Jeżeli nie czytaliście testu Nico EVO, to zajrzyjcie do przywołanego we wstępie wydania „Hi-Fi i Muzyki” 4/2024. Większość opisu można bowiem powtórzyć. W skrócie: monitory są tak przejrzyste i szczegółowe, że w pięciocyfrowej cenie bardziej chyba się nie da. Dochodzi do tego fenomenalna przestrzeń i jej organizacja. To wymarzony głośnik do klasyki, zwłaszcza dla osób, które chcą słyszeć każdy instrument osobno. A także do… studia. Tę opinię najwyraźniej podziela Bob Ludwig, jeden z najlepszych specjalistów od masteringu na świecie, który pracuje na najdroższych Egglestonach Ivy i chwali się tym tak samo, jak firma z Memphis jego poparciem.
Emmy dodały do brzmienia Nico to, czego można się było spodziewać. Niewykluczone, że wiele osób zdecyduje się właśnie na ten model, chociaż polecam zastanowienie. Obie opcje są tak samo dobre, ale każda ma swoje przewagi. Tę różnicę najprościej ująć następująco: Nico jest kwintesencją studyjnego monitora; Emma jego cywilną wersją.

O basie można powiedzieć więcej, przechodząc do rocka. Jest mocny i zdecydowany. Pompuje rytm energicznymi uderzeniami, pozostając przy tym szybkim i skoncentrowanym. W Nico EVO był twardszy i jeszcze szybszy; tutaj pozwala sobie na odrobinę miękkości, co akurat czyni słuchanie przyjemniejszym. Znów, w odniesieniu do rozmiaru membran, jego rozciągnięcie i siła okazują się imponujące. Emma zasługuje na tytuł basowego mistrza w swojej cenie, a przecież kosztuje niemało i ma liczną konkurencję. Znajdą się nawet dwukrotnie większe skrzynie, ale również z takich pojedynków może wyjść bez szwanku. Poza tym jest to bas świetnie trzymany w ryzach, bez śladu poluzowania, ponieważ nawet wspomniana miękkość opiera się na sprężynie i odczuwalnym zaburzeniu ciśnienia w pokoju przy każdym mocniejszym impulsie.

Kolejny atut stanowi dynamika, iście rockowa i koncertowa. Rytm i puls wysuwają się naprzód. Tak samo jak w symfonice doświadczamy studyjnej przejrzystości, poukładanych planów i separacji ścieżek, których nie powstydziłyby się słuchawki. Czasem wręcz odnosi się wrażenie, że to przesada, ale przecież głośniki nie produkują nowych sygnałów, ani nie dodają od siebie informacji, których nie zapisano na płycie. Mogą jedynie coś ograniczyć. Eggleston tego nie robi i po spotkaniu z dwoma modelami tej firmy mogę chyba powiedzieć, że to specjalność zakładu. Analityczna prezentacja to ich żywioł, a wyświetlanie detali, jakby nie były zagęszczone, osiąga poziom, na którym już myślimy, że więcej już nie trzeba.

Jeżeli szukacie miękkości, ciepła i płynnej narracji, to nie tutaj. W ogólnym ujęciu Emma EVO brzmi twardo, jasno i czysto. Pokazuje mnóstwo góry, którą można utemperować na przykład lampą (dobrym partnerem przypuszczalnie będzie Air Tight). Z tranzystorów idealne okazały się monobloki PS Audio BHK Mono 600; to przeciwwaga, a jednocześnie dopełnienie charakteru Egglestonów. Góra jest ostra, ale krystalicznie czysta i błyszcząca, a tego się nie da uzupełnić elektroniką. Tutaj znów objawia się studyjny charakter i dążenie do przekazania jak największej ilości informacji. Dream Theater buduje ścianę dźwięku. Nieduży pokój wypełnia gęste basisko. Słychać tempo, uderzenia, no i coś, co stanowi rzadkość w podobnym repertuarze: selektywność ścieżek. Jest agresywnie, twardo i brutalnie – dokładnie tak, jak ma być.

Link do recenzji: Eggleston Emma EVO – Hi-Fi i Muzyka

Listening started out with the Moor Amps Angel 6 power amplifier in charge, this is a powerful amplifier with an open and expansive character that was reflected in a spacious and detailed presentation from the Emmas. They worked really well with some live solo piano by Keith Jarrett (Testament Pt.3) where they tracked the variations in playing with ease and delivered the power of his left hand in full effect. This is not a bass heavy loudspeaker as can sometimes be the case with American designs but there’s plenty of low end available when required, and it’s well defined and timely which is what really counts.

