6_moons_review

The 6 Moons Review

		6 Moons Audio Review 2005 OVERKILL AUDIO ENCORE SYSTEM Reviewer: Srajan Ebaen Source: Zanden Audio Model 5000 MkIV DAC; Accustic Arts Drive-1; Audio Aero Prima [on review]; Exemplar/Denon 3910 universal player [on review]; Overkill Audio 4-channel Benchmark Media DAC [on review] Preamp/Integrated: DEQX/Overkill DAC/Pre/room-correction/speaker-correction engine [on review] Amp: Overkill Audio/Belles 4-channel amp [on review]; Bel Canto Design eVo4 Gen.II Speakers: Overkill Audio Encore [on review] Cables: Stealth Audio Varidig S/PDIF, Crystal Cable Reference digital and analog interconnects plus speaker cable and power cords; ZCable Hurricane power cords on both conditioners Stands: 2 x Grand Prix Audio Monaco four-tier Powerline conditioning: BPT BP-3.5 Signature for source components; Walker Audio Velocitor Sundry accessories: GPA Formula Carbon/Kevlar shelf for transport; GPA Apex footers underneath stand and speakers; Walker Audio SST on all connections; Walker Audio Vivid CD cleaner; Furutech RD-2 CD demagnetizer; WorldPower cryo'd Hubbell wall sockets; Musse Audio resonance dampers on DUO subs; Mapleshade 4" solid maple platform under BPT conditioner Room size: 30' w x 18' d x 10' h [sloping ceiling] in long-wall setup in one half, with open adjoining living room for a total of ca.1000 squ.ft floor plan Review Component Retail: $74,995/pr with digital crossover, outboard 4-channel DAC and Sistrum plinths [speaker serial number 015/016]

		*Hail the Once and Future King. The Future is finally Here.* Peak-performance high-frequency drivers by Scanspeak (Revelator) and Dynaudio (Esotar) usually operate from merely 2000Hz on up. Regardless, they still only manage settle times of 150-180µs. The bending-wave Manger driver in the Overkill Encore two-way covers 200Hz to 35kHz. Its resonant frequency of 88Hz remains well below the digital brick-wall filter at 200Hz. More impressively even, the Manger clocks in at 13µs over its entire bandwidth. That's faster and hence more precise by over 10 times than even the very best of conventional dynamic drivers manage! (The spectrographs to the left display how concentric diaphragm activation differs with frequency.)
The Encore -- for the vast majority of its operative band and hence where it matters -- is no conventional cone & dome contraption. If the slower settling times of the usual devices weren't bad enough, their analog crossovers are the most non-linear, handicapped and inaccurate ingredients of the entire audio chain. Just check any frequency response graph in Stereophile prior to averaging. Then check the impulse response charts. Notice how long the drivers continue to ring well beyond the initial burst of the actual signal. Feel your blood pressure rise. If your amp or CD player behaved even remotely in any such fashion, you'd toss 'em from your upper-story window to silence the neighbor's incessantly barking dog. (That dog probably has good reason for barking. He's a reincarnated audiophile reviewer. He's thus acutely sensitive to how poorly your conventional speakers are really behaving).

Billed and priced as a radical assault at the bleeding edge, the Encore categorically eschews non-linear, phase-challenged, passive crossovers. Instead, it relies on phase-correct, active, digital crossovers with ultra-steep 96dB/octave slopes. This attenuation rate insures that what the Manger driver reproduces isn't muddied up by parallel reproduction of the same tones by the massive 12" woofer with its oversized 4" voice coil. The latter's proprietary visco-elastic coating derives from a resonance-attenuating material. That is based on floor damping compounds first used in Orient Express luxo train rides of yore.
Since the demise of Audio Physic's flawed Medea speaker, the Overkill Ovation, Prey and Encore models are the only production speakers I know of outside Manger's own that employ this driver. It is otherwise exclusively sold to the DIY market. When asked how to explain this obscurity of an apparently superior device in HighEnd applications, Derek broke into a quiet smile. He humbly suggested that he really might be the first designer to have properly employed this driver by religiously accounting for its very specific needs. Only extreme chassis measures truly unleash its unique potential.
From the outside, the stylish egg-shaped, high-gloss lacquered top enclosure of the Encore thus doesn't begin to transmit the story of what went into creating it. It's built up in hand-applied and slowly cured layers from a fiberglass mold that itself was taken off a wooden master fashioned by a true furniture craftsman. We're now talking wavy 2" - 3" wall thicknesses. They are asymmetrically offset such that no internal surface point faces an opposing one of equal thickness. We're talking 18 different constrained layers. They stack polymer resin/cotton-filler/unobtainium triple sandwiches atop one another in succession. The secret "unobtainium" ingredient differs from tri-layer to tri-layer for a total of 6 undisclosed materials. The name of the game here is extreme self-damping. It effectively absorbs all of the Manger's rear wave to prevent time-delayed out-of-phase reflections through the flat diaphragm with its concentric rings. Driven from 15 powerful neodymium ring magnets and two voice coils, those rings activate outwards with lowered frequencies like ripples in a pond. Only a very small central area vibrates to reproduce treble notes [see German diagram above].

