t began quite simple, as always.

15.04.2013 11:21

Dear Mr. Pacuła!

I would like to ask you when you will publish the next edition of the news section? On April 21st I plan to launch a new version of my flagship design – the Proxima. It was initially scheduled for the last January but unfortunately not everything was completed back then. I will have the photos and description ready for the next weekend. Retail price will be 5,900 PLN per pair in Poland (higher in other countries). And one more thing – will it be possible to send the speakers over for a review?

Kind regards,
Piotr Gałkowski

The review was arranged and the speakers were delivered for it. After their auditioning and examining I read again the accompanying materials. This is a case where I can, in good conscience and practically without changes, quote the company literature in full as an introduction. This is a rare case of manufacturer honesty combined with engineering knowledge.

Albums auditioned during this review

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• Assemblage 23, Bruise, Accession Records,A 128, “Limited Edition”, 2 x CD (2012).
• Carole Creveling, Here Comes Carole Creveling”, Euterpean Productions/Sinatra Society of Japan XQAM-1021, CD (1956/2008).
• Chet Baker, Chet Baker sings and plays, Pacific Jazz/EMI Music Japan TOCJ-90028, HQCD (1955/2006).
• Daft Punk, Random Access Memories, Columbia Records/Sony Music Japan SICP-3817, CD (2013);
• Et Cetera, Et Cetera, Global Records/Long Hair LHC00071, CD (1971/2008).
• Foreigner, Inside Information, Atlantic Records/Warner Music Japan WPCR12566, “Atlantic 60th”, CD (1987/2007).
• Joe Pass, For Django, Pacific Jazz/EMI Music Japan TOCJ-90027, HQCD (1964/2006).
• Laboratorium, Anthology 1971-1988. Nagrania wszystkie, Polskie Nagrania Muza/Metal Mind Productions MMP 10 CD BOX 001, „Limited Edition No. 0157”, 10 x CD (różne/2006).
• OMD, English Electric, 100%/Sony Music Japan SICP-3810, CD (2013);
• Republika, Masakra, Pomaton EMI 52975 2, “Reedycja 2011”, CD (1998/2011).
• Savage, Tonight, Extravaganza Publishing/Klub80 Records CD001, “25th Anniversary Limited Edition, No 59/150”, CD (1984/2009);
• Schubert, Lieder, wyk. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, dyr. Gerald Moore, EMI 55962 2, "Signature Collection", 4 x SACD/CD (1955, 1957, 1958,1959/2012);

Japanese editions of CDs and SACDs are available from CD Japan

Regardless of how I started, I would end up dedicating most of the time to a certain sound philosophy we buy along with the Proxima speakers. It’s an unusual approach, virtually unheard of at this price level and therefore so fascinating. I'll start with that so as not to introduce unnecessary confusion. All other details will follow to make up a full picture of these fascinating speakers that are far from perfect and absolutely not universal, but yet form a complete whole, something like the summa of all auditions.
The implemented design solutions impose advance restrictions but also offer some possibilities. The restrictions result from a low capacity closed cabinet and a medium-sized midwoofer while the possibilities lie in the cabinet design and its unusual shape, the quality of crossover components and the tweeter.
The Proxima do not have such deep bass extension as – for example – the Monitor Audio Silver line floorstanders. Even the PMC speakers seem to offer a lower and meatier bottom end, despite being smaller – “seem” being the key word here. In a normal audition, firing up, say, Portishead, Assemblage 23, Depeche Mode or any electronic-dominated music, the said Monitor Audio and PMC will floor us with the amount of woofer-generated bass. It will be a good, meaty sound, no doubt about it. Next to them, the Proxima will seem lighter and more subdued. Not lean or thinned out, though. Play a disc with the organ, grand piano, or even some jazz with double bass that doesn’t really visit the low end, to hear that the bass in those speakers is slightly “made up”. In a very cool, “from-the-gut” way, but tweaked up nevertheless. The “wings” from Divine Acoustics will sound cleaner and more dynamic here. Even if the PMC speakers, unique in this respect, are capable of rendering a bass drum kick as well as at a rock concert, they do it by emphasizing the mid-bass. It's their “licentia poetica”, so to speak, a part of PMC’s sound philosophy. Mr. Gałkowski’s speakers are about something else – quality over quantity. That’s the way I see it.

