Sweet and Lowther

Lowther PM2A full-range loudspeakers: $1150 per pair (drivers only), distributed by Lowther America, PO Box 4758, Salem, OR 97302. (503)370-9115; fax: (503)365-7327.

I know I'm still alive because I continue to find music that's both difficult to learn and, once that's done, seemingly infinitely rewarding.

Take the tone poems of Richard Strauss, for instance. For whatever reasons--maybe it's my childhood indifference to sparkly crescendos, peasant dances, and the French horn, not to mention how unlikely my parents were to whistle the landler of Lower Saxony around the house--these take a lot of work. For me.

That's especially true of the sunnier ones. Each one I've grappled with--like Don Quixote, Till Eulenspiegel, and Ein Heldenleben--at first strikes me as both overly busy and melodically undernourished, showing great powers of orchestration but not much in the way of themes that compel on their own. Quixote in particular: Its humor at first seems fussy, precious. (As friends who've suffered one of my anti-NPR rants can tell you, I have a violent aversion to precious humor.) And it's too programmatic, too obvious, almost Grofe-like: a Happy Little Elves soundtrack run amok.

I'm usually wrong, of course.

I listen some more. And I read about it. And I listen and I read and I listen some more. (Yes, if I stare at sheet music long enough I can figure it out, but that's a far cry from sight-reading--and so I haven't tried buying or following the score for these or any other symphonic works.) Eventually, I get it, and I thank God for my generally underused ability to keep my mouth shut prior to learning what it is I'm talking about.

A conductor like Rudolf Kempe helps. Hearing the music on an LP instead of a CD helps, too. And so does hearing the piece live once or twice--though that observation is meant not in the sense of using a live performance as some sonic absolute to which hi-fi must be compared, but rather using a live performance as something that stimulates interest in and enthusiasm for a piece of music.

But of equal importance, I think, is listening to stuff like this on a decent hi-fi. Not necessarily an expensive one, or a fiddly one, or a whatever one. Just one that plays music as opposed to just making an impressive sound. A good hi-fi.

The things I value in hi-fi have less to do with the mere sounds of things than with the sucess of this or that system to play music, and to engage me emotionally and intellectually. The way I put it last issue was this: A good hi-fi is one through which the musical artistry of a Wilhelm Kempff towers over that of a lesser pianist every time. The better the hi-fi, the bigger that difference will be.

And by the way, that's all. You don't need to train your ears for anything. You needn't be able to "hear" how big the recording studio was, or what kind of instrument someone played, or where they stood or sat. And you don't need to make a lot of bass to impress your friends. Making enough music to impress yourself will do nicely.

So.

As I write this, I've lived with Lowther loudspeakers--the drivers themselves from England, the cabinets made here in the US--for about five months. And to my way of thinking, the Lowthers are great hi-fi, mostly because they make great music.

The Lowther PM2A, in fact, is a real Rudolf Kempe amongst loudspeakers. Two weeks ago I sat down with a nice old stereo LP of Strauss's Don Quixote (Kempe's own, as it turns out) for the first time in months. And through the PM2As, the thing was finally unravelled: These are the themes, these are the variations, and this is the way they should be played...

Nuances of playing technique are communicated brilliantly by the PM2As, but not in so fiddly a way that you're always on the edge of your seat straining to hear this gal's fingers squeak on the strings or that guy in the second row bang his cufflink against his violin. What I mean is: These speakers very easily and instantly exude volumes of information on the players' apparent intentions. Because they're so efficient and they have so wide an operating range, Lowther drivers are tremendously dynamic. But their goodness goes beyond just the obvious question of zero-to-sixty times on the hi-fi loudness scale: What I'm talking about is a loudspeaker that communicates musical subtleties--and not just sonic subtleties--like nothing else you've ever heard.

To someone who's already read the Lowther piece in the last issue, this may be just so much lily-gilding. So now let's talk about the specific differences between a Lowther PM5A (the subject of that last review) and the PM2A, a pair of which I've been breaking in here for nigh onto two months.

First, the technical side. As you know, the Lowther PM5A is a full-range driver with a six-inch paper cone, the center of which is home to a second, smaller cone (the "whizzer") for the high frequencies. Both cones are made of a rigid, parchment-like paper, and both are glued to a paper voice coil former. The coil itself, like the best single malts, is a double: There's wire on the inside and the outside of the former. Except where silver wire is specified (a $50 option per driver), the coils are all aluminum--or, as they say in England, aluminium, or, as they say in upstate New York, siding.

