The opening of Chick Corea and Gary Burton’s take on their old warhorse ‘La Fiesta’ on The New Crystal Silence finds our two heroes noodling around each other before settling into their groove. If you’ve heard either of these performers live, you’ll know that this noodling isn’t the aimless ambling around it might appear to be. With a sheet of AcouPlex under my Accuphase DP570, it’s all the more evident that this noodling is in fact scene-setting, preparation for what comes immediately after. But what really comes across is just how much these performers, and indeed the entire Sydney Symphony orchestra, are having an absolute blast on this recording. There’s less sense of inhibition, less feeling that the system is ‘gating’ or holding the music back, with greater dynamic freedom on both the micro- and macro-scale. So we get more subtlety from the soloists, a clearer feeling of interplay and the musical conversation – and then we get an orchestra which isn’t afraid to let rip when the occasion demands. It’s joyous, life-affirming stuff. It’s what we pay all this money for.
This musical spaciousness manifests in two ways. First, there’s the physical sense of air and space, room to breathe, in and around the instruments and the music. But there’s also a temporal spaciousness; it’s as though the notes have all the time they need to properly develop and decay. You hear them more fully realised, and that tells you a lot more about how the musician shaped those notes, how they played them, so you get that double whammy of better instruments, played by better musicians. Don’t go thinking that this freeing up within the time domain leads to looser timing. The freedom for the individual notes just makes it all the clearer how, where and when they fit into the whole, and indeed why they were put there in the first place. I started writing while thinking about how to describe the effect on the sound, but I think that does it a disservice. It’s much more about the effect on the performance. I’ll try to describe what I hear in the sound, but the material benefits come from what that does to the listener’s perception of the music.
So, in the basic terms, it’s as though the notes have coalesced into a more concentrated version of themselves. Every note is both more contained and freer from constraint. And yes, I’m aware that sounds somewhat paradoxical, but bear with me. When we hear live music, we hear each note exactly as it was bowed, plucked, blown, struck, stroked or sung. The note’s envelope reaches us more or less intact – venue, acoustics and incidental noise notwithstanding. The recorded version rarely approaches that ideal. The note gets subtly bent out of shape, blurred and smeared, modulated to some extent by all the other notes being reproduced at the same time, even if only infinitesimally so. AcouPlex seems to increase the equipment’s ability to reproduce and preserve each, individual note. There’s more shape, more definition, more raw information to each note, but there’s also clarity to the space between and around it. Because there seems to be less acoustic feedback reaching the carcass of the equipment and less internal vibration energising the innards (as long as you’ve coupled the chassis to the AcouPlex shelf), the music has less opportunity to interfere with itself. It’s pretty clear that microphony in these terms is not a trivial effect and its influence on the timing and smearing of notes is subtly destructive to the clarity and comprehension of the musical message they convey.