But it’s about bass, not dynamics, quantity. The latter is way above average in the Proxima. Listening to well recorded material, not mangled by overly aggressive compressor treatment, even a vocal accompanied by piano as featured on the album Schubert. Lieder performed by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, you will need to be careful with your amplifier’s volume knob. If the amp is a match for the speakers, you will hear true dynamics, comparable to what we actually experience sitting a few meters from the vocalist with the piano a little further away. There is no chance these two experiences can be identical but such will be our impression, as if a door opened in our mind to evoke our live experience (that’s why it’s so important to listen to live music!), giving the act of listening to the album an aura of a real event.
This is all due in part to differentiation. Only a few speakers on the market are so transparent to the source material. The nearest example of anything similar would be the work of Anssi from Finnish Amphion (see HERE and HERE. Especially the flagship Krypton3, costing nearly 70,000 PLN. It shows a similar approach to what constitutes the sound. Looking through the eyes of Mr. Gałkowski and Mr. Hyvönen the most important is timing, rhythm and keeping pace, in the sense of attack and decay precision. To paraphrase a classic, "everything else shall be added unto you" in this kind of approach – both sonic texture and body.
At first, moving over from speakers offering a different philosophy, such as the Harbeth M40.1 in which its tonality that plays the primary role, the sound seems to be lacking power and “ground”. That is true in some way as these are not speakers that “thicken” the soundstage. Yet since they don’t thin out anything, either, but rather get to the “truth” – that which is on the disc – from the timing angle, we get an equally credible presentation as from good "tonality-based" speakers, only that with differently placed accents and other overtones.

Now we reach the point where we must discuss the midrange and treble. The company literature claims that it is handled by a driver that is Divine Acoustics original design, created specifically for the Proxima. At first glance it resembles large silk dome tweeters from Dynaudio Esotar or Morel and it has a similar sound. The treble is juicy and very, very, very resolving. Not only in showing transient attack, but also its differentiation. It can be simulated even in cheaper speakers by contouring their sound. Except that this deceit can be fairly quickly deciphered and acted on appropriately – either by appreciating the effort if we think it translates into a better contact with the music, or by snorting with disappointment if we believe it to be a scam. Here it is not a try but something inherent to the tweeter or, in one word, normal. The richness of meaning it is able to articulate is extraordinary!
Thanks to that it is equally normal for the whole speaker to differentiate recordings – the (ultimate) goal of all our efforts, right? The most interesting for me was to listen to how the Proxima conveyed the diversity of “patina” that covers the old recordings. At first glance it may seem that the technology available at a given time defines every kind of recording made with it. That is true to a certain extent but not fully. It also needs to take into account “extra-musical” limitations, such as the available time, the type of re-mastering (if it’s a new album version) as well as the skills and taste of the sound engineer, producer and label manager. That is the reason for such diverse sound of various recordings, like the band Laboratorium recorded in 1977 in Rotunda hall in Krakow, or the much earlier 1960 recordings of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau that we already referred to, or an even older recording of Nat “King” Cole from his album Love Is The Thing. The differences are not only limited to tonality, which is quite normal, but mostly concern the “density” of recordings, the naturalness of sound and its depth. It just so happens that in the case of these three albums their recording quality is inversely proportional to when they were made – such is life.

The Proxima showed it straight up, without any veil. That’s a characteristic that needs to be kept in mind. Everything else I wrote above does not affect in any significant way our consideration of a system with the speakers from Mr. Gałkowski. This one last thing does a lot. The speakers are resolving and dynamic with nice full tonality. But their differentiating follows a straight path like an arrow – nothing is disguised. Whether the recording is sharp, bright or light, it will be shown exactly like that. We will get a full information, i.e. not distortion but the whole package. We will also get to know why it is sharp, bright or light, but also dark or dull. This is great news, but only on the condition that the rest of the audio chain is of the highest quality. I can easily see good tube gear in this role, as the speakers are quite an easy load. The SPEC RSA-V1 amplifier or newer would be ideal, but tube amps from Acoustic Research would also work fine. That is not a problem in itself. We would all love to to hear the difference between the mono and the stereo version of Nat “King” Cole’s album, the latter being a 3-track transfer. A number of speakers are capable of showing it, some even do it well, but the brighter stereo mix with noticeable sibilance often proves too punishing, while the mono version sounds too subdued. The Proxima not only showed that but made both auditions possible, too. It’s the kind of sound “with the benefit of inventory”.

Conclusion

However, the listener may not pay any attention to it or consider it to be secondary. The first thing that stands out after connecting the speakers to a good system is incredible space. At first, one may even suspect that the speakers are in counter-phase due to reversed polarity. Until strong, full vocals suddenly appear in the center. These speakers actually love the vocals, worship them even. The vocals of Chet Baker, Grzegorz Ciechowski, Enya, and above all Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau had a beautiful body, vivid and mature tonality as well as depth. Everything that accompanies them spans wide and deep, while the elements in counter-phase (the true, intended one) spread around us and behind us with ease and lightness. Perhaps, then, this brief conclusion is all you need. The speakers are inexpensive and show excellent precision workmanship and conscious design consideration. The man behind them is a designer with cool ideas he is not afraid to put into use. A prerequisite is high quality accompanying electronics. That is the only problem we encounter with these speakers.

