How critical are these settings? Put it this way: I have a writing desk immediately behind my listening seat. The desk chair sits me 75mm (3”) higher and roughly 1 metre (39”) further back. It’s a seating position that destroys that preternatural intimacy between the players and, as a result, the drama and musical momentum in the performance. This isn’t one of those ‘head in a vice’ speakers: the lateral listening window is actually pretty wide, but vertically it is far narrower, to the extent that my wife needs a cushion to sit on if she’s going to get the same stellar musical presentation as me.
With the Mezzos, getting the set-up right really matters. If you (or your dealer/set up guy) doesn’t take the time or trouble, you won’t reap the benefits that the speakers’ unique mix of acoustic and electrical technology offers. It makes judging the speaker at a show or even in a dealer’s showroom a slightly hit and miss affair. The seated ear-height of the listener is all-important and whilst it’s easy to experiment, simply by sitting taller or slumping in the seat, you need to know to do it. The Avantgardes are far from alone in that, but such is their potential performance that it becomes that much more critical. If you aren’t hearing explicit dimensionality, presence, immediacy and a coherent space from a recording that should exhibit those qualities, you aren’t hearing what these speakers can do.
The Rachmaninoff discs are interesting or illustrative for another reason. While the Mezzos were in situ, we got to hear the Symphonic Dances arrangement played live. The question of live versus recorded is one that hangs over audio as a whole and high-end audio in particular. Are we trying to reproduce the original event, its sense, the facts of the music or the relationships within the performance? Is live sound the gold standard by which audio should be judged? Can audio ever match live sound?
Reality check…
After setting up the Mezzos, all of those questions were hovering in my (not so) sub-conscious as we took our seats for the concert. On paper, the Ólafsson/Wang pairing should be interesting – at least if reputations are anything to go by. Interesting is one word for it… Ólafsson’s diffident, contained and thoughtful approach was either going to complement or clash with Wang’s more ‘wham-bam’ pyrotechnics. Sadly, the musical disconnect was as yawning as the visual and aesthetic contrast between these two high-profile performers. (As the wife would say, “Don’t wear 6” heels if they make you walk like a duck”). ‘Disappointing’ really doesn’t cover it. With Ólafsson’s poised restraint making Wang sound like a wind-up toy that’s been wound way too tight, the overall musical result sounded like two people playing different, unconnected pieces at the same time but different speeds.
Returning home, playing the recording on the Mezzos was a restorative experience. The two pianos were presented big, solid and vibrant with a real sense of weight and physical presence, sat in a single contiguous acoustic space, a space that reached out to envelop the listener. The contrasting character of the Steinway and Bösendorfer instruments was immediately apparent, adding another layer to the complex exchanges between the two performers. Here were impressive dynamics combined with subtlety and a deft, perfectly poised beauty in the slower passages. Note weight and spacing was a clear yet integral part of the process as a whole, adding expressive depth and range to the music. This simply sounded like life: not a facsimile of the live event, but recognisably the same thing, generating energy and energising the space in the same way. More importantly, as a performance, as a musical experience, it was way, way better than the live event we’d sat through. Here was a living, breathing example of an audio system surpassing the live performance. Okay, so this is one case of a great audio system being better than a lousy live event, but even so, it’s a really good example of just how musically impressive these speakers can be. An example that should give you pause…