from the the review in ultraaudio and I agree with 99% of it
While I expected a somewhat similar sonic experience to what I’d had with the Parsifal Ovations, I wasn’t prepared for how much alike the two speakers would sound. After the Rienzis had settled in for a few hours and lost their huffiness at being moved about, I was immediately aware of just how easy they were to listen to. As I’ve said in other reviews, how loudly and how long I can play a pair of speakers depends on their upper-midrange prominence and harshness. While I can appreciate a speaker with a more forward tonal balance, I can’t listen to one for long, or at too high a volume. There’s a big difference, I feel, between speakers that go out of their way to present detail and information, and those that, first and foremost, present music. The Rienzi, like the Parsifal Ovation, made music.
Also like the Parsifal Ovation, the Rienzi had a silkiness in the highs and an utter lack of bite in the upper midrange. As a direct result of this smoothness, it begged to be played loud. Keith Jarrett’s The Köln Concert [2 LPs, ECM 1064/65 ST] is beautifully recorded, but it has a tendency to get a touch clangy; there’s a slight upper-midrange prominence to his piano. Despite that, it’s glorious music, a lusty celebration reminiscent of Charles Mingus’s "Better Get Hit in Yo’ Soul," and as such needs to be played loud. I kept returning to this recording, as it speaks volumes about what the Rienzi did so very well. "Part I" begins introspectively, Jarrett noodling away as if there’s no one else in the room. Each note is redolent with sustain, and the tails of the harmonics filled my listening room with rich, strain-free sound.
Remember, the Rienzi’s midrange lacks a low-pass crossover; throughout an album such as The Köln Concert, the midrange driver is reproducing essentially the piano’s entire range. Sure, the woofer helps fill in the bottom, and the tweeter undoubtedly helps with some top-octave air, but for all intents and purposes, this is a one-driver speaker. And it showed. The Rienzi’s midrange was startlingly quick, reacting to dynamic shifts with an electrostatic-like agility that drew me into the music from day one.
Strain-free -- that was the key to the Rienzi’s sound. There were no sharp edges, but there was a wealth of detail and tons of air. Your ears might have perked up at my mention of smoothness, which you might have assumed was a code word for lack of extension. That wasn’t the case. If you were to listen to the Rienzi immediately after auditioning a more aggressive speaker, you might at first feel that the Verity leaned slightly toward the polite side of the spectrum, and to some extent you’d be right. But after a few minutes’ listening, you’d most likely reach for the volume control, crank it up, and settle in for the long haul with a smile on your face. Gil Evans’ Out of the Cool [LP, MCA Impulse! 29033] is the strangest big-band album. Evans’ scoring is so sparse it’s almost invisible, long periods of peaceful introspection interspersed with moments of discordant clatter. But it’s loaded with percussion details, and the liner notes include a map of where each bandmember sat and which microphones were used where. If that isn’t handy for an audio reviewer, what is?
The cymbals on "La Nevada" should sound brassy and detailed, and the Rienzis reproduced them with the full complement of requisite overtones, adding no extra glare but including a full dose of the bite that I know is present on this recording. In a like manner, the woodwinds on this track can get a bit shouty, most likely due to the poor state of my LP. While the Rienzis didn’t beat me over the head about it, they did inform me in no uncertain terms that perhaps I might want to look into getting a new copy.
https://www.ultraaudio.com/equipment/verity_rienzi.htm
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