Et Cetera
Et Cetera
Global Records/Long Hair LHC00071, CD (1971/2008)

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The information recently released by The Vinyl Factory, crazy guys from the UK who make the best re-releases in the world in terms of graphics and sound, about their planned re-releases of krautrock albums didn’t only electrify me (see HERE). What is krautrock? It’s a term used to describe German bands from the early 1970s which focused on long, instrumental passages built of psychedelic tones and sound effects (see HERE). It’s hard to categorize it as one musical genre, because do Kraftwerk, Can, Neu!, Popol Vuh or Amon Duul II have anything in common, I ask you? Oftentimes this movement is considered a genre, though. Krautrock bands played music that had nothing to do with rock’n’roll – it was rather something avant-garde and electronica. I’ll quote Rafał Ziemba’s article yet again: “The musicians of Can, Neu!, Popol Vuh or Amon Düül II experimented a lot with the early synthesizer models and tape effects. Their sound became more electronic and mechanical. Although there were numerous exceptions, such as Necronomicon, which used a more traditional sound and instruments. In the 1980s krautrock took over many of new wave’s and industrial’s elements.”


An example of how different the music played by these bands can be, as well as how many common factors you can name as well, is Et Cetera’s self-titled album from 1971. It’s the brainchild of Wolfgang Dauner. As a child he began with playing the grand piano, but he graduated from a conservatory in Stuttgart in a trumpet class. In 1963 he founded a jazz band and focused on the modern music scene, playing with Eberhard Weber, a bassist, and the drummer Fred Braceful. The band played together up until the 1970s. Dauner gained fame and recognition for combining jazz and his own experiments. At the end of the 1960s, certain elements could be observed in their music which would later become a solid part of the krautrock seen. Being barely 36 years old, but already a veteran of the modern jazz scene, Dauner recorded Et Cetera with his friends. The musician’s young age wasn’t anything special, though – in the same year, Irmin Schmidt who was only 34 released an album with his band CAN and Hans-Joachim Roedelius, aged 37, did with Cluster.
The recording session took place in the middle of December, 1970 in the Orange Recording Studios in London, with the band comprising of Roland Wittich (percussion), Eberhard Weber (bass instruments, vocoder), Fred Braceful (drums, vocals, and bongos), Siggi Schwab (guitar, sitar, and sarangi) and Wolfgang Dauner (synthesizers, clavinet, ringmodulator, trumpet, flute and others). As the author of the article on progarchives.com (David [Guldbamsen, DK], see HERE) says, it’s a musical combination of nearly anything – Indian raga music, psychedelic and avant-garde jazz with elements of modern rock. The basis of it all was improvisation, however. The band released another album titled Knirsch a year later (1972), with Jon Hiseman on drums and Larry Coryell on guitar; then the band fell apart.


Although I’ve heard many, and I own lots of SHM-CDs released by Belle (a Japanese record label available at CDJapan, where it has its own banner to get to their catalogue, see HERE), I’ve never yet heard the album we’re talking about. I got it from a friend of mine, which I’m greatly thankful for! And that’s because it’s one of the best krautrock albums from its experimental phase, with guitars in the main role, all really well-recorded and re-mastered. Although it’s a classic boxed European edition, not some SHM.
The sound is very resolute and diabolically dynamic. The drum cymbals sound surprisingly good, as in the 1960s and 1970s they were usually recorded very badly. They have a clear texture, weight and reverb. The midrange is a similar story; it’s lively, but also deep. The low bass is just underlined and there’s not much happening there. The mid and upper bass is very meaty, though, and it sounds in a way that never, ever seems “light”. I recommend this record to everyone looking for something irreplaceable that never gets boring. I assure you you’ll quickly get drawn into it and direct your credit cards in a krautrock direction. I, myself, have already ordered another album by this band, as well as several Daunter’s albums in different configurations.


Sound quality: 8-9/10

Proxima is available in the following finishes:
- African Ebony – see the pictures
- Wild Zebrano
- Macassar
- Magic Venge
All veneers are natural except for ebony. The version under review was finished with imitation wood veneer in order to keep the price as low as possible. Using the same natural veneer raises the price by almost 800 PLN (5,200 vs. 5,990 PLN). Sold outside Poland, their prices start at 1800 Euro.
These are beautiful speakers. Every detail is carefully thought out and their assembly is quite difficult. They are very tall but rather narrow and very shallow, which is a characteristic feature of this manufacturer’s designs. The speakers are stabilized by their large plinths. The stability is not ideal, however. To minimize vibration, the speaker is mounted to the plinth on a layer of cork, which also has a relatively high pliability. The plinths are asymmetrical and are designed specifically for the left or right speaker. They are mounted to the bottom by four wing nuts that allow for easy and secure tightening. Spike arrangement is not common, with four golden spikes at the front, back and both sides.
The driver units are mounted to the cabinets in a rather complicated manner. I did not manage to reassemble them properly and sent them as they were to the manufacturer. There was no problem with that since I was forewarned about the problem. For example, the woofer is mounted in such way that the grounding wire runs between the driver chassis and the cabinet. According to Mr. Gałkowski, mounting it without the wire will cause a sonic difference. The dome tweeter with an added metal front is mounted on spacers. One of them is made of fabric and its assembly is fraught with problems. One needs a lot of patience to lay it correctly. Again, Mr. Gałkowski claims that its absence “will result in a slight sonic difference”.
All other details were given by the designer in his description above. I see no need to add anything to that.