“One Dove” from Anthony and the Johnsons supremely lovely The Crying Light was one song that flipped my switch from listening to feeling. Anohni, as she now prefers to be called, has a voice that can melt hearts and “One Dove” with its simple acoustic accompaniment highlights her vibrato’d brilliance. Through the Oso/Parasound/Ayre/totaldac system, each instrument spoke with full voice that felt fully formed in-Barn making interplay that much more dramatic. When the music image is spread out yet perfectly stable, my brain interprets this as an event in and of itself to be given my full attention.

My single playlist, called “Fun”, contains 150 songs and 12 hours of music and I listened to every last one during the Oso’s stay. “Fun” is full of music I love for one reason or another, while offering a very broad palette of sounds, styles, moods, and more and the Oso played them all very nearly flawlessly. From the delicacy and slow swing of “Warm Canto” from Mal Waldron’s wonderful The Quest, to the kaleidoscopic tone colors of “Sweet Jane” from the Rolling Stones Flowers, the delicacy and sorrow of Giacinto Scelsi’s “Ave Maria”, to the barroom scuffle that is “My Baby’s Got The Strangest Ways” from Southern Culture on the Skids, to the Swans brutal “Cloud of Unknowing” from Deliquescence, Grinderman’s pounding “When My Baby Comes”, and a hundred plus more in between, the Oso was more than capable of matching the sheer scope of sounds and moods on offer.

Another aspect of the Oso’s way with music is they really zero in on time and timing as an essential ingredient in music reproduction. To my mind, this is another outcome of what strikes me as a very nicely balanced speaker. Reproduction is so believable, so consuming, that I felt free to explore different aspects of the music at hand. While some speakers can nearly overwhelm with some aspect of reproduction, Great bass!, the Oso overwhelm by delivering music as a container of things deeper and more meaningful than an accumulation of sounds. If I were to create an ideal hifi wish list, this quality would certainly be near the top.

The Oso allow for a very clear view of what’s going on upstream, which may or may not be a good thing. I believe this a very good thing because it means that the Oso’s sonic character does not overwhelm the rest of the system. While everything in a hifi, including the room, leaves a sonic fingerprint, the last thing you want from a speaker is for it to smear the voices of the accompanying cast. Give me transparency or give me dearth.

Link do recenzji: Eggleston Oso – Twittering Machines

Link: Eggleston Oso – Twittering Machines – Favorite Speakers