Similarly extreme measures are applied to the separate bass enclosure. That's a horizontally stacked affair of 33 laminated Birch Ply layers, each 24 mm thick and routed out to precisely create 3-dimensionally contoured internal spaces and tunnels when stacked and bonded. The insides are lined with a bitumen/foam layer. A first downward angling, then horizontally proceeding line finally vents through a lateral narrow slot at the rear. This line is variably filled with acrylic foam and lamb's wool. Its geometry and lining first increase, then decrease air resistance/pressure behind the woofer to deliberately accelerate its settling times. Asked about the bass chassis' substantial heft, Derek volunteered a standard loudspeaker design recipe. To properly absorb a woofer's rear wave, it calls for cabinet mass 1000 times higher than the moving mass of its driver. Overkill Audio outsources construction of the Encore bass cabinet from an English firm that builds 200 lbs precision roulette wheels for the swankiest of Las Vegas casinos. External finishing is handled by another firm which also provides Bowers & Wilkes with their Nautilus-Series Tiger's Eye finish. It's the only UK company authorized to repair the legendary German Steinway piano-black lacquers. When good enough isn't good enough, enter overkill into the equation.

While I was still hung up on the monstrous woofer, Derek added that this transducer handles (and has been tested for) 750 watts of sine wave power and 1.2Kw of music power. Disconnecting the Mangers during his setup visit, he demonstrated a Dance Hall track just for its bass sock. Set to ungodly levels that had various objects in my room dancing, the raw driver refused to visibly move. It's fair to say that an outboard subwoofer even for the deafest of headbangers will not be a requirement when you can afford to run Encores in your own castle or Lake Como mansion. On the subject of castles, private butlers and expensive audio hardware, a pair of Encores clocks in at a breathtaking $74,995. Before you reach for your pace maker, this includes the necessary DEQX external digital crossover slash remote-controlled preamp slash EQ slash room-correction engine with Overkill's onboard power supply. It also includes Overkill's own 4-channel, Benchmark Media-based DAC with outboard power supply and A/D board option for users with analogue sources. It also includes Sistrum platforms from StarSound Technologies to serve as resonance-attenuation plinths for the Encores. The David Belles-based 4-channel amplifier demo'd at CES and dispatched to Taos for my review is optional. Most customers in these leagues will already own statement-level amplifiers. One word of caution, however: It is mandatory to actively bi-amp the Encores with four identical amplifiers. Tubes most likely shouldn't apply though it's clearly not mondo power that's the prerequisite. The woofer operates with 94dB efficiency and the Manger with 92dB. Outputs are digitally equalized in the network. The Manger runs 1dB more efficient than spec'd by the manufacturer due to its unique cabinet loading.
		Both the Manger and woofer (decoupled from one another by a massive Sorbothane custom pad that allows adjustments of the egg's horizontal and lateral axes) are so fast that only amplifiers of gargantuan bandwidth/speed will fully support their innate speed and precision. (Tubes will work just fine from an operational standpoint but won't be quite agile enough for the Manger.) Curiously, all this points at amplifiers being ideal which, under standard cone & dome conditions, might not be my ultimate choices. Spectral or Goldmund for example? Think 200kHz+ bandwidth transistors with high current and steep slew rates to not handicap the Encores' response times. From this follows logically that since we're essentially considering a digital system (analog sources must first be converted before reaching the digital crossover), the brunt of the musical responsibility lies with the emotional moxy of the DAC used. Hence Derek Wilson and outside contract engineers have explored the Australian DEQX machine at great lengths to divine its relative strengths and weaknesses. They find its DSP board (embedded with over one million lines of proprietary code) to be heads and shoulders above the next competitor, i.e. of true, uncontested and unequaled reference caliber. Alas, the same does not hold true for its power supply, analog filter and output stage when inserted into a ne-plus-ultra chain. The DEQX's brilliant designer -- whom I handed Edgar Kramer's Blue Moon Award at the CES for his stock unit -- concurs without sighs. He's already considering an audiophile "cost-no-object" iteration for extreme applications like Overkill Audio's. That's why Derek Wilson bypasses the DEQX's internal DAC with his own external 4-channel unit with outboard power supply. That's why he left me with two DEQXs, one stock, one Overkill's modified version with massively beefed-up power supply. Depending on whom you ask, the power supply in active audio electronics accounts for 70-85% of the sound. I'd be able to switch between the two digital units to hear power-supply grunt in action. For true transcendental glory, two Zanden DACs following the crossover might be the ultimate weapon. I have two Audio Aero Prima DACs in-house to test just such madness. Long live audiophile ambitions for the ultimate!