It prefers smoother amplifiers to the fully exposed variety, and worked a little better with an ATC P2 power amp than the Moor Amps, this gave the balance a darker hue that makes it easier to enjoy high energy material. Dan Berkson’s album Dialogue features keyboards, trumpet and sax, the latter worked a treat with the Emmas delivering the dynamics of the band alongside the phenomenal groove they brew up on the track Unity. Patricia Barber’s tune Company came across with its weight and power in full effect, the drive and energy of the drums and bass inspiring a bit of arm flailing from the listening seat, as you do. On Bob Marley’s distinctly more laid back Natural Mystic the shaker is higher in the mix and the track is more open than usual. The Emmas are strong on reverb and leading edges, so echo and decay are well defined alongside the minutiae of detail that coalesce to form believable imaging.

I really liked the sound of Little Feat’s Red Streamliner on these speakers, Mike McDonald’s angelic backing vocals providing an ethereal quality that opens up the sound above the perfect rhythms of the band. The cavernous image produced on Kruder and Dorfmeister’s Deep Shit Pt1 & 2 was also very effective, especially when the really deep notes come along and threaten to disturb the building’s structure. Equally inspiring is Steely Dan’s Big Black Cow on DSD, this doesn’t usually cut it because I listen to the vinyl often enough to know its potential but here the timing and imaging were very good indeed.

Much listening ensued and all of it proved highly engaging and enjoyable. The Egglestonworks Emma Evolution is a highly revealing and capable loudspeaker in a very nicely appointed cabinet. Partnering source and amplification needs to be smooth and powerful for best results as these speakers make it very easy to hear what comes before them, which is another way of saying that they are transparent to the signal, and that is always a good thing.

Link do recenzji: Eggleston Emma EVO – The Ear

Take Freddy Kempf, playing Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto with the Bergen Philharmonic [BIS, SACD]: I was struck by how much more clearly I could follow the inner workings of the orchestra. When you attend a live performance, the orchestra is arrayed before you and it’s easy enough to follow an instrumental line, or a phrase, pretty much at will. Whereas even very good hi-fi often dissolves into a more impressionistic view, you experience the orchestra as an entity, with only the more prominent lines being available for inspection. The Emmas approached this aspect of the live experience more closely than anything I can recall at this price, with textures and tunefulness well beyond the norm.

And it all works on smaller-scale music, too. Antonio Forcione Live [Naim] and ‘Tarantella’ gave me textures and timbres, intimacy and ebullience; it was very clear how important every member of this small ensemble was to the whole of the musical event here. It does help turn music back into an event – that sense of performance, of a group of people with a common aim, that can often be overlooked, sadly, by systems which don’t resolve as well as the Emmas can. Timing is fundamentally important here, too. ‘Maurizio’s Party’ from the same album: bass notes from the cello were tight and tuneful, solidly underpinning the music; the percussion is fast, but also fully-textured, the shapes of the notes have time to fully develop, they aren’t cut off in the interests of pace or dynamics. Olafur Arnalds ‘This place was a shelter’ from For now I am Winter [Mercury Classics] was full of fine-boned detail, wonderfully contrasting the sonorous piano and ethereal electronica with tight, sinewy playing from the string quartet. This loudspeaker seems to revel in bringing out the full, lush detail and colour in a performance, but not candy-coated – there’s a firm grip on reality here, in all its multi-layered complexity.

The EgglestonWorks Emma Evo has perhaps the most lucid, limpid and insightful presentation of any loudspeaker at its price that I’ve yet heard. Time and again I found myself marvelling at the sheer depth of field this loudspeaker could reproduce. Take Jacques Loussier, ‘Pastorale in C Minor’ from Plays Bach [Telarc]: there’s generous spatial separation between the trio, with solid, stable and convincing images of the players. Instrumental colour is vivid, and consistent, timing tight and precise. There’s an oddity in the way André Arpino plays percussion on this track, consistently just behind the beat for whole sections of the music. It’s quite disconcerting, but clearly intentional; the Emma Evo shows the percussion to be set well back in the soundstage, but that’s not why he’s a little late, he’s very clearly doing this on purpose because he locks-in to other sections of the same track. It’s these sorts of insights that elevate the Emmas above the competition.

So where the Nico Evo exemplified the best in a smallish, standmounting loudspeaker – coherence, speed, imaging, invisibility – the Emma Evo takes those qualities and adds scale, weight and another layer of colour and texture. You still get all the pace, coherence and clarity, the limpid, lucid vision into the heart of the music, but you also get a bit more of that heart. It’s pretty clear that if there’s a ‘house sound,’ both the Emma and the Nico Evos conform to it. The Emma Evo isn’t a large loudspeaker, though neither is it small, but because of the sheer levels of insight and detail there’s no real sense that you’re being short-changed on large-scale performances, and small-scale stuff just invites you right in to share in the intimate, immersive music-making experience. They respond to a little tweaking, and they’ll reward quality in the upstream elements of your system, they’re just so very communicative of what’s going on. They are proof that in moving from stand-mount to floorstander you don’t have to compromise on the strengths of a superlative small loudspeaker, you can just add other qualities on top if you do it right.

