[Review] The Seventh Veil go flat earth

The Seventh Veil go flat earth

After my trip to see Steve Margolis, the guy behind Seventh Veil, I arranged a home dem. Steve kindly came round on Wednesday morning and out went the SBLs and cheese plant and in went the Seventh Veil Nonsuch and a Double Little Awesome. We played with the setup for a few hours to get the subs tuned in and then Steve left and returned late Friday to whisk them off for another dem. I think he was also suffering withdrawal symptoms for his babies.

The speakers are taller than I remembered and show how compact the SBLs are, but the Nonsuch footprint is much smaller so they take up very little space. The Double sub is likewise tall but thinnish. The design is two stacked subs held apart by bolts, the lower firing up and the upper firing down. Surprisingly the subs sit on rubber feet with Superballs as decoupling device. Strange but very effective. The sub is certainly tall enough and could usefully hold plants or designer teapots. I'm trying to persuade Steve to designer plant pot accessories to go with the speakers.

The drive units on the Nonsuch are 2" aluminium cones made especially for Seventh Veil by Doreen Bance of Bandor. They are coated in an Austrian lacquer, which Steve believes to have almost magical properties. Similarly Doreen Bance has also made the cones for the subs which are slightly more conventional 7" drivers. These are long throw drivers. Doreen and Steve believe that there are practical advantages (speed and enclosure size for example) of going for smaller long-throw drivers rather than larger, more conventional drivers without such a long throw.

There is talk of a 15" version which will go "lower than you need". Most of the technical detail is displayed on the web site including pictures of the internal design which is not your usual box. There is very little damping wool (Scottish sheep or Llama), rather much of the sound is damped down by controlling the reflected waves using egg-shaped segments with clever internal ridges. The enclosures are also sealed as Steve feels you don't get good, fast bass with reflex ports and the use of separate subs is so that the upper range and the bass units don't interfere with each other. (Where have I heard that before? )

As the Nonsuch have no crossover the treble and mid is incredibly open and fast - even more so than you get with an active crossover and streets a head of a normal passive filter. Unfortunately, Steve only had an Audio Fidelity valve crossover of the second order rather than the purpose design one he is having designed for the bass filter. This meant that to keep the mid band tight we had to hold the bass back a little. In the future Steve will be supplying a fourth order crossover and I am wondering if the third order SNAXO could be pressed into service. I also had to have some cables made up (thanks RKR) to connect the sub crossover to one of my two NAP250 poweramps as I didn't have any decent ones with RCA plugs. For the record my system is CDS2/NAC52/active NAP250. For this dem the configuration altered to CDS2/NAC52/NAP250 -> Nonsuch/NAP250/ Audio Fidelity active crossover -> Double Little Awesome

The combination looks beautiful in the flesh and the walnut finish worked really well in my front room. The veneer has a good deep grain to it and has been applied with great care round the acute bends in the Nonsuch sides. The internal MDF is treated to minimise expansion through moisture so there is little danger of the veneer cracking. They also come in Piano Black which sounds tempting but I've yet to see these. The pair I borrowed are the first production model or “artists proof†and I suspect that future versions will be even smarter in the finish.

The Nonsuch finally settled about two foot out from the wall and the Double Little Awesome was stuffed in a corner behind the record shelves displacing the cheese plant. The armchair was also moved from between the speakers to minimise any interference or damping and I settled in for three days extensive listening. Unfortunately my wonderful wife had to go to her parents in Wales which left me on my own so she only got to hear them very briefly and also that I did get a bit carried away on Thursday evening.

 

The Listening

First of an apology. I am not giving a play list. For three days I ran a record race with one record sparking an idea for the next. The usual test tracks came and went and then I started digging deeper with snatches of music and full works. There is just too much to list or remember

Things started slowly. It took a bit of time to sort out what was going on. I have SBLS and love them. They are fast, go deeper than would be expected and have a good warm mid range. My wife loves them, preferring them to SL2s and isn't happy to replace them. I've yet to hear anything at any price that has made me wish to replace them. Yes there are better speakers but none that have had me reaching for the cheque book.

You get the impression I like SBLs and am very used to the sound. Normally it takes a couple of minutes to get my head round a new speaker. With the Nonsuch it took longer. This I worked out was because they sounded just like SBLs and I was looking for difference and not similarities. The first time I heard them was with valve amps driving them which gave them a lovely open sound. I was expecting similar when I put them in my system which put me off the scent for a while. At first I just got what the hi-fi was doing and not the speakers or the music, so let's get that aspect out of the way.

The most obvious thing about the Nonsuch is the speed. They are fast, very, very fast, like Roadrunner. Nothing seems to phase them. Put on a Amnesiac by Radiohead which has some weird speaker breaking scratching, clipped notes and extreme and sudden dynamics. Where most speakers ignore it or make a stab at general noise the Nonsuch give it all to you and ask what the problem is. King Crimson, Red is a favourite test of timing as it has some very quiet but fast hi-hat work which potentially sounds as though Bill Bruford can't drum. Again the Nonsuch show just how great a drummer Bruford is. In fact there was stuff on the disc I hadn't ever heard in 20 years of listening.

