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Salk Sound Soundscape 10 Loudspeakers Review

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What cars and audiophile speakers have in common

Jim tapped into talent on loan from the auto industry to resolve the design intricacies of the midrange/tweeter housing. The midrange portion of this housing has an arched tubular shape akin to a Quonset hut, with a stylized bullet shaped portion atop accommodating the tweeter. Laminate construction was labor intensive, so the option to use molded construction with the help of Detroit auto making experts, though more costly initially, was preferred. One of the advantages of molded construction is forming a housing which is denser than MDF or hardwood, yet less susceptible to the effects of vibrations.

I have one quibble with the midrange, the presence of a permanent metallic grill cover. I am nearly fanatical about the removal of grills from speakers, and it distresses me any time I am forced to listen to a speaker with non-removable grills. I have heard so many speakers with and without grills that I don’t believe I would now ever opt to run a speaker with a grill if given the option. Imagine throwing a tomato at high velocity into a strainer. Yuck! My ears tell me the same thing – Yuck! – I hear the effect of putting a grid or grill in the way of sound waves. This is no complaint of the Soundscape in particular, but of fixed metal grills on the Accuton driver. This effect is so bothersome to me that I thought of reviewing the Golden Ear Triton Towers, and went to hear them at a local audiophile dealer. When I examined the front baffle I was horrified to feel an involved plastic grill underneath the fabric cloth. The amount of materials used over the drivers was unacceptable to me and I decided I would pass on the write up. That’s not so much of a final determination of the quality of the speakers as it is my disgust with anything shoved into the path of the drivers.

I understand the desire of some manufacturers to keep kids’ fingers out or to make sure the delicate cone is not wrecked in transit. However, if I had my way no high end speaker would have a fixed grill, as it simply diminishes the perfection of the wave launch. Speakers may be voiced with grills on, and there are excellent sounding speakers made to intentionally utilize grill cloth material in place of a more expensive wood baffle. I can respect these decisions, but it does not change my conclusion that it is settling for less than ultimate performance. Early on when I was first involved in high end audio such things were of little consequence; now I believe I would not have as a reference speaker one with fixed grills.

Online discussions about the Accuton drivers mention that if one takes a pencil and taps the metal grill it will ring. I did, and it did! Does that mean it’s a lousy driver? No, not at all, but I suspect it could be made to sound even better if the grill was removed and it was voiced without it. I have no doubt the Accuton was the best driver in comparison, but it would be an even better driver if the metal mesh could be removed! If the ceramic cone is as fragile as they say it is unlikely Accuton would take that step, but it would be a nice improvement.

Toward the back of the bass module, behind the midrange/treble cabinet, there is an attenuation switch for the RAAL tweeter. I asked Jim whether this was an allowance for trying to finalize the crossover of the tweeter; he replied that the tweeter was made with three sensitivity taps built in. However, there was a snag, “But with the crossover topology we eventually used, these taps were not usable. Rather than eliminating the possibility of having variable output on the tweeter, we decided to modify the crossover to return this capability.”

That was a wise decision, as it allows running the tweeter full tilt or a bit more subtly. I found the RAAL to be a “forgiving” tweeter, not easily made to sound etched or piercing, so after conducting listening tests with and without attenuation I let the tweeter run wide open on every rig I established.

The Binding posts are utilitarian, and though I have no complaints about their operation, I feel they are spaced too closely. I had to watch out carefully when connecting the Clarity Cables Organic speaker cable as the spades are wide. I held the legs of the spades against the binding post so as to allow them the maximum spacing and torqued them down gently with a binding post wrench; I wasn’t going to risk a slip of a wire and an electrical short which could conceivably happen if the posts were tightened by hand. Also, the markings designating the posts as positive and negative are very difficult to see in less than brilliant light. Salk Audio needs to more clearly identify these connections. Perhaps most audiophiles intuitively know them, but there are a few novices who would be intimidated by even such mundane things as speaker wire hookup, especially if they are having trouble seeing where the positive and negative leads go.