Link do recenzji: Eggleston Emma EVO – Hi-Fi+

Moving to jazz, Chet Baker’s voice on his 1956 LP Chet Baker Sings [Pacific Jazz PJ-1222] never had the lissome innocence and haunting barely-there effect it did as heard through the Emma EVOlutions. Similarly, the pure, burnished tone of his trumpet (also “barely there”) became a delight to my ears, as his thoughts on each of the album’s standards unfolded in precise, economical statements. Try “My Funny Valentine” for starters. Similarly, Blossom Dearie’s eponymous 1956 recording, reissued on CD in 1989 [Verve 837 934-2], was delightful. In one of Norman Granz’s better recordings, this CD beautifully captures the innocent young girl in her 32-year old dewy voice. And, the six-decade-old mono recording yielded nothing to today’s technology, the Emma EVOs being thoroughly of "today's technology," revealing all of this vocalist's idiosyncrasies.

Considering idiosyncratic voices, another has to be that of Tom Waits. His 1975 LP Nighthawks At the Diner [Asylum Records 7E-2008], recorded live before a select audience at the Record Plant in Los Angeles, has it all -- upright bass, drums, piano, tenor sax and Waits’s raspy voice, captured truthfully by engineer Bones Howe in a snug acoustic space. The balance between the lows, mids and highs with the Emma EVOlutions was perfect. That, along with their transparency and dynamic capabilities, allowed this music to bloom such that I felt I was among the lucky ones in the audience. Finally, on Danish neo R&B singer Erika de Casier’s debut album, Essentials (16-bit/44.1kHz FLAC), the subterranean bass heard throughout was occasionally augmented with even deeper, more ominous tremors, such as that heard a third of the way in on the song “Intimate.” Once again, the Emma EVOlutions provided an extraordinarily visceral listening experience. And so it went with each well engineered vocal recording –- in many instances the Emma EVOlutions replaced the somewhat synthetic voices presented by lesser speakers with eerily lifelike, three-dimensional portrayals.

Sometime later, I streamed Jimmy Smith’s 1956 album At the Organ, Vol. 3 (16-bit/44.1kHz FLAC), which I had just finished listening to with my subwoofered Revel M22s. I was gobsmacked as the trio sprang to life before me in Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in vivid, palpable sound. On “Willow Weep for Me,” Smith’s inimitable Hammond organ had such physicality it nearly brought tears to my eyes. To my surprise, no subwoofer was needed to coax out the deepest bass-pedal lines -- they were not only heard but felt. I was hearing something special here.

A cornucopia of string sounds is found on Irish piper and low-whistle virtuoso Davy Spillane’s debut LP Atlantic Bridge [Tara 3019]. Released over 30 years ago, it features Spillane’s dazzling mastery of the Uilleann pipes with support from such esteemed players as guitarist Albert Lee, banjoist Béla Fleck and Dobroist Jerry Douglas. Whether it was Lee’s “countrified” Telecaster licks, Fleck’s nimble picking or Douglas’s puckish Dobro, the unique timbre of each instrument was revealed as well as I have ever heard. The presentation was full of moments (which I’m sure we’ve all had) when a small performance detail or microdynamic shift caused me to lean in, toward the music, with a smile on my face. The Emma EVOlutions created such moments with ease.

Link do recenzji: Eggleston Emma EVO – The Audio Beat

The tonal balance the Emmas exhibited, was for the most part very accurate and smooth.  Their overall sonic characteristics lean slightly toward a warm sound, rather than bright – pretty much exactly where you would expect a good speaker to land.

To evaluate how the Emma EVOlution handled guitars, I turned to Exodus and their song called “No Love” – the first minute has a single guitarist playing, before the aggression of the track bursts out. Stringed instruments were extremely detailed when listening on the Emma EVOlution.  On numerous tracks of different music genres, I was absolutely amazed at how accurate and detailed acoustic guitars sounded.  I have lots of experience listening to live guitarists and with my eyes closed, these speakers made me feel as if someone was playing a heavy-gauge 6-string guitar right in my living room.

