Taking ‘big’ out of the equation and moving straight into the realm of the small and intimate, the underlying nature of the ASR amp becomes more apparent. The track ‘Some People’s Lives’ from Janis Ian’s Breaking Silence (Analogue Productions APP 027) offers the perfect window, the small-scale, straight to two-track recording capable of an almost ghostly realism. The ASR captures the solid presence of the piano within a palpable acoustic and positions Ian’s voice tangibly, seated at the keyboard. It captures the deeply melancholy tone of the vocal and the precise weight and timing of the piano phrases that underpin and accent it. It offers a vividly complete and holistic picture of the musical event. But what it lacks is the reach out and touch ‘she is here’ immediacy of systems like the Avantgarde Trio G3 with its iTron active current drive amplification. There’s a subtle distance, a slightly set-back perspective to the image, as if you are looking in from the control room rather than sitting in the studio itself. Listen longer and deeper and you become aware of the presentational cues that go with that perspective: a very slight softening to leading edges, a smoothness to the dynamic tracking that helps explain the amp’s calm assurance and control when it comes to wider dynamic swings. Let the album run on into the title track and the amp’s solid presence quickly reasserts itself, meeting the music’s dynamic demands with impressive enthusiasm.
Steppin’ up – steppin’ out…
As that transition across tracks and musical styles demonstrates, move away from such exacting material and that distance manifests itself as a subtle, almost tube-like warmth that’s far from unwelcome on many a mainstream recording. Switching to the raw studio sound of Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust… on SACD (EMI 07243 521900 2) it allows you to advance the volume, delivering the music’s attitude, edgy presence and dynamic impact without it hardening or shouting. It’s a performance that leaves you in no doubt as to why the album had such an immediate and profound impact when it first appeared. It’s a performance that is all about the music, its message and sense of purpose, Bowie’s intent just as clear and powerful as Smetana’s or Starker’s. But it’s also a performance that can traverse effortlessly between ‘Suffragette City’s intense wall of sound and the sparse delicate opening of ‘Rock’N’Roll Suicide’ – before building back to the densely layered power of that track’s and the album’s finale.
This amplifier’s engaging and convincing performance is built on two underlying sonic foundations. The examples above demonstrate the ASR’s dynamic authority and ability to track the incoming musical signal, not only when it comes to discriminating dynamic levels and density, along with the steps between them, but also its ability to separate and maintain instruments or voices operating at different levels, letting them coexist within a single sound-field, with both clarity and purpose. It’s a crucial, often overlooked and generally underappreciated aspect of audio reproduction – one that’s key to a convincing sense of the performers and their performance. Too many amplifiers drag the dynamic envelope in the direction of the loudest sound, disturbing the balance between instruments and/or voices. The Emitter II does a fantastic job of preserving those relationships, intimate when they should be, clashing when they do.