The PM5A has the second-largest Alnico magnet you can find on a Lowther driver (only the PM4A's is bigger), and the pole piece is a heavy, magnetically permeable alloy called Permandor. Taken together, this magnet and pole piece measure an almost absurdly high 2.3 Teslas on the flux-density scale, and the system efficiency is 98 dB measured in free air (and somewhat higher than that when the rear wave is properly horn loaded).

So if that's a PM5A, what's a PM2A? The same exact thing, only with a pole piece made out of soft iron instead of Permandor. This gives a slightly lower flux density (2.1 Teslas) and, consequently, lower efficiency (97 dB) than the PM5A.

Keep in mind, too, that the PM2A is less expensive than the PM5A by some $350 a pair.

God knows I'm cheap, but that's not the only reason I prefer the PM2A, albeit with all appropriate caveats and conditions. To my ears, the PM2As are a little more laid-back sounding, and just a tiny bit softer up top. If there are any other differences--in the bass or whatever--I can't hear them.

As to those caveats: The PM5As on loan from Lowther America already had some miles on them before they reached me. So did the loaner pair of PM2As. Was it a fair comparison? I mean, is one or the other pair more broken-in? Maybe. I know for sure that Lowther cabinet designer David Clark (914/888-2360) thinks "my" PM2As are nowhere near fully broken in. And, Jesus, these things have seen daily use in my system for a couple of months.

In that sense, perhaps all Lowthers are works in progress up to some point--although the only work involved is listening. Which isn't.

In either case, whether the drivers are the PM2As or the PM5As, their calling card is a breed of snap, temporal accuracy and steadiness, dynamism, and reach-out-and-grab-you presence that no other speaker I know can pull off. You can't listen to my Lowther-ed stereo without the feeling of being closer to what's on the record than with any other speakers. On the other hand, with few exceptions (like Quad ESLs), you can't go from the Lowther experience back to anything else without those other speakers sounding musically spastic by comparison.

With the Lowthers drivers and Medallion cabinets, notes, beats, and feelings coming across with unprecedented purity. This sense of directness has a sonic component as well as a musical one: Even with the softer, less aggressive sounding PM2As, I can hear plenty of detail. It's enough to make me hope we get snowed in some weekend soon, so I can get out Mark Lewisohn's The Beatles: The Recording Sessions, and go through my records and listen for all the broken strings, splices, and swear words.

While I find the less expensive PM2As easier to live with overall, most of the same Lowther flaws, noted last issue, remain: There are still a couple of bumps in the upper midrange response, and these make the sound a shade more aggressive than it ought to be. (But again: David Clark believes that this will largely work itself out over the coming months.) They sound better at volume levels that are low to moderate overall (imagine: a speaker with a dynamic range that's almost too wide!). And, at least when used in the not-terribly-large, not-terribly-expensive Medallion cabinets, they do not make a whole lot of bass. (When Rob gives me back my spectrum analyzer I'll be able to tell you exactly; for now, I'd guess there ain't much at all below 70 Hz.)

There's more to be done about all these things, though, and when I move on to building and reviewing the Medlallion kits, we'll try them out. These suggestions include:

* The use of a proprietary sound-diffraction material called Deflex in the chamber behind the magnet;

* Using gaskets between the Lowther drivers and cabinets--which I so far haven't done; and,

* Making sure all the inner horn surfaces are absolutely as smooth as can be. Clark points to this as especially important: Even a little bit of roughness here can jeopardize the smoothness and extension of a horn's bass performance, he says.

I'm also tempted to some day play around with the Lowther's phase plug, that bullet-shaped thing at the center of the cone. This, like most such devices, works by preventing sound from being propagated by the entire cone (or, in some cases, by the voice coil and its former), some parts of which are further from your ears than others; thus the acoustical waves that do reach your ears all get there at the right time. But Lowther drivers have evolved somewhat over the years, while the size and shape of that plug haven't necessarily kept pace. I can't help but wonder what some time with a lathe and a little experimentation might accomplish.

But that's off in the future some time, after the deadlines and the holidays and the teething. Right now these speakers are giving Janet and I an extraordinarily great deal of musical pleasure, and that more than offsets the Lowther's flaws, limitations, and general do-it-yourselfishness. They're terrific fun, terrific hi-fi, and I don't want to give them up.

Next issue (I promise): Building those Medallion cabinet kits.