It is without any doubt my curiosity and Alex's www.raalribbon.com usual hospitality and his own person of which billions of I just came home, left in a vacuum, of having my mind totally blown into nothingness and "Eternity"...! Why, well simply because listening to those speakers turns your oh so rooted knowledge, prejudgment and expectations upside down. It tears your trousers down and f**** you before you see it coming. OK what are we dealing with here? A cylindrical omni ribbon where each ribbon is fixed in a form that slides down into pre machined grooves in between the mega big round neo stick magnets. Micrograms of foil tied in a tremendous magnetic gap of enormous field strength. So few micrograms of aluminum, but 18 of them! Enormous moving area for a treble driver. Unheard of absolutely. • 18 x 3" double magnet drivers designed by Alex himself in a sextet sounded omni cylinder totally aligned to the omni ribbons. Completely dead cabinet for such a cluster of drivers and the cavity is totally stuffed with cotton dampening. • The "smallest" open baffle cube containing 5 x 15" customized drivers each with very low moving mass and tremendous magnetic neo structure to move that small mass, but such a big moving area. The cube it self is cast in bronze with a rough soft surface which has a waxed patina. Pictures can't justify its beauty in reality. And as mentioned, it's an open baffle with the 6th • All unified total timelignment. A filter of which I don't know the details of, yet. The filter is to be placed above the omni midrange cylinder and the omni ribbon. A Cylindrical hat on top of the omni ribbon and the fabric cylinders will hide the midrange section for the good final look. At my audition the filters were spread in a bird's nest on the floor, but will be fully assembled as it should be. All this listed were thought out and mastered by Alex himself. SOUND: Yes...this is why I named my mail with "There is something I have to tell you", because it is of such different character than I have ever have heard before. Being so used to this and that speakers principle basically sound and way of dispersing sound, this is something completely different and differs from everything else I hard in my entire life. I have to admit, I really though I should hear a defused sound due to reflections from the surrounding walls. No sweet spot. Blurred image and sound all over the place in all directions disturbing and being an obstacle to hear dynamics, details and pin pointing the instrument is the sound stage. But NO pals. NO! It is like you have say, a big ball room, and you are there yourself and the performing band or orchestra. The speakers are completely acoustical invisible and it seems the music is just materializing it self out of nothing. You don't even think about room tweaking, because what room? Yes, just like that. Yes you hear the music, the band etc as you where conducting the musicians yourself. A piano has the size of a piano exactly, in 3 dimensions. A violin is recognized as a special box with some strings tied to it and a bow touching the strings. So are the voices, so is everything presented to you. The speakers themselves are tremendously effortless, reproducing each and every detail without the slightest audible distortion, no matter the SPL it's reproducing. Incredible. Are the fast? Yes, fast as hell. Does something "stick" out or in? Nope! What about the bass? Normal open baffle sound. Cabinet sound? Hollowness? Nope guys. They growl and groove, going incredibly deep down, having kick as I never heard before, shakes you like you were a feather in the air. Distortionless free open and deep bass like The midrange effortlessly reflects what ever there is to find in a recording. Fast. Tonally correct and perfectly matches the omni ribbon and the omni bass. The treble omni driver is again so effortless serving you high frequencies like getting treated in a 3 star Michelin restaurant. The do not sound like traditional ribbons or neither the ribbons Alex so successfully sells all over the world. They are soft, crystal clear high rangers with no particular signature. The whole speaker is tuned to the mellow side which in this case just makes the music more true and believable. The dynamics seems to be unlimited. We went so loud that I though I would be deaf after this, but OK, I did not become deaf, maybe because of the lack of distortion and any stress of any kind. Alex and I, with our heads together, could not scream to each other in the ears and hear one word! Cranking them down just let you feel you are moving a bit away from the big ball room. The signature, if we can call it that in this case, remains the same. You are just left with the though: What if these speakers were connected to some awesome good sounding powerful tube amps? My God. What would we then hear? Just all this but with more of it all. Even more elegant ball room and an overall better audible smell of everything. These speakers perform so radically different than any other speakers I heard...in the good way. They change your mindset of how things should sound and could sound. Because, before Eternity was born, there was nothing like it. In this very moment, I'm still under the deep impression of these speaker's presentation of music. And that will last for quite a while I think. And it will take a very long time to have another chance to have another listen as Alex packs everything and sends the whole shit to the US on Monday where thousands of people can audit them at the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest. They will not come back to Serbia and we have to wait until Alex makes the next pair. With emotions over hearing all this, I congratulate Alex for giving the worlds audiophiles a chance to hear their music in a completely different and positive way. Gerner |