Below Overkill's flagship Encore resides the $44,995/pr Ovation + DEQX with a different woofer and unified cabinet. Below the Ovation, there's the ellipsoid head of the Encore going solo and then dubbed Prey ($27,995 with stand plus DEQX or $23,995/pr as a console-mounted studio monitor). To augment the Prey's single driver bass, there's the $14,995 Predator sub with external 500-watt bridged/balanced stereo amp and upward-firing Encore woofer. This woofer is then loaded into a 360-degree dispersion lens similar to Duevel. Regarding finishes, if they're fabricated anywhere on the globe, they're available to be wrapped around any Overkill speaker, endangered wood species excepted. For security reasons and customer peace-of-mind, each Overkill speaker carries an embedded micro-chip. Its encoded serial number remains permanently hidden from view and is accessible only via the appropriate scanner.

The golden appendages of the Overkill Audio team belong to Petra Lewis, Derek's fiancée of the younger (and female!) ears and also mother of 22-month old Emilia. Petra sings with a gospel choir and plays the drums and harmonica. Andy (cello) and Craig (saxophone) are friends "on loan" from the local Cambridge Music Union who routinely provide in-house life performances to serve as the reality standard to which designer Derek Wilson aspires. As will be obvious from the mention of the DEQX, the Encore speaker system provides unprecedented end-user control over frequency response. This accounts for room size and room placement as well as listener preference. From flat-lined to slightly bass-enhanced, midrange-lifted or treble-subdued, you're in complete control. Well, Derek should be - or whoever your domestic installer happens to be. You see, with such broad-scale input over vital parameters comes the (often unwittingly applied) freedom to make musical mistakes. Fortunately, part of the DEQX's remote control functionality is the Profile Bank. This includes Bypass and three presets. After extensive room measurements (via DEQX's supplied microphone, internal signal generator and USB laptop interface), Derek entered three different target curves for my review. They all account equally for <200Hz room-induced nonlinearities but then diverge slightly in midrange and treble band contouring. In the critical vocal range, less than 0.5dB of lift can spell the difference between emotionally compelling and intellectually dry. Instead of the old trial & error of tube rolling or cable swapping to hit upon just the right combination of second-hand factors, this system allows you to attack the essence of emotionally compelling performance like brain surgery right at the crossover - precisely, repeatedly and with full deliberation. And that's the future, here and now.

A skilled installer/retail agent incorporates owner feedback to tweak the final sound to 110% satisfaction. He'll commit to software memory three different curves that could be optimized for good and bad recordings. Or, one curve could account for the occasional full-tilt party mood when the windows are opened to your capacious backyard for formal weddings or corporate takeover meets. The options are quite staggering. Most importantly, pesky room issues of asymmetry or limited placement options no longer compromise your audiophile investment. Of course, a high-quality DSP-based room correction device cannot turn turds into gold bullion. For peak performance, one must start with a superior speaker like the Encore. Don't for a moment consider the DEQX a cheap crutch here. It's a phase/time-correct precision calibration tool that's part of Overkill's comprehensive V.I.P. commitment to any prospective customer.

A 33% down payment gets the ball rolling. When, after a three-month custom-built delivery protocol, it finally ends up in your marble-trimmed court secured in custom wooden airline crates, the handler will be an Overkill expert. He'll spend the requisite two days on site to set everything up, calibrate the sound to your preferences and then teach you how to use the system. Unless you upload the DEQX software to fuss with it personally on your laptop afterwards (and thereby risk altering things detrimentally), this will be as simple as switching the components on, selecting the appropriate input, adjusting volume and deciding which of the three preset compensation curves you wish to employ. Gentlemen racers already know that their pit-stop crew can electronically alter fuel intake and other vital performance parameters to suit riding style and weather conditions. Expertly pre-set DEQX profiles are nothing other than optimized response curves for wet, dry or intermediate aural road conditions. Time to turn the Overkill ignition over and fire this beast up. Vroom vroom without da boom but super-sporty red line wallop? If a preview of an encore already equated to a full review, we'd never find out. Stay tuned as this tube-loving fossil pursues an exciting new road not less but never travelled before...
