Our story began on a Sunday at the end of January. However, this is not the case, it all started years ago, from the curiosity of two people who met on social media. They appreciated each other's mentality and content, they exchanged ideas, some on their taste, their listening habits and research of sound, and some on their path as a designer, editor and creator of audio equipment. It's me and Mirko Marogna, and the two narratives say the same things, even if one from in front of the speakers and one from behind them
Tracing back to our experiences, we find ourselves united in a precise historical and cultural moment: the ferment of the great oriental sound thinkers, in particular Be' Yamamura, a crucial pivot for subsequent events. Well, Yamamura was, of all the Japanese with golden hands and ears of the virtuous era, the most Italianized, for his stay in our country. His presence is not secondary to the diffusion and understanding of his sonic philosophies, since, unlike some other kind of remote and unreachable gurus, getting to know Mr. Yamamura was not a difficult undertaking, and having exchanges of sincere opinions was equally within reach with him. Thus, among the wonderful Cantus speakers in parchment paper and carbon wire suspensions, the current solid-state amplifiers, the spectacular Dionisio horns in cork-coated resin, the most varied research in the analogue field and his extraordinary talent in calibrating the reading systems, the myth is well-known reality.
As far as I'm concerned, Be's influence was fundamental for growing this passion, both in person and through the third-person story of my late dear friend, Pietro Pesenti, also a trusted acquaintance and sponsor of the Maestro. Regular listening to the Dionisio by my friend, in their pros and cons, has formed in me an open-mindedness towards the complexity and variety of sound aesthetics, giving me tangible lessons of how High Fidelity can go beyond mere instrumental data and the superficial jumble of parameters and report cards, to rise to a state-of-the-art representation of a musical message as a painting can be or a photograph. Knowing, of course, does not force you to uncritically choose or idolize, but allows one to treasure and enrich one's baggage.
While this was happening with me, a more experienced Mirko Marogna was hanging out directly with Be' Yamamura at work. The person's acumen had made it possible to overcome the teacher-disciple relationship – see here – transforming it into an equal relationship between colleagues. Mirko tells me many anecdotes fuelled by the satisfaction of someone who has truly given and received them with passion and gratitude.
It’s something nothing less than revolutionary: a combination of highly prized and highly efficient ALE compression drivers and solid-state amplifications, digital controls, thousands of watts available. For those who are used to the Hi-Fi salons from the Land of the Rising Sun, hearing about class D instead of thermionic tubes of infinitesimal power seems like cheating.
However, Mirko's chronicles demonstrate a competence, as well as a courage and determination to invest, which quickly made me realize that I am not dealing with a bungler, but perhaps the most extreme and aware experimenter I have ever met. Editor's note | For further information see ReMusic interview with Mirko Marogna here.
The incipit of this article was born from curiosity, and since then there have been five listening tests conducted together, all with his present amplifiers. The most recent, most intriguing and surprising in various respects, is the one conducted a few Sundays ago at my place.
The resident system has a stereophonic and a monophonic chain brought together under the hat of a single pair of Loth-X Minstrel speakers. They are equipped with full range loudspeakers, handmade and with numerical control machines by Stefan Stamm based on the Lowther PM2A, of which they are only distant relatives, loaded at the rear with a 3.7-meter folded horn. The effort amounts to almost ninety kilos of carpentry, capable of over 104 dB of efficiency and a bandwidth comparable to most multiway on the market.
I came to these loudspeakers, now out of production for some time, seeing some striking peculiarities which in about a year of fine-tuning I distilled into the environment, thus arriving at the decision to sell the Acapella High Violon Suboktave, important loudspeakers and my personal references of the last years. In the stereo branch of the chain, the speakers are amplified by an integrated amplifier from the same brand, a Loth-X JI-300. Produced by Silbatone for Loth-X, it is the entry level companion, so to speak, designated by the company for its speakers: a single-ended 300B tube, with precious technological details such as a “rectifierless” power supply – I presume switching – very low impedance, the same Tokyo Ko-On volume attenuator that is also found in the famous Kondo Ongaku, silver-clad copper foil output transformers, i.e. copper strips covered – not plated – in silver. The valuable burden is housed in an imposing frame, elegantly machined from solid, in fact the nickname Junior Integrated silk-screened on the chassis appears almost ironic. The maximum output power is 8 watts. A Manley Steelhead RC phono preamplifier and two turntables, a Simon Yorke Zarathustra S4 and a Technics SL-1000 mk2, with various cartridges are connected to the amplifier. On the digital side, a Revox B226S CD player and a streaming system based on a Mac mini and RME ADI-2 DAC FS sound card are ready to use.
