Mono & Stereo Richard Weiner
"My first room display at AXPONA 2019 could have been my last.
Destination Audio, my friend Joe Jurzec promised, was as good as its name: a series of products intended to stop our neurotic search for improvements. Get the horn-loaded Vista speaker, a pair of the company’s Type 45 or Type 50 tube amps, one of their tube preamps, and climb off the merry-go-round of tiny steps forward and back. Quit worrying about the newest, most exotic, or novel twist of audio engineering. Settle down and enjoy your music collection.
At this year’s AXPONA, Destination brought a new, smaller speaker, the NiKA. In this context, smaller is a comparative term. NiKA is an imposing four feet tall, two feet wide and two feet deep. There’s a 16” cone woofer in a ported box (the Vista has two, in a horn-loaded enclosure), a big metal horn loading the midrange driver, and a smaller treble horn. It’s finished handsomely, but the NiKA will not be confused with a lifestyle cube you conceal on the ceiling.
Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition (Ozawa/Chicago, Sony 69100) would be perfect to rattle the hotel room’s walls, right? I had it in my bag.
But I know Sam Wisniewski, who designed NiKA. He’s from Warsaw, and he loves Chopin. And who should play it but Artur Rubinstein? I passed over a set of the Nocturnes (EMI 64933).
We often forget that a concert grand piano is nine feet long and weighs a half ton. If you walk down the halls at a hifi show, you hear attempts to reproduce the sound of this instrument coming from book-sized speakers. The little boxes give cues, and your mind provides the body and heft of the real thing.
The Destination NiKA gave me Rubinstein, his Steinway and Chopin, all more authentically than I had heard it at any other show, and perhaps anywhere else. I didn’t have to imagine the size of the instrument, or its tonality. Rubinstein’s precise keyboard work was conveyed as it was recorded.
This was one of those musical experiences that don’t come along very often. I caught Sam’s eye to show how impressed I was, and he made a gesture on his forearm: the performance was giving him goosebumps.
I heard other speakers this big elsewhere at the show. They all cost more, but none was as coherent from top to bottom, and none even came close to this level of musical satisfaction"
