| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Exotica: 12-12 review, Jonathan Valin The Absolute Sound, August/September 2004, issue #149 Wayne Garcia and I shared a near –religious experience when we visited the Epiphany Audio suite at the San Remo hotel in Las Vegas this past January. . .the Epiphanies did not sound like. . . any other speaker we’d heard before. They were not just different---they were astonishingly different.” Wowed Wayne and I were by the Epiphany’s sound, and wowed we remained, even after months of critical listening. At their best, the Epiphanies make most other speakers sound the way the world looks through one eye---relatively flat and dimensionless. They are the aural equivalents of binocular vision. There is something so right about the way the Epiphanies reproduce the phase relationships essential to flat, uncombed frequency response and realistic imaging. . . that, with great recordings, they seem like dimension doors opening on actual instruments playing in actual rooms and halls. . . .The Epiphanies hang their stereoscopic images in soundfields that are as close to colorless and grainless as those of any loudspeaker around---a truly remarkable feat. . . One thing is certain: the combination of peerless phase accuracy, relative immunity to wall and floor bounce, and very low driver colorations makes for an extraordinarily realistic presentation. For what it’s worth—and to me its worth a lot--- the Epiphany 12-12s are the only other speakers, (in addition to the Quad ESL-57s,) I’ve auditioned that can three-dimensionally embody and separate out in space each singer’s voice, while preserving a three-dimensional sense of the gall all of them are singing in. Some speakers plant cartoon figures in a diorama; some give you statures against a painted curtain; the pips give you the whole enchilada---three-D folks in a three-D world. . . The Pips can do this same thing with any ensemble be it vocalist or instrumentalists. From midbase to . . . top treble, they are the most transparent loudspeakers I’ve heard, rivaled in this regard only by ‘stats like the Sound Labs, which cannot reproduce the tree-dimensional “body” of vocalists and instruments the way the Pips do. In the top octaves, the Pips are, . . . quite wonderful---detailed, airy, and extended, with a natural, un-hi- fi-like ease, an absence of sting and etch… . . .If you’re the kind of audiophile who has longed to hear the sound of Staz headphones projected not inside you head but out in the room in front of you, then the remarkable Epiphany 12-12s come closer to this phase coherent ideal than anything I’ve heard in thirty-plus years of listening.” Exotica: 6-6 review, Wayne Garcia The Absolute Sound, August/September 2004, issue #149 The Epiphanies will change---or at least challenge---the way you think about reproduced music. Before them I was pretty confident that I knew what audiophile terms such as ‘coherent,’ ‘transparent,’ and ‘neutral’ meant. Listening to the Pips (is) at once breathtaking and mind-boggling. . . To hear a soundspace. . .with such life-like dimensionality, with voices and instruments spread before you, each with its own breadth and body, like so many redwoods in a grove, is to realize that the space carved by most speakers to more akin to looking at a hologram of the forest. The (Epiphany’s) sense of space was so very three-dimensional. . . that the walls of my room effectively changed shape from disc to disc as never before, creating a spooky-real sensation of hat it was like to be at each recording venue. Think of a proper multichannel setup but without the extra speakers. The Epiphany speakers are aptly named. The many hours (and counting) spent listening to music with them are among the most enlightening and enjoyable I’ve ever known. |
 |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 | |  |
 | |  |
|
| The Finest High End Import and Domestic A/V Electronics For Home, Mobile, & Marine Entertainment! |
|
|
|
Decibel Garden ® pictures and content of this website are copyrighted 2008-2010 ©
|
|