The other branch of the chain is particularly unusual, to begin with, it is monophonic, meticulously dedicated to a great master of Tateyama, who also unfortunately passed away: Susumu Sakuma, eccentric and brilliant designer, poet and innkeeper, owner of the Concord restaurant. Legendary restaurant, where you could listen to his creations while enjoying a hamburger. Having the luck of owning three of his works, a phono preamplifier and two power amplifiers, I set up this branch dedicated one hundred percent to his tradition and habits, using his own turntable and cartridge, precisely a Garrard 401 with a Denon DL-102 mounted on an ancient Gray Research 108 tonearm.
It could be said that the stereo branch follows a more ordinary high-fidelity canon, and the mono branch is more similar to the concept of "painting" as opposed to "photography" that I mentioned previously. Sakuma really know how to take a voice out of the record and put it in the flesh in the living room, with a special and deliberately interpretive recipe, made of several interstage transformers, and often in contrast with textbook electrotechnical practices.
Mirko from Esoteric Pro Audio comes to me with a stereophonic power amp and two monophonic power amps, with the beautiful name Caravaggio, in addition to the cables, always homemade, with a personal project of which I knew only the copious use of mu-metal.
We listen to the system resident in its two branches, and after an hour of getting used to it we move on to testing its devices.
Stereo power amps and mono power amps largely share technologies and philosophies. The monos benefit from physical and electromagnetic separation between channels, as well as, above all, individually dedicated power supplies. The delivery capabilities have huge numbers, which I summarize in the power of one 1400 watts per channel into 8 ohms. The construction draws heavily on the experience cultivated with Yamamura. The machined high-density graphite front, which bears the brand in high relief and houses a microscopic LED light point to indicate the power-on status, continues at a right angle under the appliance, constituting the support base for the circuits, once elastically decoupled from the bases. A steel sheet wraps from above and on the sides, while an aluminium panel closes at the rear and houses the connections. The speaker terminals are all made of high-quality rhodium.
It seems necessary to me to make a technological mention which does not strictly relate to sonic performance, but which gives an indication of the determination and anti-improvisation of Esoteric Pro Audio: all the circuits are made on PCB, with the clear EPA engraving on each card, indicating a level of industrialization which is rarely found even in much more structured realities than the small-scale artisan one in question. Editor's note | For further information on the complete Esoteric Pro Audio system see here.
The first step is the most logical replacement: the JI-300 stereo integrated amplifier with the Caravaggio stereo power amp, necessarily connected to the RME ADI-2 DAC FS sound card, therefore also used as a preamplifier via its integrated volume control. The outputs are necessarily XLR, the only connection present on EPA electronics.
I could start from the bass, the mids or the highs, but the correct approach is to try to explain how the system, rather than assuming slightly different expressions in one or the other parameter, rather incorporates a different management model of the entire performance. This is common to all the tests, including previous ones, of the amplifiers under examination. They have such an energetic and dominant ability to deliver and control the speaker – or speakers – that they give the sound of the system a real intent, an objective that is punctually achieved. If this result already appeared incontrovertible with the Acapellas, driven at the time by the powerful Manley Reference 350s, which as soon as they were connected to the Caravaggios took on surgical cleanliness and control, becoming in some ways similar to Mirko's studio speakers but without steering the timbre towards no cold note as prejudice would lead one to suppose, even more impressive is what was achieved with the Loth-X.
The limit of the full range and the limit of the single-ended tube integrated amplifier, even though "on paper" the 8 watts are enough and more than enough for the high efficiency of the speakers, are taken up by this amplifier as a sort of flaw to be fixed, and we immediately finds itself with a new extension, and a cleaning of noise and resonances that seems to have moved to another room, one with better acoustics. It seems that all the small, usual confusion between one note and another, that "dirty inevitable", so subtle that it doesn't even seem like a problem in daily listening habits, rather than being a cause of force majeure, or environmental, can be eliminated by the amplification which, with a curiously necessary iron fist, stops the sound where it belongs and makes the system immediately more transparent. This is not to the detriment of natural harmonic decays, it is not a misunderstood poverty, often translated with impunity into "control" in the judgment of poor amplifications, which do not know how to restore harmonics, envelopes and decays in the correct way and are clumsily promoted by those who do not remember the live instrument sound. Here, on the contrary, the disappearance of the residual background noise allows the piano notes to decay with a length, in some pieces, never before noticed. A purely mathematical fact: beyond a certain level of sound attenuation, the message sinks below the noise threshold. If the noise becomes lower, the note can decay longer before being lost.