The closest experiential precursor for my encounter with the Encore was Green Mountain Audio's Continuum 3 flagship. It relies on conventional (albeit very good) dynamic drivers and conventional passive networks (though via exceptionally well-executed minimum phase/time 1st-order filters). It employs cast marble sculptures with user adjustments for the critical 200Hz+ range [below]. In its review, I described the C3 as free from both transient fuzziness and its polar exaggeration -- hyped incisiveness -- to become an unusually clear window on spacious sonic vistas. Its relative lack of time-domain errors vis-à-vis higher-order networks manifested as excellent spatial precision and depth of field.
My catch phrase for the Green Mountain Audio design thus became transient fidelity. That's an often underappreciated dimension wherein human perception is extraordinarily acute, far more so than in the frequency domain. When adhered to, performance makes strides in precision, accuracy and "life" jump factor to become most tangible with percussive sounds. Their encoded dynamics then rise from zero to redline nearly instantaneously. Sticks crack, strings pop. Applying conventional transducers and crossovers, the C3 perhaps pushes the inherent limitations of its approach as far as humanly possibly. Enter the Manger-fitted Overkill Encore with its digital crossover. It picks up where the Continuum 3 left off. Covering the equivalent critical range with one single driver rather than two eliminates the need for Roy Johnson's Soundfield Convergence adjustments. This also makes for a visually more pleasing solution. The only physical adjustment which your Overkill setup agent will have to perform is alignment of the head's longitudinal axis with your primary listening area. This tilt/aim is accomplished by how the Manger enclosure nests into the very thick contoured Sorbothane pad [pictured].
To appreciate the following comments, a look at the impulse response of the bending-wave driver is instructive. The horizontal axis represents time in milliseconds Like any mechanical engineer's ideal, this driver stops nearly instantaneously with nary any overshoot. It reputedly does so over its entire bandwidth, especially when rear wave elimination is as ambitiously pursued as in Derek Wilson's enclosure. It's vitally important how any reproduced event begins (the transient, the original rise of sound from utter silence). Alas, it's equally important how this reproduced event ends - on time, coming to a dead stop with minimum driver breaking distance. If the driver overshoots and rings out, you'll have accidents in time. These accidents are ghost echoes and smearing. How wide-spread DUI drivers are on the audiophile roads becomes truly apparent when you encounter a loudspeaker/driver that accelerates and breaks far harder than is the norm, with unencumbered reflexes not under the influence.
What's that sound like? Exceptionally micro-dynamic and realistic. Most of all, effortlessly clear and transparent. In some ways, it's as though one listened in an anechoic chamber. An anechoic chamber eliminates room echoes via radical absorption of all boundary reflections. But this simile only carries so far. The Encore eliminates echoes inside the playback system. Naturally, your room still imposes its own signature. It always does and a certain amount of acoustical reverb is mandatory to avoid an overly dry and dead sound. The room simply remains the final frontier but one for which the DEQX can partially account by compensating for certain negatives which every room inflicts on smooth and even frequency response. Common standing-wave aberrations in the critical bass area can be notch-filtered. Hence, this Overkill system can cure common pains of verkackte room-induced nonlinearities.
For context, this is the step response of a $29,500/pr speaker as measured and published by Stereophile. Used here with express permission from John Atkinson.
The resultant crystalline clarity and purity of the Encores can initially be disconcerting. Our ear/brain bio computer has been trained for so long to "auto-eq" for the artifice of playback that when you first remove many of the triggers that prompt this mechanism, something seems amiss. For one, what's missing are effects of "room muck" you've come to take for granted in how it imprints itself on your playback chain. More importantly yet, there's the wholesale subtraction of blurring, overlay and ghosting (softness and warmth) within the actual signal. Encountering your signal in the raw can be a bit of a shock at first. However, once your ear/brain switches off its customary auto-eq, you see two truths - one auditory, one whole-body sensorial. The auditory one shows that you now hear the recorded room -- not your own -- far more clearly than before. The whole-body sensorial means that the act of listening has become very easeful. Some uninspected neural activity ceases to be invoked. A certain amount of deliberation -- to get into serious listening mode -- ceases to be required. You know the caricature. "Hey, don't disturb me, I'm going into the basement to enter the zone." Add the furrowed brow, creased forehead and shut eyes. Call them all indicators of a certain efforted stress to maintain focus and concentration. Those are part and parcel of the audiophile's routine. It's called subliminal work.
With the Encores, the habitual prerequisite of this experience no longer applies. Here's a good question: Do you constipate and struggle during a life concert to make out certain things? Or do you relax into your seat and get played by the music? It's popular and trite as hell to say that it's all about the music. Alas, what we usually mean by that is a particular experience. It's a psycho-physical gesture or frame of mind. It's not really just the music doing the talking. It's us working consciously and subconsciously to enter a specific state and keep the enemies (the reminders of artifice) at bay. Our biological EQ filters them out. Once we're past whatever our personal outer routine happens to be -- disconnecting the phone, dimming the lights, cleaning and cueing up the record -- this psych work begins behind the scenes like a computer's defragmentation program.

