First with the Norwegian sax player Jan Garbarek in a musical dialogue with the Hilliard Ensemble. »Mnemosyne« – the Greek word for memory – is the title of the album which ought to be missing in no record collection. For the test we put on »Gloria«. Exactly positioned the four voices are facing the listener. Because of the reverberations in the nave this recording is already rendered spaciously. But now while listening over the Soulutions, one can do without this knowledge completely. It is a church, that much is clearly perceivable. 



The »Agnus Dei« is accompanied by Garbarek very empathetically. We know this recording in and out, why does it sound so different today, so intense? First it is the prominent increase in articulation sounds, the perfection in the no longer blurred church reverberation and the much more intense timbres – wonderful. The imaging qualities are so fascinating that you get the real impression of being physically present in the house of God. Why is this so sensational? High-wattage amplifiers often carry the stigma of »being too heavy to walk«. By this we understand that they can truly play very loud, for instance they can reproduce a tympani with full force, but for the price of muffled details. Here we don’t notice anything like that. Maybe we have been influenced by the power specs? Well, let’s take out the Dire Straits classic »Private Investigations«. Even the noise floor in the first bars appears more cultivated than normally – and this is no joke.



Then Mark Knopfler begins to play on his guitar which no longer sounds thin now, yet unfolds the intrinsic energy that this string instrument really possesses. He is standing clear, contoured and with a three-dimensional effect between the loudspeakers. Instruments faded in and out via the mixing console are relentlessly exposed and this in a way which does not disturb the music, but enrich it. At 3:49 we can barely trust our ears: with abyssal depth and mighty thrust the bass is towering in the room – the Revel was not capable of doing that before, was it? Actually we don’t need to mention the falling glass (5:41) and the pressed doorhandle (5:46) any more – it sounds as if everything was taking place right here in the listening room. 



Hence we can anticipatingly sum up: absolute imaging of details, perfect spatiality and an overall performance which surpasses the high expectations by far.

Swiss men among themselves …

Let’s have some fun now. For these purposes the Swiss have a gorgeously suitable band named Yello. And so their album »Motion Picture« slides into the Audionet. Scarcely anybody would believe what the Soulutions are doing with »Get On«. Surely many a discotheque would be happy to deliver bass of this quality. Again it’s the F 52 which surprises us. Because it is pumping bass frequencies so low that you can literally blow-dry your hair at the bass reflex port. If you listen to the same track over heavy-calibered integrated high-end amplifiers afterwards, a feeling of listening only to a portable radio is spreading. This does not mean that the integrated amps are so bad; it’s rather the Soulutions which are simply so damned good.

 

The performance level is bound to mess up the test routine, for now everybody wants to hear his or her favourite songs or even the whole record at best. So »Bubbling Under« by Yello is added to the list as well. The mix of various sequencer lines and Dieter Meier’s vocoder-alienated voice becomes a total work of art. Whereas otherwise we had the choice between so blurred that one can no longer hear any details and so precisely resolved that the overall impression gets lost, the Soulutions do both in a perfect synthesis: despite the wealth of details the entity is preserved unaltered. Now it also gets obvious how sophisticatedly this record was produced.



If the received sonic impression is to be confirmed, then Anna Netrebko should accept our invitation, right? So we let the Grande Dame sing »Sempre Libera« from Verdi’s »La Traviata«. According to the first impression the Soulutions can do better than the soprano vocalist. This impression arises because at no point we get even the faintest notion that the hifi chain is approaching the margin. Open, free and far from all limitations, thus can be described the performance projected into the listening room. 



With »Ave Maria« the Soulution mono blocks furnish the last necessary evidence that they are the best power amplifiers. The chain celebrates Netrebko’s singing with perfection. The colorature of her voice is accurately reproduced. One cannot but say that awe is inspired by that marvellous voice and its consummate reproduction. It’s fabulous – never before during the past three decades has the author been listening to music over a chain in such a way.

Deutsch