All this and more emerges with renewed authority in the transition from the stereo amplifier to the two mono amplifiers, which also add a considerable slice of frequency extension, above and below. With this further upgrade, the Stamm fullrange, whose extension I certainly hadn't despised until then, gains a touch of finesse in high frequency, vigorously expressing its skilful plasticity in cymbals and pizzicatos but letting a lighter colour pass through, a lighter air in the upper harmonics of copper and silver. The low frequency dries out and linearizes, losing some apparent humps and ditches, and making the lower octaves of the double basses, or the low hit of the bass drums, even better heard. Especially by setting high listening volumes, you realize that those low frequencies, previously perceived with the ears and brain while the roll off prevented them from becoming physical on impact, actually began to be felt with the body, from the sofa cushions. Two elements sufficient to make the speaker seem unrecognizable, with the same methodical action already tested, as I mentioned briefly, on the Acapella High Violons.
The listening sessions range from acoustic genres, exploring the timbral difference between the various strings of the same guitar in a strum, the extension of a piano and the decays of the notes, the correct placement and size of a voice within the stage, all improved characteristics compared to listening with my amplifiers, to electric genres with distorted electric guitars, played at volumes that very rarely do not cause an environmental and eardrum disaster. I still remember with a commotion the electric guitar of Maggot Brain, from Funkadelic, reproduced at a volume similar to how it would actually be played in the studio, which didn't make a difference, if only one, and left us speechless.
Esoteric Pro Audio Caravaggio mono power amps, with external protective film still to be removed
The Caravaggios' intervention therefore follows a scientific and repeatable program, based on silence, extension and control. They are not power amplifiers that you can buy to give a colour to the system, on the contrary you would buy them to completely reset it: away with the noise, away with the colour. The meaning of the word "transparency" is, finally, responsive to its optical definition: a transparent material is a material that lets light pass as it enters, without attenuating it in whole or in part, without imparting a colour to it.
With Esoteric Pro Audio, you pursue the goal of listening to the sound as it was recorded. This, for once, is not the ritual attempt to hide behind beautiful words a cold, sharp, icy character and anything else that is boring, if not annoying. Too often we are self-referential in proclaiming a transparent sound, and we should understand this when annoyance or perplexity soon arises in the comparison between what we are reproducing and what we listen to every time in concert. What we did on Sunday, however, was to start listening at 11.30 AM, interrupting at 19.30 PM, and if we deduct an hour for lunch there remains a total of seven hours of listening, after which any stereotypical, edgy transistor would have made us wave deaf. On the contrary, we left with fresh ears and ready to listen again, the brain did not have to implement any filter to protect itself and it was as if the day had passed in silence.
Before interrupting the test, we took advantage of the presence of the Sakuma, the best of my system, to better understand their colour and the Master's intentions, making use of the EPA transparency. Surely, what an esoteric, interpretative and unconventional product like this can do cannot be classified in a comparison: they are "coloured", in their own way, but they are so to create a holography of the voice starting from the support, detaching it from the seabed with a kind of acoustic sleight of hand. Sakuma listened to voices, saxophones, trumpets, pianos, double basses recorded with the – brilliant – monophonic techniques of the time, and his aim was very clear: to isolate the performers he paid attention to and bring them to the foreground, sculpting their contours in the most vivid and from the front row that he succeeded. Therefore, it makes no sense to compete between the results of two radically different goals.
The charm of a day of testing with very high-level equipment remains, where Sakuma was able to remember the reason for his research, Esoteric Pro Audio reiterated its votes with the maximum possible "fidelity", and in my opinion it succeeded, one of thousand, with no problems. The integrated Loth-X, which could not boast the stylistic signature of the Sakuma and the recognition of a noble poetic license, was cornered in a more cerebral and mathematical comparison, in which he appeared so defenceless that he could only throw the sponge.
For my part, who fortunately do not have to give up the beauty of Sakuma's transformation from "recorded" to "live", I believe I can no longer give up the strenuous and sincere loyalty that the technological branch of the chain can give me, now more than never rewarded with expertise. For this reason, and no longer considering myself subservient to the seductions of a high-sounding name, I believe that Esoteric Pro Audio deserves to give voice to my system in stereo, and for this reason I have booked a pair of power amplifiers. I invite anyone who is ready to break away from the charm of big names, to be able to admit the probable defeat of some of them, and, to explore the world of Mirko Marogna.
Official technical specification: download the EPA Caravaggio Hybrid Amplifier manual here - ITA only
Official Italian dealer: to Esoteric Pro Audio website, looking for specialized distributors all over the world
Official current price in Italy:
Caravaggio Hybrid Amplifier mono 7,300.00 EUR 1.400 watts at 8ohms
Caravaggio Hybrid Amplifier stereo 7,450.00 EUR 700 watts/channel at 4ohms
