![]() ![]() A grille wraps partially around the column, covering the drivers without adding a diffraction-producing obstruction. A tall column containing the midrange and treble drivers rises from the woofer enclosure, making the column look a little like a stovepipe. The narrow but deep lower enclosure holds a side-loaded 12" woofer. The P-FR looks unusual, to say the least. I'll just consider the $3000/pair P-FR left and right loudspeakers in this review. These components are available separately or as a $4448 package. The entire Composition Home Theater package consists of left and right loudspeakers with integral powered woofers (the Prelude Full Range, or P-FR), a center-channel speaker (the Prelude Center Channel, or P-CC, footnote 1), and a pair of surrounds (the Prelude Quadrapole Surrounds, or P-QPS). Infinity has more than met those goals (see my review in the Stereophile Guide to Home Theater) but, perhaps more importantly, they created a loudspeaker that provided audiophile-quality musical performance at an affordable price. The Prelude was designed to combine simplicity of use, elegance, and good video soundtrack reproduction in a Home Theater loudspeaker system. Every driver and component in the Prelude was designed from scratch specifically for this product, with some design aspects pushing the envelope of what is possible in loudspeaker technology. Created by Laurie Fincham (formerly of KEF) and his protégé Andrew Jones (also once with KEF), the Prelude is the culmination of an 18-monthlong, ground-up development effort. The Infinity Prelude represents a bold new approach to loudspeaker design. So that's the story of how my listening room ended up home to the two most disparate products imaginable. At $3395, the CAD-300SEI is also a good price match for the $3000/pair Composition Prelude P-FR. ![]() Moreover, the Preludes, with their astounding 96dB sensitivity (2.83V/1m) and integral powered woofer, seemed an ideal load for a single-ended amplifier such as the Cary CAD-300SEI integrated amplifier. The Preludes' extraordinary musical performance and unique design compelled me to tell you about how they performed in an audiophile-quality two-channel playback system. The Preludes were such a musical standout that I rescued them from the Home Theater room (where they had been powered by mass-market receivers and fed with a laserdisc source) and gave them a new lease on life in the larger music room, with reference-quality source and amplification components. In addition to evaluating the loudspeaker systems under review with video soundtracks, I assessed their musical qualitiesor lack thereof. I discovered the Infinity Preludes while surveying Home Theater loudspeaker systems for the upcoming second issue of the Stereophile Guide to Home Theater. ![]() This combination didn't happen by accident as you'll see, these apparently disparate products are a match made in heaven. What a bizarre marriage it was, then, to pair the new Infinity Composition Prelude P-FR loudspeakers with the Cary Audio Design CAD-300SEI 11W single-ended triode amplifier (reviewed elsewhere in this issue). ![]() Conversely, a Home Theater loudspeaker systemparticularly one made by a mass-market manufacturerwould appear to put the emphasis on booming bass and reproducing shotgun blasts, with little regard for musical refinement. Single-ended tubed amplifiers are about reproducing subtlety, delicacy, nuance, and communicating the music's inner essence. Including an essay by Bill Dietz, Unbegrenzt is released on 28 August by Blank Forms Editions and Empty Editions.I can't think of two products at further ends of the audio spectrum than a single-ended triode tubed amplifier and a mass-market Home Theater loudspeaker. Unbegrenzt was restored and mastered by Stephan Mathieu. It follows Selected Early Keyboard Works and Selections From 100 Models Of Hegikan Roku, as well as a two volume collection of Hennix’s writings titled Poësy Matters and Other Matters. Here the realisation expands on Hennix's work with infinitary compositions, a concept central to her work with the ensemble The Deontic Miracle. The Stockhausen original was released by Shandar as part of Aus Den Sieben Tagen (1969), a collection of 15 text pieces written in Paris in May 1968 and which, without notated direction, offered poetic cues aligning with the concept of intuitive music, a form Eurocentric improvisation. Unbegrenzt was recorded by Catherine Christer Hennix (recitation, percussion and electronics) and Hans Isgren (bowed gong) in 1974 and is the Swedish artist's realisation of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s piece of the same name. ![]()
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