There are some speakers for which the accumulation of niggling issues adds up to a frustrating experience, but this was not so with the Soundscape. These were not major shortcomings but rather slight potential improvements. Once an owner has the speaker set up they would likely never come to mind again. I have found other inconveniences associated with components which must be worked around. The plastic posts of the Pathos Classic One MkIII are not conducive to all spades, and the binding posts on the Eminent Technology LFT-8b are not only close together but are solid copper, requiring care so that they are not stripped. Counter intuitively, most audiophile components have a few issues or idiosyncrasies which could stand revision. The component that you own may be part of a long line of different models each with its own improvement, each bearing changes intended to refine the original design.

Sometimes the use of interconnects with wide-barreled connectors can cause problems when attaching them to a component with narrowly spaced sets of inputs. I have on occasion had the uncomfortable experience of connectors pressing against each other, splayed out to a slight degree and exerting some pressure on the component’s jacks. When using hefty interconnects I never just jam them in, but test the spacing and slowly insert them to see if there will be too much pressure on the jacks. One has to be on the lookout when setting up gear for potential pitfalls, but I usually don’t discount a product over such considerations if they fall within a tolerable range, as there are myriad combinations of products which will work without such concerns.

The heavy speaker base, which comes separate and is mounted to the bottom of the woofer module, has three heavy non-adjustable spikes. With my ½” underlay and thick Berber carpeting in my listening room this did not leave much clearance between the bottom of the speaker and the carpeting. However, there was enough elevation to get the speaker base to rest just above the surface of the carpet.

Painting an acoustic image with the Soundscape

Do you love Monet or Roy Lichtenstein? Both are interpretations of reality, in the one case termed “impressionist” and the other “pop art.” Likely you are drawn to one or the other of these two styles of art, or perhaps you can see some merit in both. Some individuals may react strongly to one or the other, suggesting, “…that’s not art!” One thing that all can agree on is that neither of these techniques produces a true copy, a photographic replica of reality.

Neither do audio systems produce the “real thing,” a perfect replica of the acoustic reality. The best they can do is to represent the collective manufacturers’ and audiophile’s best efforts to present reality as they hear it. Some systems are far better than others overall in fooling the ears into imagining what is being heard is ‘live,’ but it is always an interpretation of the real.

“Impressionist Systems” and “Pop Systems”

The reason I mentioned these two radically different artistic styles is because I see a spectrum in audio system building; on the one end is the harsher, more technical “pop art” system which is mostly about definition and precision, while at the other end is the “impressionist” rig with less emphasis on precision and more on mood and feeling, usually summed up as an emphasis on tonality. Owners of either kind of rig claim their musicality, even though they are assembled to achieve different goals.

Both of these can be legitimate pursuits, just as Impressionism and Pop Art are legitimate artistic pursuits. One’s system will likely not be a perfect picture, an exact replica of the acoustic landscape retrievable from the source (at this time we are discussing only music playback, not the performance or production of it, though these are every bit as susceptible to interpretation as system building and component and instrument manufacturing). A rig is going to typically lean one way or the other, toward an analytical, “pop audio” sound or a relaxed “impressionistic” sound. The audiophile tends to build the type of system his ears yearn to hear; it’s not often that an enthusiast will intentionally build systems of both types, even though system builders like me love to do so. More likely, if confronted with the opposite style of system the audiophile will declare it unacceptable and attempt to move in a direction toward their ideal.

With this in mind, the Salk Soundscape 10 is to be considered a Romantic, or Impressionist speaker and definitely not a Pop Art type of transducer. Even though it utilizes some exceptionally refined drivers it is voiced to be subtle and smooth, not glaringly technical. In Pop Art one sees the lines with stark clarity, but in impressionist artwork the lines are secondary, while the use of light and shading is primary. Such is the case with the Soundscape; the “lines” are drawn generally but the ear is not drawn to them, so to speak. Rather, the tonality of the speaker carries the day.

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