It's somewhat anti-climactic to observe how in the presence of the Overkill Encore Audio system, this work relaxes to a profound degree. It's because in the vital time domain of clarity, there's so much agreement between what's real and natural and what's playback. I deliberately call it anti-climactic because it is. Instead of obsessing over this new-found level of realism (by exploring every crevice of the soundstage, for example), you simply find yourself in the physical place where music happens. You don't try to get yourself there by activating some serious listening mode discipline. Once you're free of this need to constantly collect proof that things are real and not fake -- or more accurately, disregard all the proof to the contrary -- some internal judge retires his check list. He calls it a day. Good riddance, your honor! I'm not saying that the Encore system matches up perfectly with reality. That's never possible. What is the case here I believe -- because the Encore plainly demonstrates it -- is that active digital crossovers are far superior to analog variants. First-order series or parallel passive crossovers are the closest approximations of in-time rather than out-of time solutions we have in the Old World of speaker design. Hence there are distinct parallels between the best of those efforts and this New World of phase/time-correct digital crossovers. This becomes more relevant even when we add into the equation a multi-concentric wide-band transducer like the 7.5-octave Manger that reacts precisely enough to not blur most of the subtleties that show up when time aligns. The professional market knows full well the advantages of active crossovers while HighEnd audio resists the whole notion like a five-legged hyena. Derek Wilson cleverly circumvents our option of refusal. The electronic outboard crossover mandates four channels of amplification. You gotta go 'pro' whether your cherished beliefs like it or not. This equates to active drive. How active?

There's nothing between the Cardas speaker terminals and the voice coil leads (four for the Manger, two for the woofer) but a choice run of Dutch silver/gold Crystal cable. That connecting cable is cold-welded to the terminals (no solder) and direct-soldered to the driver voice coil leads via a protracted process that has to -- perfectly -- account for the weight of the Crystal wire and the exact angle by which it approaches the voice coil leads. Say "Sayonara" to the reactive shock absorbers and buffers of the usual passive networks. Those insert themselves between the output current of the amplifier and the physical driver they're supposed to control. Active drive gets its hands directly on the driver. There's no intermediary. Each time an intermediary crossover is involved, something gets lost in translation. As far as I'm concerned, the Overkill Audio Encore is the blueprint for the future of loudspeaker design. Other speakers will undoubtedly follow. In fact, NHT already has, with a less ambitious system that incorporates DEQX from inception as well. Part of Derek's recipe is the marriage of an active electronic DSP-based filter with the Manger driver, spending a good three years learning how to make the latter come into its own. Having heard the Continuum 3 rather recently in this same space, I feel comfortable stating that the Encore -- as it should for the money -- goes beyond the C3. Alas, how much of that advance is a function of the digital crossover and how much credit must go to the extreme drivers chosen and the overkill cabinetry I have no means of knowing. So let's move on to what I can talk about, namely the influence of the upgraded Overkill DEQX and thereafter inserting two Audio Aero DACs to replace the Overkill 4-channel converter.
First, an example that demonstrates the resolution of this speaker system already with the stock DEQX. On La Nuit Obscure [Virgin France B00004S6LN], a tenor slowly and steadily builds to a gigantic climax. Halfway into the crescendo that coincides with a heroic ascent into his top register, a bowed double bass enters very faintly behind the singer. This occurs extremely stealthily, at exactly the same pitch and at a very subdued volume. It's thus spatially and tonally completely overshadowed by the vocalist. There's one moment where the physical scraping noise of horse hair across strings has the two drift apart to even notice that there's two simultaneous performers. The bass changes momentary timbre. It becomes a distinct yet short-lived separate entity. Then he recedes again into the singer's shadows. But now that you know he's there, you can still make him out as a blended presence - if you pay attention.
We all have stories of suddenly hearing things on treasured records we never heard before. This is one of mine. I'd never heard the bassist bowing in this section of the track before. Considering that my usual reference system isn't exactly chopped liver in the resolution department, this example and what it points at become testament to the spatial separation power of the DEQX/Encore system. It truly operates at a very high level of precision. Simply put, hearing new things very rarely happens around here anymore. From component to component, things certainly sound different but to discover raw data that remained completely obscured before... well, that's somewhat of a rarity.

