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Deliverance. The first albeit abiding impression was one of gushing generosity. It's a very different gestalt from a sealed internally damped speaker which—essentially—attempts to murder its driver's rear wave. This asymmetrical action on the cone has a sonic penalty. Whilst the sound gets very accurate, grippy and taut, it also dries out and turns a bit rigid. Having just come off my sealed Boenicke Audio B10 for literal contrast [right], it was massively obvious how the exotic Fostex was allowed to breathe freely and deeply. No dead end for the rear wave. Dipole time. Without getting sloppy, this sounded unbuttoned. No restriction around the Adam's apple to look a properly formal suit monkey ready for the corporate tie. No tucked-in shirt restrained by a belt despite summer heat.

This speaker wore its shirt informally loose over the belt, top two or three buttons undone, sleeves rolled up. If you extrapolate from the associated wear comfort to a tacit sonic feel, that's a truly fitting image. The Prime sounded demonstrably big: unfettered, elastic, fluid, unrestricted, easeful, grand, in motion. And in motion isn't just linguistically tied to emotion.


This undeniable quality registered nearly at once like seeing a thing clear as day. Hence it preceded and completely overrode any curious or concerned thoughts over bandwidth. Be it the wondrous Aytaç Doğan's kanun on Deva surrounded by fine cymbal work; or Vangelis' classic miniature opera China whose lengthy "Himalaya" features many industrial sounds long since associated with movie imagery of space craft, plenty of synth-generated HF trickery, martial drums, anti-phase effects and very dense visual layering... fine metallic tinkles on top and powerful weight below were taken care of to require no looking for or after.


Similarly subtracted from the usual black Book of Concerns when facing down widebanders? No whitishness, never mind prickly penalties for daring transistor drive. From experience this artifact of zippy whitishness seems to require 100dB ratings like Rethm, Lowther and Voxativ. There transient rise times routinely come at the expense of tone mass. It's all caffeine, adrenaline, blister and attacks with an insufficient counter balance of languorous decays and bloom. Now triode power becomes almost obligatory. By taking a different route, the Prime reminded me directly of the also 93dB soundkaos Wave 40 also fitted with a tweeter and high- plus low-pass filters. Where the Greek eclipsed the Swiss was on bottom-end reach and weightiness from a thrice-bigger enclosure and far longer 'line'. Where the Swiss overshadowed the Greek was in the uppermost treble. Its Raal ribbon painted with the finer-tipped brush yet also had more nylon than steel-string textures. The narrow-dispersion Fostex tweeter played it more incisive, metallic and laser like.


To make the decisive point again and slaughter our sacred cow of the intro twice over - it's clearly eminently good form to declaw a widebander with a low-pass filter and graft a dedicated tweeter atop. Not pursuing extreme sensitivity ratings seems useful too. Having now heard two such designs which both stayed well clear of the usual liabilities of the breed, I'm becoming convinced that this is the better approach. Voxativ and Rethm do it differently but to my ears pay a price. Their sound is more on edge and thus far more finicky and tweaky about copasetic ancillaries. That said, a common theme for all widebanders seems to be extravagant soundstaging. Here they overlap with dual-concentrics like KEF. That's presumably because they all approximate the point-source ideal which causes less reassemblage data processing for our brains.


This returns us to huge. With the Prime sounding huge has a twin function. It's not just because of capacious wall-to-wall coverage. It's foremost from that expansive gush factor. It's not a carefully calibrated civilized trickle from a faucet. It's a more oceanic let's-drown affair. It admittedly reads overdone but direct contrast to a sealed box with plenty of internal damping makes this difference instantly obvious and self-validating. To be fair I ought to add that the low damping factor of the SIT-1 monos played a part. A Mola-Mola Kaluga with 0.002Ω of output impedance across the board would audibly overdamp this Fostex. That's the appeal of 93dB speaker efficiencies and widebanders. You get to use triode or triode-like amps without turning their higher output impedances against them. High damping becomes mandatory for infra bass - but that's where an active subwoofer can take over to let the vital midband exhibit this fluidic flag-in-the-wind behavior that's so attractive.


Those were the basic attractions.