Then there is the detail. As with Red there where quite a few disks that I was very familiar with which had instruments I didn't know where there. (I counted 5 tings on Roy's test disc, rather than the usual 3). This extra detail allowed my hardest track to really open out. I have a recording of Tallis, Spem in Alium made in Winchester Cathedral. The miking was done a long way back from the 40 Quiristers to capture the ambience and resonance of the choir rather than the different lines. Usually this comes out as a blur, a general impression of the work but the Nonsuch not only delivered the ambience but you could pick out the individual singers from the cloud. Another favourite is A Day in a Life off Sgt Pepper. At the end you can hear John Lennon get up from the piano and say “Shhâ€Â. No surprises there but for the first time in ages I was aware of the 20khz signal put on to annoy your dogs. I won't pretend I heard it but I noticed / felt some of the resonant harmonics from that signal.

As for bass, well they go low enough for me. Somewhere around 20-25hz apparently. They certainly put nice deep rumbles in on several organ pieces, dealt happily with Dreadzone, Return of the Dread, Brian Eno's Apollo and the other bass test tracks. No complaints there. We'd obviously got the crossover right as the bass produced a realistic stereo image with the instruments appearing where placed rather than from the sub.

I also got that strange beast, soundstage. I'm not a fan but it did work well here and helped separate the instruments further. Good crisp left and right and depth. Bizarre stuff, doesn't happen in the real world but the sound engineer's got to do something. It was more marked in Steve's valve setup but I have Naim so what do you expect.

So the speakers do hi-fi nicely but what about the music? Oh yes indeedy, they do music. Loads of the PRaT thing, finger tapping, foot stompng, jump in the air and thrash that air guitar wildly sort of PRaT. Yet sit quietly and listen to Angela Hewitt play Bach's Goldberg Variations and you can feel her emotional response to the music. You are brought much closer to what the musicians are doing and so much closer to the music. The speakers are revealing to such an extent that the imperfections and technical brilliance are all exposed. They also removed that high shrillness of women's choruses singing at the top of their range making them much pleasanter to listen to. We are talking recorded music but cd does still have a lot to offer and these speakers help you retrieve that.

Were there any down sides or flaws? Well of course, no speaker is perfect. The sweet spot is more critical with the Nonsuch than with many speakers and standing up does lose some of the higher frequencies.. I also found that the sound was coming too much from the speakers. This I suspect came down to not enough toe in and a slightly unfortunate incident triggered by the results of Thursday evening. Any other downsides? Not that I can think of. Unless you count them playing louder than my SBLs and a very slight glassiness that might have been room colouration coming through. Oh and you do need two power amps, one for the Nonsuch and one for the Little Awesomes as well as a bass crossover. Again Steve maybe designing a version with a built-in power amp and crossover which will make life easier.

So what happened on Thursday & Friday. Well, Thursday I sat up until 3 o'clock listening with a bottle of wine and a bottle of scotch which meant I wasn't fully on the ball Friday morning. I came down put on various bass testing discs including Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Everything sounded fine, great, superb etc,etc. Then I came across a couple of discs that sounded thinner than I remembered. It was at this point that I realised I hadn't switched the sub on. Being a valve crossover I'd turned it off the previous night & not plugged it back in the morning. Despite that the Nonsuch had performed admirably well on their own with out the support of the Little Awesome sub. I reckon in some rooms you could happily just use the Nonsuch on their own. Mind you, turning the sub back on did raise the musicality substantially.

 

The Aftermath

Steve reappeared late Friday and ripped the speakers out, leaving me to go back to the SBLs. I was dreading this moment but in fact it wasn't nearly as painful as I'd imagined. The detail died back, the sound closed in a little but the musicality remained. The SBLs are good, just not nearly as good as the Seventh Veil package.

My wife came back and gave her considered response which was that she found a more pleasing warmth to the SBLs but that the Nonsuch were certainly revealing and did somethings better. She couldn't see the need to replace the SBLs, “If it ain't broke, don't fix itâ€Â. Hmmm but she only heard them for a short while, mainly straight from work or rushing off late to work so hardly good time for serious listening.

Will I buy them? I certainly hope so. Money is tight and I was hoping to buy the P9 but now it's one or the other. I have to convince my long suffering wife, which will mean another home demo but the speakers are now travelling round the country so it won't be immediate. Paul Messenger doesn't really want to hear them does he? Nor does Wadia-Meister, nor AlexS or Jason Hector. I on the other hand need another six week home dem just to be sure

There is also the issue that I hope to be moving soon and what will the speakers sound like in a different room. My guess is that won't be a problem. The sub can go in a corner and the Nonsuch can be placement isn't quite as critical as some speakers. Rather they can be moved quite a bit to get the right spot. Being sealed there is quite a bit of play with placement.

Watch this spot. I may well get them and then I'll have to change my email address.

 

A mock up

 

Thanks for that indepth review mate nice one
One fear I had about these, you seem to have confirmed though, 'back to the warmth of the SBL's', still Glad you good enough to try em mate.
We'll give a good work out on Tuesday too. WM