The same picture appears with »Featherlight« from the wonderful album »Slowly, Slowly« by Siril Malmedal Hauge. The size ratios are absolutely correct and the imaging of the singer is perfectly palpable. In doing so the MB5 B makes every nuance of her vocal performance audible in a most natural form; it even reveals very faint breathing noises at some points which had remained hidden from me so far. At the same time it clearly highlights sibilants without presenting them in a pesky way, making Siril’s chanting sound so natural that she almost seems to be present in the flesh. Next I put on the album »Ojos de Gato« by Giovanni Guidi which came out last year, and also with this more complex lineup hardly a sheet of paper fits between the canned music and my own emotional world: the MB5 B places the opulent drumkit, the double bass, the piano and the two wind players on a very spacious stage that is accurately staggered far into the depth and floodlit by bright spotlights.
Light through the whole spectrum
At the same time the instruments have so much breathing room that Chad Taylor on the big drums and Francisco Mela on the drumkit don’t violate each other’s turf and can enter into a fruitful dialogue. The communication between Gianluca Petrella on trombone and James Brandon Lewis on tenor saxophone, which starts right at the beginning of the first track, »Revolución«, quickly takes on a very pushing, sometimes dissonant character, but the ScansonicHD is not at all deterred by this: it fans out the entire timbral spectrum of the two instruments in all shades and gives them the due, pervasive conciseness while the musicians are virtually duelling. When finally pianist Giovanni Guidi joins in the hot action with emphatic tones, it becomes fully apparent how masterfully the MB5 B overlooks the melodious entanglements that give the whole performance its particular charm.
After a creative seven-year break Emmanuel Top, the doyen of acid techno, has produced a new album. »Moma« is a collage of fifteen eponymous tracks some of which are closely related whilst others mark a turning point. Maybe this is because the iconic figure will soon turn fifty, but this work contains no trace whatsoever of the spectacles of the days gone by. Instead Emmanuel Top surprises this time with elements of ambient techno and plenty of atmospheric sound effects in an accurately arranged sound image. However, the abysmally deep grumbling bass runs on »Moma Part 3« make me want to put this graceful speaker through its paces. Briefly: in a sovereign way the MB5 B almost climbs down to the final rung of the scale. It pushes like crazy, yet remains unconditionally controlled and, on a side note, displays an unusually high level stability.
Realistic dimensions
Recently Marco Schiavo and Sergio Marchegiani recorded the piano sonatas for four hands, Köchel catalogue 19d, 358, 381 and 521 by Mozart; this excellent recording by Decca captures the grand piano rather directly. The MB5 B uses this reference to deliver an exceptionally suspense-laden performance, indulging in a magnificent wealth of timbres and convincingly rendering the dynamic range of the concert piano. I had already expected that here, too, it would trace the sound body with razor-sharp contours and in a realistic dimension. Just like the fact that it’s an easy task for this loudspeaker to clearly distinguish the two pianists from each other on the keyboard, even when they’re playing in similar pitches. But I hadn’t expected how far its imaging precision would reach here and what emotional effects it would produce with a piano piece: the representation has a holographic character – like carved in stone the grand piano is standing there, ready for an all-round view in your mind’s eye. Hat’s off to these brilliant speakers!
