TESTED: Loiminchay Chagall Loudspeaker

An Act of Passion

The Chagalls provide an excellent mix of midrange and treble detail and resolution with a slightly warm lower midrange and high levels of bass energy. The emphasis is on “slight.” This is not a “colored” speaker and its timbre depends on room placement and how you set its controls. To the extent it has a coloration, it is like listening to music mid-hall in an older and warmer room (at a time when far too many speakers have a coloration that tilts towards a forward sound in a bright hall that emphasizes the upper octaves).

 With good recordings, the Chagalls produce an exceptional illusion that you are listening to a live performance. You do not have the feeling that the sound is colored, but you know where you are and what your listening position is. In short, if you like audio “detail,” close-in listening, and lots of treble energy, this is not the speaker for you. If you care about timbre, musical coherence and “smoothness,” and lower midrange warmth, but you want them without sacrificing natural musical detail and energy from the middle of the midrange up, the Chagalls do very well indeed.

Moreover, several hundred hours of listening to jazz, classics, and occasional rock/country never revealed a problem with hardness in the strings, upper-register piano, upper-register woodwinds, female voice, or percussion that wasn’t on the recording. I don’t know if this really is a product of the diamond tweeter.

I have mixed feelings about the exotic tweeter-materials craze. Far too often, diamond and beryllium tweeters are spotlighted in ways that provide upper-octave energy that does not occur in live music and push the treble and upper midrange of borderline recordings to a point that actually becomes irritating. The Chagalls don’t do this. Some audiophiles may find their overall balance a bit warm, but their upper octaves provide the kind of life, air, and energy I hear in live performances and the rear controls allow a lot of fine-tuning of the speaker’s overall balance and timbre to get things right in a given room and system.

Most important, the upper octaves are properly integrated with the midrange and bass in ways that bring out the true character of instruments and types of voice. Most of my listening is to acoustic classical music, and much of it to recordings that use the original instruments or instruments whose individual character is carefully chosen by the musician and is important to the performance. I am all too conscious of any departure from realistic recordings of solo piano, strings, and woodwinds. These departures are common with grand piano, clarinet, and violin. It is hard to get the lower midrange right and still preserve the upper midrange and treble. Most speakers are either a touch too warm and lacking detail, air, and life, or—more commonly in recent years—have too much upper-midrange energy and sound a bit bright or hard. The Chagalls have character but they produce a consistently realistic illusion of live music in timbre, detail, transient response, and the ability to make acoustic music seem real. They may depart from measured accuracy in timbre, but if you want the illusion of live music, they err on the side of realism.

I worked my way through a wide range of CDs, SACDs, and LPs in auditioning the Chagalls, including a number where I have heard the same performers in the same venues and know the genesis of the recording. I also listened to some test CDs of solo instruments that friends made of their own performances while I was present. No one recording is revealed truth, and there are reasons that we rely on sound engineers rather than rolling our own, but the Chagalls got things right time after time. The same was true of voice, with particularly good baritone voice reproduction and a natural lack of hardness in soprano voice—even with some close-miked tracks on older Judy Collins CDs.

Let me give you a few examples. I won’t describe the David Russel recording Art of the Guitar as a guilty pleasure [Telarc SACD]. He is too good a musician, the music is well chosen, and the recording is exceptional. The Chagalls, however, can make this compulsive listening when you want to really enjoy the guitar or simply step back from the pressures of life. The Kuijken String Quartet has done a superb chamber music version of Mozart’s Requiem [Challenge]. The warmth and full range of the cello and viola are extremely natural and the violin is sweet and musical without losing treble energy and detail. Sharon Bezaly’s recording of the Mozart Flute Concertos [BIS SACD] has the slightly too bright character of a number of otherwise good BIS recordings, and the solo flute can sound hard in a number of passages if the speaker is too bright. It is very realistic with the Chagalls.