Now it's popular to talk about musically irrelevant Uber-resolution. This strange concept suggests that resolution is a sentient being. It can deliberately distinguish between what to resolve and what not to, what to shove into the foreground and what to obscure. Musically relevant stuff over there, musically irrelevant stuff over yonder. Not. The data is either on the software or it isn't. Heightened resolution doesn't invent information. Neither does it grab more data off a disc that somehow eluded lesser system (generally speaking). With lesser systems, less of the available data makes it through the convoluted chain and to the other side where things become audible. Envision two sheets of fine metal netting. You find them in window screens to keep the insects out. Even a slight misalignment of these screens, one atop the other, will either prevent you from looking through them altogether or make the remaining holes so tiny that you see more grid than landscape. One overlooked mechanism of musical misalignment occurs in the time domain. Skew things in time, offset a few screens and sacrifice literal in-sight into your recordings. Clearly, the Overkill credo is one of keen resolution. But to attach different importance values to different portions of the resolved signal -- some relevant, some not -- seems like a very flawed mental construct. If it's on the disc, it's relevant. Getting everything that's on the disc is the relevancy of high fidelity, period.
Quite distinct from resolution is tonal balance, however. It determines how what is resolved gets presented, either in balance or out of whack. Here the frequency contour facility of the DEQX can spell the difference between flat boredom and dimensional involvement. A very general rule of thumb for what most people consider a musically pleasing balance is a tilted axis. It slightly dips in the treble and slightly rises in the bass. The DEQX lets you have it level-flat. Trust me, flat ain't involving at all. Or, the DEQX let's you bypass any digital correction altogether. Unless Rives Audio eq'd your room with one of their all-out Level 3 acoustic make-overs, bypass won't be the ticket to bliss either. What's most educational when a laptop screen gives you visual feedback for very specific adjustments? The difference a very subtle presence region lift can make to your emotional rapport.
Adjust for half a dB in the bass instead and you'll be hard-pressed to tell. My favored compensation curve eq'd for some <60Hz crap and then installed three little lifts centered on 350, 800 and 10,000Hz respectively. Curve 1 flat-lined above 1kHz which didn't have quite enough air on good recordings but clearly took the edge off some forward-but-fun high-power Turkish pop by Yildiz Tilbe. Curve 2 and 3 differed only in the 800Hz-centered lift and then just by a skoch. Guess what? Said skoch gave vocals that magical lock/thereness factor. Ty to nail that G-spot the old-fashioned analog route. You could chase your tail for years and never catch it. That's one reason why the Encore system heralds the future. It takes the guess work out of achieving magic. It puts you (or your expert) in full control. This flexibility had one showgoer at CES ask a both strange and valid question: "Isn't that cheating? This can make any bad speaker sound really good." I refer you to the above impulse response graphs. The DEQX has zero control over driver behavior. A slow and sloppy speaker will still sound slow and sloppy. But it is true that a digital correction engine can minimize room-induced peaks and dips that are usually blamed on a speaker. The question really should become this: "If DSP can address certain room interaction issues, why does the whole industry remain married to analog crossovers?" Why indeed. Once the competition hears the Encores, they'll be forced to reconsider this now outdated notion.
Let's take stock of the basic system. It starts with the Exemplar-modified Denon 3910 universal player. Its tube-fitted analog output stage is bypassed for RedBook playback since one connects to the following DEQX via the digital output. From the DEQX and still in the digital domain, the signal continues on to the Overkill/Benchmark 4-channel DAC and Overkill/Belles 4-channel amp. All cabling is Crystal Cable since that's what Overkill uses for all its internal wiring (in the speakers as well as components) and thus recommends also for all external system connections. In this configuration, the Exemplar/Denon as transport was a mite warmer and not quite as transient-defined as my customary Accustic Arts Drive-1. It's a small difference that wasn't clearly better or worse but merely different. I preferred the Drive-1 flavor, Derek the Exemplar/Denon take. Once I had determined this particular contribution of the 3910, I left it in the system for the remainder of the review. It's how the Overkill Encore system is marketed. How did its overall sound compare to my customary reference? It was cooler and leaner, faster and more precise, with superior spatial resolution and separation. Percussive events on both micro and macro scale had more definition without crossing the line into unnatural sharpness. While I really appreciated all these qualities as being more life-like, I did miss some of my customary warmth and body. Curiously enough, this was less the case when the system's playback levels matched whatever the particular instrument's output (close-miked or captured from a distance) would approximate at my listening distance. At realistic levels, with a vocalist set to how loud he or she'd be if singing at me from 12' away, the Encore system sounded - well, uncannily realistic. At subdued levels, however, things became less involving. What telegraphed then was crystalline clarity but also a lack of harmonic envelope. When you think about it, that's realistic, too. Move away from a stage with unamplified performers. The farther you retreat, the more harmonic density fades.

