22-Mar-2015, 23:58
(22-Mar-2015, 22:26)stonedragon Wrote: from the article they said this...I fully agree! It is absolutely phantastic how rich the Phantoms sound. You can listen to almost any music at high and at low volumes. The sound image stays stable and neutral. Also the soundstage stays constant.
the sound of the Phantom looks much more precise, clear, almost surgically. It is amazing that the clean sound (measured in peak as 102 db) even at high volume without distorting clean and out of the speakers penetrates. It is just louder.
I noted this because of trashken comments about the speakers being 'bright'.
It struck me today that on certain tracks the clarity is so much 'up there', with nothing left out that such a presentation could be thought as 'bright'. Personally I don't think so. It is just that these speakers eke out the last bit of detail in a track and are not forgiving and will reveal a recording with surgical precision. Some may like that sort of sound others may not, but for me it suits me just fine; because I've heard things on recordings that I simply did not know where there. I know that might sound very clichéd but it is true with the 'Phantoms' (btw, try 'Hotel California' on the album 'Hell Freezes Over' by the 'Eagles - brilliant set at about 50 - wow!!!)
A strange behaviour occurred to my stereo setup two days ago what could explain some of the 'disappointed' experience some reported here. They listened to the Phantoms either in Paris or London and reported back that the soundstage was small compared to a setup with the expert system. I cannot comment on this but experienced that I was listening to a 'strangely' configuered Phantom pair a few days ago. I found out through some testing with in-phase and out-of-phase played white noise from a Test CD that in the out-of-phase white noise track only one phantom was playing while the in-phase track played on both Phantoms. I used Spark and played the Test CD from Qobuz. Similarly, the left channel was strongly attenuated, specifically the bass when I played the same out-of-phase white noise track through an apple TV via Toslink on the Phantoms. On another Apple TV all was playing fine on my old analog system. So I could track down that apparently only one Phantom was playing the correct stereo channel while the other Phantom played in mono. This obviously resulted in cancellation of the out-of-phase signal. In conclusion: It could happen that one of the phantoms was configured as mono, even though I am rather certain I did not configure it as single nor as middle speaker, but as one of the stereo pairs in Spark. After I resetted the system and reconfiguered it again all worked well, with great sound stage and both speakers playing the out-of-phase track. It is quite clear the the sound stage is compromised when the two Phantoms are not configured as pair of left and right speakers and the buggy Spark might cause some problems there. This might be the reason that some were not so impressed about the soundstage and others are. in my case the soundstage of the Phantoms is wider and better defined than on my B&W 802 that so far impressed me exactly inthis criterion.
So from time to time test your configuration if out-of-phase tracks play well in stereo configuration.
