability to scale instant dynamic shifts, whether from quiet to loud, or loud to quiet, there’s almost no sense of lag, drag or hysteresis, just music. There’s so little scope for disbelief that closing my eyes puts me right there, at the performance.
