exert Stereophile

So how do you describe a chameleon? Fast—staggeringly fast, in fact. This is a dynamic speaker that’s as quick as any electrostatic I’ve heard. It shares with ‘stats a phenomenally low level of coloration as well. Tonally neutral, it favors no one frequency range over another. I’ve heard it described as lean and lacking in low bass, but I didn’t find this to be so. Perhaps, with a rated response going down only to 28Hz, it doesn’t offer deep bass, but I couldn’t have exploited anything lower in the rooms I used it in.

The bass it does reproduce is articulate and well-defined—I have never heard more of the subtle performance details that distinguish one acoustic bass player from another. Heavy Sounds, by Richard Davis and Elvin Jones (LP, Impulse! A-9160) is one of my acid tests for bass articulation: “Summertime” is an 11-minute duet between bowed bass and drums (played with mallet and brush only) that exploits just about every tonal possibility the two instruments can muster. Davis has never had the deepest bass tone; his instrument possesses a light, almost nasal timbre, and the WATT/Puppys reflect that. Toward the climax of the song, Davis turns his bow around and, putting wood to the strings, sets aswirl a cascade of overtones that almost screech their way toward inaudibility, while Jones anchors the excursion with muted tom tom flurries. The combination of near-ultrasonic color and woody earthiness tests the resolving power of just about any system—I would have said any system, but the WATT/Puppys weren’t fazed by it one bit. It remained music, intelligent and comprehensible, never descending into noise.