Which is not to say that the gestation of this gift to the music lover was effortless. Albert Von Schweikert's white paper on his new VR (Virtual Reality) speakers reflects the twenty-two years of design research that have gone into solving the practical problems of listening to music in the home. Here we have an engineer who began work at Cal Tech with a "by the book," time and phase coherent design that measured well, and sounded bad. Thus began a long process of rethinking fundamental engineering axioms: were speakers being designed to reproduce the sound of an instrument in your living room, or a test tone in an anechoic chamber?

     Imagine a guitar playing in a room: its sound radiates as an almost omnidirectional spherical wave pressurizing the room as whole. Doesn't it seem intuitively clear that to reproduce this guitar accurately a speaker should try to replicate this waveform as it is projected in such a room, rather than as it is projected in a heavily damped chamber that effectively eliminates boundaries?

     Now, go back to the guitar playing in a real room, but add a microphone to record it. The interface between mike and spherical pressure wave is the first translation of music into an electrical signal; this is where the encoding of a recording begins. While recognizing that the parameters of this interface are variable i.e., that there are a variety of microphones and recording techniques Von Schweikert asked: can this encoding process be reversed? Can you use the "general" parameters of the encoding done right at the microphone to design speakers that can retranslate the signal back into the spherical sound waves the microphone first "saw"? The design principle that emerged here, what Von Schweikert calles, "acoustic inverse replication," seeks to engineer speakers with the most natural radiation pattern and the least aberrations in frequency power response when playing recordings in a room. Let me introduce the technology by which the VR-4.5s work to achieve that goal.

     To reproduce the spherical radiation pattern microphones "see," the VR-4.5s integrate front-firing drivers that perform well both on and off-axis with crossovers preserve flat frequency and phase response over a wide frontal "window." To "fill in" frequency response above 1 kHz, an out of phase rear ambiance tweeter is wedded to this wide-dispersion frontal array, via a crossover engineered to work with the front drivers to create an overall spherical radiation pattern. As for the drivers themselves, it was found that cone flex cancels the spherical waveform normally generated by pistonic motion, resulting in "beaming." Moreover, different cone materials have intrinsically different tonal signatures. So careful measurements were used to select drivers with minimal cone flex, and then live-feed listening was used to match the tonal signatures of the most suitable drivers. (When a friend's voice is fed directly through different drivers it's easy to recognize how well the drivers are presenting a common tonal signature.)

     These sonically matched drivers now needed to be mounted in minimal baffles surrounded by acoustic felt padding to eliminate diffraction effects, and thus insure that the sound waves could "wrap around" the speaker to simulate a point source. Finally the drivers needed to be physically offset, to insure that transient response and spatial perspectives remained accurate. Each of these steps helps the drivers to disappear while projecting a widely dispersed yet phase coherent spherical radiation pattern into a room.

     But why use five drivers? We've seen the reason for the rear ambiance tweeter; let's consider the rationale of the other four.

     From the fact that most microphones use single diaphragms, Von Schweikert hypothesized that a single driver will introduce the least number of problems in "acoustic inverse replication." So an Audax 5.25" rubber coated carbon fiber driver with a free air response of 57 Hz to 11,000 Hz was chosen to act as a "quasi single source" ("quasi" because to get uniform full frequency power response in a room you need to add drivers to handle the low and high octaves). The human voice was then used to set least intrusive crossover points: 125 Hz was chosen for the Audax's low limit, to minimize the chestiness that commonly plagues the crossover between woofers and mid-ranges; the high limit was set at 3500 Hz, cleanly above the highest soprano fundamentals, yet still including first and second harmonic overtones. Thus a single driver covers the full tonal range of the singing voice.

     To get down to 20 Hz, Von Schweikert added dual, 8", custom built, double epoxy coated (to eliminate cone flex), polypropoylene drivers, and, to eliminate the mid-bass hump common in dual driver woofers, gave each its own ported chamber, crossing the low bass driver over at 60 Hz, while crossing the other over at 125 Hz. For the tweeter, he used a 1" rubber coated, non flexing Vifa aluminum dome. He then tied these four front firing drivers together with 24 -dB/octave slopes that minimize acoustic overlap and the lobing radiation patterns common in multi-driver, first order slope speakers.

     But Von Schweikert didn't stop there. Distributing the drivers into separate mid-treble and bass modules helped eliminate standing wave and resonance problems common to single enclosures; constructing the cabinets with a damping compound sandwiched "constrained mode" fashion between double MDF walls  converted vibration into heat (instead of simply redistributing it throughout the cabinet at higher frequencies).

