And when things get more serious? Play Górecki’s III Symphonia (the composer conducting the National Polish Radio S.O. – Polskie Radio PR SACD 2) and the Duos capture the muted pathos of the slow, stately, bowed bass opening. As the piece builds, the layering of the split sections, the interleaved melodic lines and the slow but inevitable increase in power and density create an increasing emotional intensity, just as the piece does live. The first, towering crescendo gives way to the poised calm before the soprano sings, the music (and the Avantgardes) leading you naturally into the resurgent emotional maelstrom that is, after all, subtitled the Symphony Of Sorrowful Songs. It’s a massive piece of music, three slow movements, each that builds and builds to embrace every facet of the orchestra to project the intensity and pain of death and loss. The Duo GT not only matches the dynamic scale and emotional range of the piece, it does it without the strain or glare that so often afflicts even the best systems struggling to play this intense and powerful music. Perhaps most notable of all is the absence of brightness or ringing on the loudest passages behind the soprano voice. Just when you expect the Duos to reveal their horn DNA, they sail through the peaks with grace and power to spare. One thing the Avantgardes aren’t short of is headroom.
Not surprisingly, the opening fanfare of Mahler’s 5th Symphony (Barbirolli and the NPO – EMI SLS 785) is meat and drink to the Duo’s sheer body and presence. But what is far more impressive is the measured poise and natural instrumental tonality they bring to the slowly evolving and deeply reflective Funeral March that follows. The sense of space and interwoven instrumental interjections, so central to both Barbirolli and Mahler, is beautifully presented, with an effortless sense of musical and dynamic coherence. On a lighter note, the jaunty woodwind, bass and bass drum opening to Shostakovich’s First Symphony (Masur and the LPO – LPO 0001) is another example of this speaker’s effortless musical grasp, instruments natural, solid, instantly placed and identifiable within the orchestral fabric, adding to the substance and presence, the sense of a live event.
In the same way, the cash register that opens Pink Floyd’s ‘Money’ has a greater sense of solid crunch and rattle, a more insistent rhythmic drive and impetus. The shipyard soundscape on Jackie Leven’s ‘Defending Ancient Springs’, all welding torches, rivets being beaten, ship’s hooters and shouted imprecations, is more varied but also more ordered, establishing the pattern over which the slashing guitar riffs and vocal are laid. The drums match the striking impact of the hammers, while at the same time the mandolin still maintains a tinkling delicacy. It’s indicative of the freshness that the Duo GT brings to even the most familiar tracks. This isn’t that audio cliché, hearing things that you never heard before. This is hearing the same things, but in a way that you never heard them before.
You can’t always get what you want…
Part of this is where many a seasoned audiophile is going to diverge from Avantgarde’s musical vision. The Duo GTs definitely favour direct sound over reflected energy. The first half of ‘The Road’ from Jackson Browne’s Running On Empty (Asylum 6E-113) was recorded with the voice, guitar and fiddle in a motel room. If I play the track on the Sasha DAW/VTL S-400 set-up, I hear a clear relationship between the seated Browne’s voice and the guitar in his lap. David Lindley’s fiddle is positioned higher as he stands to one side. When the vocal starts, it brings with it a sense of the small space in which the recording was made. Play the same track on the Duos and the musical relationship between the two instruments is even more connected in musical terms, the accents and phrasing of the lyric even more direct and explicit – but the spatial relationship between the three is absent. Likewise, when the track opens up after the second chorus, folding into the live concert performance, the Duos capture the expansion in the surrounding space, the increase in the volume, but they don’t capture the overall acoustic, the boundaries of the venue. The Duos are about the direct connection with the voice and instruments, rather than the holistic sense of an enveloping acoustic space. It doesn’t mean that they don’t image or that they don’t separate images across the stage. Individual images are both distinct and dimensional. But they lack the sense of natural perspective and spatial continuity – the spaces between and around players – that the Trios (with their full-range horn output) deliver so spectacularly – and that is considered de rigeur for more conventional high-end speaker designs. In part, it comes back to that question of distance: sit closer to a band and the direct/reflected ratio alters, the impact of the surrounding space recedes. There’s also no doubt that on all but the most minimalist recordings, the acoustic is a synthetic construct – and the Duo may well be guilty of telling you too much. Indeed, play a stereo extravaganza and the Duo delivers in spades, it’s just that not too many recordings fit that category. Ultimately I suspect that we are running up against the limits of the speaker’s bottom end transparency and integration. The Spacehorns offer seamless continuity with the Trio G3. As good as the subs on the Duo GT are, they’re not in the Spacehorn’s league (or price bracket).
