Hi pulinap, this response is coming a little late I think - David alerted me to your post regarding the nenuphar, and from a read, I see it in specific reference to ‘holographic imaging, overall balance, and bass performance’.
ok then, I’m running my nenuphars with a 19W line magnetic 125 211 tube amp with a tube preamp. My prior experience with audiophile bass is from a 120W ss amp and a 30W tube amp paired with Larsen6.2 speakers going down to the high 20s, proac D30rs speakers going down to an accurate 20hz, and the tekton moabs with a claimed 20hz that doesn’t actually sound like it goes that low.
I think excellent bass is absolutely vital for everything higher up to gell well, and at the very beginning listening to my nenuphars, I felt that the bass wasn’t performing as well as my proacs - this not in relation to depth of frequency, obviously, but with respect to total nuance, speed, and accuracy. With the right speaker cable, fuses, and power cables, however, the bass is now not only performing better than my proacs, but with such subtlety of timbre, I am moved to tears at times. It will never go down past 30hz, nor hit the subwoofer-like bass of my proacs, but it does something better - something which David first mentioned to me as sounding more ‘right’, having to do with the same driver that’s driving everything also driving the bass on that single unsplit signal. (I hope I’m explaining that correctly, David).
The outcome of that single driver and the amazing cabinet that drops the bass to ‘just’ 30hz, is that the lower frequencies I’m hearing has this cohesion to everything else I don’t hear with the other speakers I own, or any other speaker I’ve heard - on most speakers, the bass is just that, bass; great for the feel, rhythm, and depth, but mostly sounding unplaced and just there as bass coming from the speaker, however solid and deep, but expected. Nenuphar bass is a psychedelic thing for me, a teleportation to the very venue and air that resonates with a bass that belongs to everything else and becomes part of the sound decay of the music in the air - its so effing ‘real’.
Ok, the bad news haha - there are three tracks I use to gauge the effectiveness of bass depth (nothing else regarding nuance or accuracy) - ‘temple caves’ - mickey hart, ‘raiders march ’ - john williams, and ‘fading sun’ - terje isungset. About 6 and 18 seconds into ‘fading sun’ there are these crazy deep thumps - they are not just casual events or accompanying background support, but absolutely vital and visceral parts of the track. These are so light with the nenuphars and my 19W tubes that they barely register, in comparison to my proacs and the Larsen with the same amp. The good news is that the Tekton moabs only do marginally better. With the ‘raiders March’, there’s this massive background orchestral bass drum hit that caps the movement at about the 1.32 mark - its deep solid boom resonates to cradle all the other instruments for that single moment - this is noticeable, but is still pretty weak from the nenuphar. Finally, about 12 seconds into ‘temple caves’ there is a super deep note of an earth drum immediately following the opening of the track - this drum strike lacks any presence whatsoever on the nenuphars, as would all similarly deep notes from tracks that go way down deep. I have not been disappointed in the depth of its bass performance in any other way, be it bass heavy numbers like Lorde’s ‘royals’ or Paula Cole’s ‘tiger’. And almost every full orchestral tracks. But do not bother listening to billie eilish’s ‘you should see me in a crown’, and you won’t get the same visceral chopper blade thud in your belly with Pink Floyd’s ‘the happiest days of our lives’ ; p
I have not made any mention of ‘holographic imaging’ or ‘overall balance’ because the nenuphar will not disappoint in any way on these two counts - it is an amazing speaker ; )
In friendship - kevin