     What emerged from this long R&D process is a speaker whose complexity, like its 5 drivers, grows directly out of its simplicity. Each of the design decisions I’ve recounted is directly tied to eliminating specific ways in which a speaker reminds you of its presence. The overall goal is what Von Schweikert terms as "globally coherent" speaker that effectively removes itself as a source of listener fatigue when playing in a room. I want to emphasize this last point before turning to the critical importance of setup and break-in. Let’s consider your room.

     When you listen at home, at best around 40% of the sound you hear radiates directly from the speakers, the rest being reradiated from your room's boundaries, furniture, etc. A design that emphasizes "axial coherence," like Albert's early Cal Tech effort, attempts to make the output of its different drivers time and phase coherent "at the listener's ears." But if the room is not adequately damped, or if your head involuntary wanders from the narrowly correct window, the reverberant response will overpower the flat axial response and begin to clue you in that something is amiss which then leads to listener fatigue.

     In contrast, Von Schweikert's "global coherence" design takes advantage of the fact that the ear can't discriminate phase distortion above a certain threshold. By averaging deviations in phase response over a wide area of the reverberant field, while still keeping that average above the threshold of distortion the ear can detect, Albert’s design frees you from being locked into a "hot spot," and, judging from my experience, eliminates fatigue in long listening sessions. I have never enjoyed a more consistently natural sense of ease than listening with these speakers.

     Von Schweikert uses quite stiff suspensions on all his drivers so that they can maintain their high resolution capabilities over a longer period of time. But to get the inner detail that comes with high resolution, suspensions have to be very finely displaced. The latitude necessary for such displacements only comes with sufficient break in. In short, don't judge the subtle qualities of these speakers until you've put a good 100 hours on them; 200 hours is preferable. Let's set them up.

     At 46"H x 13.5"W x 19.5"D, the $5650 VR-4.5s are large enough to dominate a room, yet their pleasing proportions and black cloth with dark cherry endcaps finish give them an attractively nondescript appearance. Clearly, however, they aren't an exercise in sculptural elegance like my Sonus Faber Amators.

     The $2000 premium you pay for the 4.5 Signatures over the dark cherry VR-4s translates into Audio Magic solid core silver wiring (also available in the $4650 dark cherry VR-4 Silvers), and the use of premium Hovland solid foil capacitors and Solo flat ribbon inductors in the crossover of the mid-treble module (the 4.5s' bass module being the same as the 4 Silvers). From listening to both the 4 Silvers and the 4.5s, the money for the crossover upgrade is well spent: imaging is tighter, timbral signature more telling, and the nuances of voices more palpable.

     Each module has its own set of high quality Cardas hookup posts, so bi-wiring is a necessity. I used matched runs of Marigo's new 3.1 Signature speaker cables another evolutionary step in Ron Hedrich's assault on exceptional quality. And since the point of separate modules is their mutual isolation, I suggest you play around with different "interfaces." The bass modules come with small rubber hemispheres glued to a layer of felt. I tried Navcom sheets over the felt, but the added warmth wasn't needed, and the softened transient attack was a minus. But here we're talking minor tweaks. The most important consideration is placement.

     In my 13' W x 35' L x 7.5' H room, it finally took "The Listening Room" speaker placement program to get me to move the rear corners of the 4.5s within eighteen inches of the sidewalls and four feet out from the front wall, with just over eight feet separating them center to center and my listening position just under eight feet away. I've never placed a speaker that close to the side walls, but my first two "mini monitor" positions had the speakers sitting too close to a room null, and bass response suffered. You have to map out your room modes to get the best bass these speakers have to offer. And you'll want them as far apart as possible to let the soundfield fully open up. And damping first reflections does help with articulation. Having taken this care in setup, I was repaid with something I didn't think I could hear in my suspended wood floor, large picture window and sliding glass door, second story apartment: uniform and nimble bass response extending cleanly to 25 Hz before dropping off noticeably at 20 Hz. With that gift, I had to start learning how to listen to the foundations of music I hadn't realized I had been missing. So now, at last, let's get to the good stuff.

     Now I know some of you suspect I only listen to Janis Ian and Dar Williams. So to continue in the "let's hear some real bass" line, let me briefly mention the timpani in Boulez's recent Deutsche Grammophon "4D Audio" recording of Stravinsky's Firebird [D 101700].

