Excerpt from Michael Fremer's review of Musical Fidelity Titan Power Amplifier
Antony Michaelson had brought along a copy of Piano Music in a Church, a recording of solo-piano works by Chopin and Debussy, performed in concert by Endre Hegedus on a Steinway D grand and recorded in a small Irish sanctuary using a pair of microphones run directly into a Nagra IVS TC analog open-reel tape recorder (CD, Tone-Pearls TPRCD1; also available as digital downloads from www.toneapearls.com). Tone-Pearls calls its postproduction technique “Almost Analogue Digital.” According to the liner notes, there’s no post-recording processing— each CD is a “master disc” individually created and tested. How many plays they get before the tape wears out I don’t know, but the copy I have is as fi ne a piano recording as I’ve heard on CD. Among other familiar pieces, Hegedus plays wickedly fast and slinky takes on Chopin’s familiar waltzes in D-fl at Major and C-sharp Minor. There’s also a short piece by Debussy, Le petit nègre, composed in 1909, that’s pure ragtime.
It didn’t hurt that playback was via the four-box Scarlatti stack from dCS ($80,000). The sound was impressively natural and utterly transportive through both the kW and the Titan, with all of each amp’s power put to great use on the wide dynamic swings that well-recorded solo-piano performances require to sound convincing. Both did an excellent job of suggesting the space in which the piano sat, particularly as the softly played high notes mingled with the church acoustic.
However, whether because of its additional 3dB of quiet, or its lower distortion, or whatever, the Titan presented the piano more vividly against a blacker backdrop, with the church’s reverberation in greater relief. The Titan produced a better-fl eshed-out piano with a more supple percussive attack, a somewhat richer complexity of harmonic structure, and noticeably less glare in the dynamic peaks that excited the stone church’s reverberant acoustic.
At the end of the 41-minute recital, the audience breaks into applause. Amazingly, throughout the recital no one had coughed, sneezed, or made any bodily sound whatsoever—I’d had no idea there was an audience at all. The kW rendered the sound of the applause with a harder, more brittle edge than the Titan, whose version was softer and more fl eshy, yet with enough hardness to sound like the clapping of an audience in a stone church.
Stereophile, June 2009, p. 93-95
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