Now we're knee-deep in two realities. One concerns itself with over how things sound live. The other relates to how most audiophiles compensate during playback to produce pleasing results at levels they consider optimum (or use most of the time due to considerations for neighbors and those they live with). Bluntly put, most audiophile systems sound better than the real thing at low volumes - if that's what their owners have optimized them for. We create artificial body with tubes, with transformer-coupled conditioners, with cables. To caricature this trend for impact, we do pretty. Then there's Meg Ryan of the publicly faked orgasm who, in the parallel-life flick Kate & Leopold, is admired by her scheming boss precisely because she won't do pretty but deals with things the way they are. Should one complain that the Encore system is too realistic by lacking artificial warmth?
Switching to the Overkill-modified DEQX with its stout external power supply might have you reply in the affirmative. Why? Because it adds significant body and harmonic fullness already at lower-than-realistic levels (or what would equate to a far-field listening seat). Is this now more or less realistic? Excuse me while I pass on that impertinent needling. Let's just say that it's distinctly more pleasing and emotionally compelling. It draws you closer into the intimate sphere of the musicians without foreshortening the apparent listener perspective. The musicians as soundstage images don't move closer to you, their sound does by fleshing out to become denser. In this setup, the digital & solid-state Encore system made the best sound I've yet heard in Taos. While my customary system is still a bit warmer, I'd now be comfortable stating that I've perhaps overcompensated its voicing. By comparison, it flattens out the particular 'life spark' the Overkill Audio system injected into any material I threw at it. Being a hard-boiled audiophile, I was of course secretly wondering if things could possibly get better yet. After all, I had two Audio Aero DACs staring me daringly in the face. The answer to that impertinent needling I won't avoid. It's an unqualified yes. It also clocks in at a spare $10,000 for the pair. Without diminishing the non-aggressive directness and spatial precision of the Benchmark Media-based Overkill DAC, the tube-buffered upscale analog output stage of the French machines created that heightened extra-dimensional focus in the soundstage which, I remain convinced, requires valves somewhere in a system (hey, I'm hanging on for my dear dinosaur life here). As the dedicated Audio Aero DAC review will show, we're talking distinct Zanden-level sound. While not identical, it's a very close call on either sides of the fence. In this system, replacing the Overkill DAC didn't at all undermine resolving power but simply intensified the communicativeness by deepening tonal colors and making the inter-performance space more audible. Taken to this rarefied level of performance, the Encore system now was plain spooky. Take the Motion Trio's Pictures from the Street [Asphalt Tango 0504], a radical accordion trio with instruments custom-built by Pigini, the Rolls-Royce of accordion makers. These 18,000-Euro instruments produce bass far lower than standard accordions and use special hand-made reeds to boot. The scraping and shaking of the bellows, the percussive taps of nails on keys, the physical pumping motions with their tell-tale shifts in space -- all those little noise indicators filled out the sketch of the primary (so-called musically relevant) sounds. It conspired to cast the highly intoxicating spell of the real.
Reflecting on my personal odyssey of audiophile playback in the home, I'd have to say that every component upgrade always occurred in the service of the earlier-described experience. In and of itself, it's not the same as the live one. Certain aspects of it are actually better. They tend to make up for reality losses elsewhere. It should follow (and it does) that the Encore's greater overlap/lock with the live experience means that it sounds different from what I own. Because more coincides with reality, there's less need for 'sideways' compensation. On Kostas Metaxas' purist recordings remastered on DVD, the reality factor truly kicked into high gear. Arguably, certain listeners could find themselves too attached to their personal compensations. They could point accusingly at the Overkill approach for not needing them. Fair enough. At the price of the Encore rig, it's clearly not for everyone. Moreover, it might not be for most church-going audiophiles. Let's face it, our kind often has more of an emotional investment into personalized renditions of aural truth than the real thing. Also, to work as intended, the Overkill system offers far less hardware variables than many audiophiles will be comfortable with (essentially only the amplifiers are up for grabs). Clearly and unapologetically, designer Derek Wilson and his fiancée Petra Lewis [above] sell a system, not just a pair of speakers. Won't the average 'phile insist that he or she knows better what hardware to mate to the speakers than their makers?