After several hours of listening I realized that the Emma EVOlution may be one of the least fatiguing speakers I’ve listened to in recent memory.  I enjoy silently critiquing  audio show rooms and even more so friends’ systems, whether praising or bashing them in my mind.  The one thing I can’t stand and won’t tolerate is a fatiguing tweeter.  The tweeter used in this EgglestonWorks speaker is made to their specs by Morel.  It’s as fine a driver as can be found today.  My ears actually felt great after listening.  Not unlike my legs after a 100km road bike ride.  In fact, my ears never asked for breaks, even after 4 hours of Genesis and a little wine.  My legs did, however, require occasional breaks.

A speaker’s ability to image well and paint a large soundstage always impresses me.  The Emma EVOlution offered spatial imaging in spades, and a depth that was generous and visual.  As most critical listeners do, I often closed my eyes and was easily able to locate each musician within the soundstage. Case in point was Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” track on their Celebration Day live album.  Robert Plant, with his shirt wide open, was so far forward on the stage it seriously felt like he was standing on the edge.  Meanwhile, Jimmy and the gang were nestled safely back from the crowd and in their respective positions.  The keyboards on this version really add another dimension to this great song.

The depth of Peter Gabriel’s voice on the track “Fly on a Windshield”, from the Genesis The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway album, was a thing of scary marvel.  His voice emitted from left of center and simultaneously also from outside the soundstage.  This album is a recording that really requires some special gear to play it at its fullest potential.  I’ve heard this entire album (which is possibly my favourite album of all time) on a system worth nearly $175,000 and remarkably the performance of the Emma EVOlution wasn’t that far away from that performance.  This speaker approached a very similar level of realism, tonal balance and rhythmic timing as a system that costs many times that.

Link do recenzji: Eggleston Emma EVO – NOVO High-End

Excelentní vzorek (hudebně i zvukově) japonského jazzu 70. let „Breeze“ (Jiro Inagaki / Sould Media | „WaJazz: Japansese Jazz Spectacle Vol. 1“ | 2022 | Nippon Columbia | 180GHMVLP01) zněl skrze Emma EVOlution s excelentní intenzitou, reprosoustavy snesou jakoukoliv představitelnou hlasitost bez nejistoty a krom nižších úrovní dodávají napjatou, intenzivní dynamiku, plnou těla, důrazu a masitosti. Když se měniče pohnou, tak už se skutečně hýbou, je tu spousta síly a fyzické šťavnatosti. Zvuku i energie je víc, než byste čekali i podle již jisté rozměrnosti ozvučnic a měničů – napoví to ale mohutné cívky. Možná by se dalo říct, že k předávání energie přistupují EgglestonWorks se vskutku americkou velkolepostí.

I k rozboru detailů se Emma EVOlution staví spíš rázně až dravě, „Smyčcový kvartet č. 1, „Métamorphoses nocturnes“ (Quatuor Diotima | „Metamorphosis Ligeti“ | 2023 | Pentatone | 5187061) byla seřazená, disciplinovaná a hmotná, pořádek ve skladbě je vedený velmi pevnou a jistou, přesto ne technicky strohou rukou. Detaily nejsou úplně svítivé, stejně jako se nezdá, že by EgglestonWorks šly po takové té naprosté audiofilské prokreslenosti až k mikrodetailům, zvuk je organický a zřetelný naprosto úměrně tomu, že se pohybujeme ve vysoké kvalitativní třídě.

Ve „Faith“ Alfa Carlsona a Jiří Kotača Quartet („Our Stories“ | 2024 | Animal Music | ANI123-2) se Emma EVOlution spouštěly skutečně hodně poctivě dolů, ne nezřetelným zabručením, ale konkrétním, mocným a kontrolovaným tónem. Hudební scéna byla solidně, neochvějně ukotvená, hmatatelná, docela velká a důstojně, s nadhledem poskládaná. Není to takový ten evropský mikromanagement zvuku, kde je všechno v dokonale holografickém obrazu, ale přesto jde o skvělé stereo.

Spousta mléka a krve protékala též úžasně pozitivní skladbou „Cambridge 1963“ Jóhana Jóhanssona v čele s houslemi Mari Samuelsen („LIFE“ | 2024 | Deutsche Grammophon | 00028948657735). Plnoštíhlý, bytelný zvuk je plný barev, krásně poslouchatelný a bezkonfliktní, silný, snad trochu tuhý, ale velký v energii asi jako rozjetá lokomotiva. Emma EVOlution hudbou ochotně naplňují prostor, dávají pocítit až fyzickým důrazem každé přejetí smyčce přes struny houslí a zvládají ukočírovat mohutný hudební tok.

Link do recenzji: Eggleston Emma EVO – Hi-Fi Voice

Link: Eggleston Emma Evo – The Ear – 5 Star Badge