Only you!

The other day I heard the Meistersinger Overture for the first time again - this, or something similar, is how a witty and profound aphorism by Friedrich Nietzsche begins. In it, the thinker strikes cultural-philosophical sparks from his deeply ambivalent attitude toward Wagner's music, torn between fascination and repulsion. I always found the phrase that one could experience significant music »once again for the first time« particularly apt, both rhetorically and factually. Every passionate listener knows this. One's self or the circumstances have become different. Suddenly one hears the supposedly familiar under new auspices. What brought me to the High End were such equally ear-opening and sometimes disturbing experiences: Good sound, I soon learned, was not simply a luxurious ingredient to music that could be enjoyed in lower quality without damage, just less comfortably. In the true sense, it is rather the access to the music itself. How wide the gates open all at once when a new device clears away obstacles that you sometimes didn't even suspect were there in the first place!

This is especially true for loudspeakers. No component causes more ear-pleasing changes. That's why they are not only noticed and appreciated, but literally revered: for many listeners, they are often even more distinctive objects of desire than other components. I can sympathize with this. I, too, now look with pleasure and at the same time with awe at the picture-perfect, one meter twenty high columns of the Liszt Reference, clad in noble cherry real wood veneer, which still stand unplayed in my listening room.

The reputation of Vienna Acoustics loudspeakers precedes them. The name alone must sound enticing to the ears of all aficionados. It's true that Peter Gansterer develops his meticulously sounded transducers in a small town in Lower Austria. But in Vienna, the capital of music, the ardent lover of classical music grew up, there he experienced and studied the famous halls, the Musikverein, the Konzerthaus, the State Opera in detail. How often I have heard melomaniacs and connoisseurs of classical music praise the loudspeakers of Vienna Acoustics. Their musicality, their naturalness and their pleasant timbre, they say again and again, are hard to beat. But I have never been able to experience them myself.

But now she stands in her imperial grandeur, the Liszt Reference. Resting on massive and yet so elegant aluminum spikes, it plays itself in. This takes time. Although the Liszt already sounds quite good fresh out of the box, at least fifty hours are necessary, gladly more, until the mechanics and materials loosen up and begin to play at the height of their possibilities. That the set-up also requires care is already indicated by its most obvious feature: As with the predecessor presented a good ten years ago, the Liszt still without Reference, the mid-high unit sits like the head on the body of the woofer unit. Thanks to an aluminum »neck«, the autonomous cabinet can be angled to the listening position. The reason for this is clear: the shorter the sound waves, the more directional they are. With the degree of tweeter alignment, I can therefore choose to make the sound image sharper or create a somewhat more diffuse spatiality. This is also a question of taste. Once this is satisfied, I lock the head with the included screwdriver.

Here, one should take the time to explore the full potential of the noble speaker. After all, the head holds a very fine chassis, an elaborately handmade coax driver and thus a point source. When tweeters and midrange drivers share the acoustic center, phase shifts are eliminated and thus spatiality is optimized. Even the older Liszt worked here with the patented Flat Spidercone technology. Now it has been further developed, chief engineer Piotr Cholewa forcefully explains its advantages: A flat diaphragm eliminates phase shifts, after all, it vibrates almost ideally piston-like without undesirable partial vibrations, for example, at the edges. Admittedly, there is a disadvantage: it is inherently less rigid than a dome or cone. Vienna Acoustics counteracts this with a composite diaphragm, with a mixture of special polypropylenes stiffened at critical points by fiberglass struts. This achieves the optimal balance between stiffness and internal damping. At 2,600 hertz and with a slope of 12 dB, the 15-centimeter-diameter midrange driver passes to the tweeter in the center, a double-coated fabric dome. With its small but distinctive phase plug, it is reminiscent of a ring radiator, it then also adapts the technology of the Super Tweeter from the Klimt reference series and wants to ensure maximum resolution at the lowest nerve level.

Atmospherically light color spectrum

This flat membrane technology now also benefits the bass section. The predecessor had still worked with cone drivers here. Here, too, the material mix of polypropylene and glass fiber allows the crossover to be constructed as simply as possible. Consequently, Vienna Acoustics relies on single-wiring and also manufactures the high-quality binding posts in-house. Three 7-inch woofers sit in the imposing woofer cabinet, which is stabilized internally by seven struts against unwanted resonances. It divides into two chambers that have been damped differently, resulting in a different acoustic behavior of the otherwise identical drivers. The woofer in the upper chamber has its own bass reflex flow port at the rear and docks the midrange frequencies by fading out at 230 hertz with a slope of 6 dB. The remaining woofers share the lower chamber and another flowport. They are supposed to act more like a subwoofer, Piotr Cholewa explains to me, going down really low and making music as accurately as possible.

This can be verified. The Liszt has meanwhile settled in and spreads its intense, yet atmospherically light color spectrum in my listening room. After some back and forth, I prefer a distance to the rear wall of a little more than one meter and only a minimal angulation of the mid-high unit. The woofer cabinet is almost parallel. The two speakers effortlessly overcome a base width of more than three meters without creating an acoustic hole in the middle. On the contrary, their sweet spot actually appears more like a »sweet area«.