     Boulez is quite economical. The presentation is squeaky clean yet spacious, and of course I thought I knew what to expect. Or did I? When an audiophile friend and his equally audiophile wife first brought this disc over to test the Von Schweikerts with the final tracks of the first tableau and the concluding second tableau, even sitting several feet behind them, I found myself repeatedly . . . well, jumping. Did I know this piece or not? It wasn't just the speed of the bass attack (had I ever really heard well recorded timpani in this room?), it was the infamous sock in the chest, that sheer physicality I've tended to pooh pooh as mere nostalgia for adolescent adrenaline. Then I remembered that I've never heard Firebird live. Live?! And, of course, it struck me that my body had already involuntarily commented on the undeniable liveliness unfolding before me.

     So after Fred and Anitra left, I had to experiment with more of those classical warhorses that I rarely play since, up to that evening, they just hadn't sounded right, just hadn't "fit" this room. The final verdict is still out on suitability, but for the first time since moving to this apartment seven years ago, Boulez' Firebird has clued me in that, yes, large scale classical works and not just the string quartets the Amators played so well might now make sense in this room. Which is not to say that the 4.5s are not the Amator’s equal on small-scale classical — far from it — but now, at least, I have a fighting chance to sort out the sonic mess that had been the Romantic Sublime in my listening room.

     Two more brief classical comments. For years I've tried to come to terms with Glenn Gould's victorious elevation of virtuoso performance for its own sake (of course, one might reduce him to a rather short lived epigone of Liszt, but let's not argue). "Come to terms" because for all the vacuity of today's technically perfect performances, it was Gould's famously quirky Goldberg Variations that made me wake up to Bach's music (outside the Masses). Listening to Sony's SBM Glenn Gould Edition, I was drawn, as I always am, to the rubato of Variation 13. Now, remember this is a 1955 mono recording, and very mono it still is but, oh, so much cleaner, and yet somehow, as time gets stolen, longingly gentler Gould's touch more precise in its lilting expressiveness. And finally, turning to another favorite the VR-4.5s have forced me to rediscover, I was quite startled to find Mozart's Violin Sonata in B flat, recorded live on one of those BBC Music disks (Vol.II Number 6), not just cleaner and clearer, but now presented with a genuine change in perspective! I know that the VR-4.5s' rear ambiance tweeters (whose levels you can adjust — I normally leave it on full throttle) are a great help generating the complexly layered depth that these speakers are capable of. But only speaker/room interaction as a whole can account for how the relative positions of violin and piano (not to mention the audience whose clapping now honestly sounds human), have been curiously fleshed out. I can now follow the lines of their interplay as if I were, well, suspended before the stage. Is this just my imagination? Or perhaps the suggestive power of rereading Von Schweikert's white papers once too often? Let's say I hope what I'm hearing does, indeed, reflect the power of my imagination encouraged along by the "reach out and touch it" sense of articulate presence these speakers impart — sense of presence that makes all the little tell-tale signs of a live performance (the squeaking chair, the performer shifting back and forth on stage) so immediately intelligible — and thus just as immediately dismissible — that they no longer stand out distractingly as this or that inarticulate noise. Here is a live performance recreated in a way that now invites me to walk through it, as if I suddenly have the space to linger with Mozart's playfulness that before I was working just a little too hard to reconstruct.

     If these last remarks, given the ebb and flow of critical shibboleths in the high-end, seem overly fascinated with the value of soundfield reproduction, let me simply assert that the Mozart demonstrated yet again how important a soundfield can be when it invites you into the work of art.

     But that invitation proves empty if the violin appears six feet wide, or if its timbral signature doesn't convince, or if your body isn't already acknowledging changes in tempo. Color and tempo are perhaps the two most vivid examples of a performer's interpretive reading of the composer's expressive intent. They have to be compellingly present in a gracefully intimate way to let your own imagination and emotions join in the interpretive interplay this piece is offering. Listening to the Violin Sonata, the free play of such presence struck me as if I were hearing this piece for the first time. And however much the dimensions of the soundfield changed with different recordings — either expanding (as with Joy Askew) or shrinking (as with the Gould)— the gains in the expressiveness of color and tempo with the VR-4.5s have uniformly translated into making the claim of music more present.

     Over the past six months I've listened at home to speakers ranging from the $1,500 Vienna Acoustics Bachs to the $10,000 Wilson Benesch ACT Ones. The quality of product in the high-end has progressed to the point where the contingencies of luck, association, and circumstance will present you with satisfyingly good components at many different price points. But still there are components, and particularly synergistic marriages of components, that prove exceptional.

     "Exceptional" for me means those designs that make us learn all over again what's possible, not just theoretically, but in the nitty-gritty detail of day-to-day, or in my case, night-to-night listening. The Equilibre amplifier was such a component. It’s found its exceptional mate in the Von Scweikert VR-4.5 Signature speakers. The transformation their synergy has effected in my system is of course "satisfying." But it's decisively more than that.