Truly, the system's approach is one that sits poorly with many in this hobby. We revel in our constitutionally sanctified right to follow our own creed and make our own choices no matter how detrimental many of those choices might be. That's why I think that Overkill Audio's primary audience -- outside the selective process imposed by the financial key hole -- will not be the quintessential audiophile at all. The target audience is folks whose commitment is first and foremost to live music experienced close to the stage. This customer want a turnkey solution that works perfectly as is, just like a fine motorcar which you don't acquire to modify but to drive (after the seat and controls' reach have been painstakingly adapted to your size at the factory). While the DEQX component of this system is the ultimate in real-world adjustability, the system on a whole is very non-tweaky. It's been designed as a whole and substitutions are neither necessary nor encouraged. Adding up prospective cost of ownership for the Encore system, it's in line with my own reference system. It doesn't sound the same but if live music were the standard, it's clearly closer and hence superior. It's also an impossible reviewer's tool. It shuts the door on most individual component substitutions which make up the protocol of reviewing. As a reviewer, I'm stuck with the Old Way of doing things. But if I changed careers tomorrow and could settle down with one system and then call it quits, I might well settle on this one. I'd embrace the future like a long-lost lover and kiss valves, analog crossovers and the whole bloody lot good-bye (though I would sneak valves into the DAC for that slightly enhanced state of affairs a smidge beyond reality).
Compared to what this Overkill System does, anything else I've had through here including my own stuff still sounds like personalized renditions - some of them very close, most of them pleasing, the rare ones truly compelling and admirable but still separated from the real thing. If your dream and ambition are for less rather than more separation, you must hear what Derek Wilson, Petra Lewis and their collaborators have wrought. It could be a terminal meeting. If it impresses you like it did me and you're not a reviewer, you may not be able to go back. Practically speaking, I can't extricate myself from the mixed-component approach. But I now certainly have a different idea about its limitations and what certain component choices and subsequent acquisitions of mine were in response to. As Newton tells us, every action engenders an opposite reaction. Any voicing decision mandates an opposing one since none occurs on the center line. All are attempts to get us on this center line which, presumably, overlays reality but more often than not is merely an idealized notion.
With the Overkill-modified DEQX, I found myself walking on that line - or at least in closer proximity to it than before. Substituting the Audio Aero DACs probably took me slightly off it again, into a subtly idealized, better-than-real parallel dimension but not by much. Replacing the very good Belles-based amplifier with something like the newest Pass Labs X350.5, a Vitus amp from Denmark or a 1000w ICEpower-module based unit, one would expect certain changes as well. However, since opportunities for harmonic distortion behavior in a digital/transistor system are rather limited, such changes could be far smaller than a more conventional cone & dome-based setup would predict. It'll be something for the next reviewer to investigate if he or she has a suitable pair of identical stereo amps to experiment with. In conclusion, my turn down an alley never entered before was highly enlightening. It could well be that much of the SET phenomenon is in response to certain speaker-based limitations. Is it because those are lacking or significantly reduced in the Encore to not require this compensation that they sound stellar with conventional transistors even to a SET aficionado? I can't know for sure but I think this might be true. It's become nearly de rigeur to equate resolution, accuracy and precision with a certain sterility. As noted earlier, I initially reacted along those lines a bit. But settling into this new presentation, allowing my perceptional bio mechanism to adjust and then replacing the standard DEQX with the modified version truly turned things around. In generalized parlance, it's like getting certain aspects of the quintessential ultra-precise Wilson Audio sound but having those presented in a fashion that's less overtly spectacular and thus more appealing to someone with my particular biases. Close-miked violin is dynamic and metallic and pungently direct but lacks all electronic glare or unnatural bite. Bass is unbelievably pitch-accurate yet massively powerful when called for. Vocals parlay all the seemingly insignificant micro details to feel real. In the end, it's about very high resolution, natural and distinctly non-exaggerated dynamics and a bold directness that must be a function of superior speed. It's brilliant stuff I shall be sorry to see move on to its next review.
My uncle playing his guitar on the porch
Listening to Damian Draghici's Oneness [Bashalde 0117] made me think on its title. There's oneness between listener and music to describe a co-created experience in one's home. Then there's overlayed oneness (simultaneity, transferred synchronicity) of playback and live event. These two aspects of oneness are not the same - and Overkill Audio clearly is dedicated to very high standards of the second kind. The future of room-adaptable digital crossovers as part of a true system's approach is finally here. It points the way for what is bound to come.
Post Scriptum: Derek Wilson just informed me that he has contracted with John Tucker of Exemplar Audio to include John's well-regarded tube output stage and shunt-regulated power supply in the 4-channel Benchmark Media DAC. With a bit of luck, I'll be able to draft a brief follow-up report before the already scheduled pick-up of the Overkill Audio rig occurs. Should Tucker's mod rival or exceed my results with the two Audio Aero converters, the resultant system performance would kowtow to the highest expectations of valve devotees while combining those with true cutting-edge DSP facilities for a very novel marriage of the old and very latest. Perhaps then Derek & Petra need to adopt Roberta Flack's "Killing Me Softly With Their Song" as the anthem for the Encores?