So, if we return to the Pluhar record and get critical, while the pipe and flare of Trovesi’s clarinet have an almost preternatural sense of shape and volume, there’s less sense of the reed and his lips, the drums are impressively hollow and dimensional, but with less explosive beats and reduced texture from the skin. None of this is musically destructive or limiting when it comes to communicating the sense and purpose in the performance, and it certainly does no harm when it comes to matching the speakers to the sort of affordable, powerful, solid-state amps that make bi-amping a more attainable option.
Everybody’s welcome…
The Diptyque’s qualities are also musically agnostic, neither favouring one genre nor another. Their consistently expressive musical abilities are just as effective on small or large-scale works, classical, jazz or pop, one-take purist, acoustic or heavily manipulated studio recordings. At least part of that is down to the material consistency across all the drivers and the speaker’s inherent phase coherence, with first/second order crossover slopes and the acoustic centre of all the drivers being perfectly aligned. A fascinating example of this even-handed musical integrity is the Birdy album Fire Within (14th Floor/Atlantic 825646420315) with its mixed production approach and sudden shifts in musical density. Birdy’s vocals (and piano or guitar) are generally mic-ed in a simple, intimate acoustic space that’s set in front of the heavily produced and manipulated backing, involving everything from heavy, multi-tracked synths and drums to lush string arrangements. A song like ‘Wings’ has an anthemic quality, but even here, despite the sheer density of the backing arrangements, the inevitability in their building power, there are still quiet, almost solo sections. It’s a style that is even more pronounced on songs like ‘Light Me Up’ or ‘Standing In The Way Of The Light’. The Diptyques reproduce those telling vocals with subtlety, intimacy and directness, while still building a convincing musical backdrop, whether they’re deftly layering textured slabs of sound, backing vocals, guitar riffs and insistent, pulsing keys and ticking percussion, or the straight-ahead pop of the jaunty ‘Maybe’. It’s not just that the Reference IIs’ shift chameleon-like with the different demands between and within tracks. It’s the fact that they illuminate the contrast between singer and the backing arrangements, leaving you in no doubt that it’s done quite deliberately – and with considerable skill, to considerable effect. If you doubt that, just play the final track, ‘Shine’. This production team certainly knew when to leave well alone…
Combine this ability to shift musical density with the Reference IIs’ spatial definition and ability to place instruments within the soundfield and you have a speaker with an innate ability to localise musical energy without emasculating the performance. Plenty of speakers can set instruments or voices in space: plenty can reproduce the sense of body and weight behind an instrument or voice. Very few can capture an instrument’s location and output with the natural solidity and presence of the Diptyques. It’s yet another aspect of the speakers’ performance that helps explain the ease with which it tracks musical pace and momentum, its inherent rhythmic integrity, the way it allows the musical performance to breathe.
