The Ucellos rock you back on your heels with their immediacy and speed. Blam! Suddenly there’s sound in the room and equally suddenly you realise that after a lifetime of listening to cone drivers in ported or infinite baffle speakers you’ve been listening to transients rendered slow and soft by the inertia of cone and driver technology. Never hear good horns and you’ll never know. But now I feel that I’ve joined a rather exclusive club. The speed of horns is really, really compelling. My name is Kevin and I am a speed-aholic.
Mears of course is far too polite to tell you that your cone and baffle speakers are inferior, but once you’ve heard and acknowledged the difference all his enthusiasm comes tumbling out. How did his ‘journey’ to horns come about?
“Well, it comes down to my own audio preferences which I found were simply not satisfied by other speakers. I began at the deep end with huge Tannoy cabinets and built some Westminsters, then moved onto Autographs as I was interested in the corner horn aspect of design. These were extraordinarily hard to build. Paul Voigt, a designer I admire, was involved in the development of the Autograph and I subsequently found out where I could hear stereo pairs of his own Voigt corner horns, Altecs and other older types. Through travelling to hear these audio rarities my circle of friends grew and I found that people were not only generous with advice and input but were keen to visit me and hear what I was working on.
“All the time I was working on these things I had a pair of Klipsch Belles I had bought but not listened to, so one night I put them on and found a direct nature that appealed. They were different to designs of the same period from the UK; there was something in there that was more engaging, faster. However, the mid horn was metal and ringy, and so I started exploring and found a few folks in USA who were working with the old Klipsch designs with new crossovers, horns and drivers. It was all too tempting and I ended up buying and trying all sort of combinations. In the end it was a particular wooden tractrix design of horn that really took me and that’s what I use today. Nothing of the original Belle design remains in the Ucellos. The bass horn is similar, and that’s all, but I wanted to maintain the look of what I consider to be a beautiful original design and pay homage to the inspiration that Paul Klipsch’s work gave me.”
After angling the Ucellos slightly further in towards my listening position, Mears and his pal departed chez Fiske wishing me happy reviewing. I left the Ucellos playing while I cooked supper, but after my wife and I had eaten, I kissed the dog goodnight and slunk back to the listening room to begin The Serious Work.
By the way, the dog is a Vendee Griffon we call Hector…… just in case you thought I was making a rude joke about my wife. Shame on you.
I don’t consciously own any so-called audiophile recordings, buying my software purely on the basis of my musical preferences, but if the definition of an audiophile recording is one where dynamics and clarity and audio veracity are to the fore, then I guess my copy of Joe Jackson’s Body & Soul (AMLX65000) means I delude myself and that I do own at least one.
Oh, what a record! I got my copy in a used vinyl shop in Reading, Berkshire a month or so back and yes, while I’m at it, why not give a shout-out to The Sound Machine? Lovely people, plus a great and always changing selection of used vinyl of many genres. They’ll send stuff all over the world. www.thesoundmachine.uk.com
Released in ’84, Body & Soul, so the sleeve notes say, took five weeks to make, with much effort put into finding the right venue – they actually ended up using a Masonic Lodge – the right microphones – Neumann M-50s were used for the whole-band backing tracks – and the right mastering machine, a 3M DMS-81 four track. Treat yourself to a copy and tell me if you like it too.
Driven by my predominantly Audio Note system, the Ucellos took this benchmark recording by the scruff of the neck and stood it up in front of me in a way that my own Audio Note Es do not. As a rule I can’t be bothered with all that nonsense about soundstage depth and placement – it’s musicality and tonality I want, not a sonic hologram – but the Ucellos simply won’t be denied; a hologram is what they throw, and it demands attention. Sit right in the narrow sweet spot and they project performers with a chiselled-from-granite confidence that is so mesmerising that I temporarily forgot what I’d come there for. In the end I shifted sideways on the sofa and sat way off axis just so that I could just concentrate on what I was hearing. It’s notable that the Ucellos’ tonal balance did not shift when I moved sideways.
I think of all the instruments that best showcase the speed with which a transducer can respond to a recording, the piano has to be it. Be My Number two is not my favourite track from Body & Soul. Until near the end, it is simply Jackson singing at the piano. It is the way the Ucellos reveal the DNA of the piano that really shocks, showing it emphatically as a percussion instrument whose attack can be moderated at the player’s will by controlling the speed of strike, and by the use of dampers. The Ucellos show the choices Jackson makes through his fingers and his feet in a way that slower speakers cannot; but they are not coldly analytical either. The bitter sweet irony and yearning in Jackson’s voice is revealed in spades, and there’s warmth and organism without overt colouration.
I have owned a copy of Du Pre’s Elgar Violin Concerto under Barbirolli on EMI for some 20 years and in the early days I wept copious tears while it played, old softy that I am. But as time has passed, familiarity has hardened my heart, or desiccated my tear ducts, so that in recent years while I listen and am moved, there is no outward sign of the remaining turmoil within. The Ucellos overturned this composure so that emotions once more overwhelmed me. What was different? The remarkable ability of the Ucellos to better keep pace with the recorded artist so that her timing and nuance are more faithfully reproduced.
What tortured souls Elgar and Du Pre were. Recorded eight years before multiple sclerosis forced her to stop performing, was this performance solely driven by her, I think unique, understanding of Elgar’s work and her insight into his troubled mind, or was it also inspired by a premonition that her life was to be cut so short? Listen to this familiar recording through Ucellos, and I’ll wager the wonderful tonality and timing will make you ask questions too.
ALK’s brutally abrupt crossovers ensure that there is no co-driver interference between the three elements of the Ucellos and the integration is clean and seamless. I heard absolutely no sense of cupping with voices – and that, I am told, is frequently a trait exhibited by horns. And the Ucellos’ dynamic range is simply extraordinary. They have a matchless ability to portray the softest, most subtle information on recordings, then in the next millisecond almost blast you out of your listening chair with a crescendo so fast and so loud it feels as if it might wake the dead.
The Saturday Sessions 2011, is a two-disc set published by the BBC covering a selection of live acts recorded in session during a recurring Saturday afternoon radio programme. Will Young sings a truly beautiful version of Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill. I sometimes tease visiting musical know-it-alls with this track. They almost invariably fail to name the vocalist.
Me: So what do you think?
Visitor: ‘Spine tingling. Gorgeous singing. Fantastic pitch and control. Wonderful emotion. But I haven’t a clue.’
It’s Will Young.
‘Who?….. No…… It can’t be!…… He can’t…’
Sing?
“If I only could, I’d make a deal with God, and I’d get him to swap our places”, whispers Young. Except he ends the word God with a subtle t sound: ‘Godt’. It is so quiet I’ve never noticed it before, but once I’d cottoned on to how the Ucellos reveal minutiae like this it became a bit of a game to see what else turned up in familiar recordings.
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