Reference 3A De Capo BE Review

Reference 3A De Capo BE Review
Back in July 2012, I posted a very enthusiastic review of the Reference 3A Dulcet speaker. You can find it here.
http://www.audioasylum.com/cgi/vt.mpl?f=speakers&m=318237
Reference 3A has a generous program whereby customers who don't have a local Reference 3A dealership and thus must buy direct from the manufacturer are given a six-month trade up period. During that time, the purchaser will receive full price credit toward any more expensive Reference 3A model. You are only on the hook for the return shipping costs.
In speaking with a dealer in California toward the end of my first 6 months with the Dulcets, trying to decide whether to upgrade, his comment that “The Dulcet is terrific, but the De Capo is in another league altogether” pushed me over the edge. After about five months of ownership, I sent my Dulcets back to Reference 3A in Canada and eagerly awaited their replacement.
Unfortunately, the shipping company completely mangled the first set that I received, but Reference 3A was able to get a pair that had been shipped to another Texas city diverted to me. No harm done – the new pair was flawless. I got a pair of De Capo i/A’s (the “A” indicating the presence of the Surreal Acoustic Lens in the center of the main driver) in the beautiful, matte red-cherry veneer finish.
In common with the Dulcet, the De Capo is a rear ported design with a raked front baffle for better time alignment between the two drivers and a “crossover-less” design in which the house-built, woven carbon-fiber mid-woofer is run flat-out with nothing between it and the amplifier. A single capacitor in the signal path protects the tweeter. Also in common with the Dulcet, the De Capo’s are sold in mirror imaged pairs, meant to be positioned with the tweeters on the outside edge and the speakers firing straight ahead into the room with no to-in. The biggest difference is the much larger main driver (8 inches as opposed to 4) and the more voluminous cabinet. As you’d expect, these factors result in a more authoritative bottom end (although, especially considering its diminutive size, the Dulcet is no slouch in the bass department, either). The De Capo will also move more air and energize the room more readily than the Dulcet. And it will play louder without signs of strain, enabling you to be drawn fully into a large, symphonic piece without being reminded that you’re listening to smallish, monitor speakers. Finally, it’s more sensitive, rated at 92 db compared to 88 db for the Dulcet.
So then, how do they sound?
The De Capo’s are just sublimely musical, projecting not only the emotional core of the performance, but rendering it coherently as well. Coherence is a difficult thing to express in words, but you know it when you hear it.
For example, Paul Simon’s 2006 “Surprise” album is a collaboration between the singer-songwriter and electronica pioneer Brian Eno. Simon’s erudite lyrics and meandering melodies are embedded in Eno’s complex, layered and often dissonant electronic “soundscapes.” This album is a great torture test for a speaker. Lesser transducers will render many of the tracks on “Surprise” a noisy mess. But the De Capo has the ability to present the complex rhythms and sonic textures in these songs as, for lack of a better word, integrated performances that make musical sense.
Another aspect of this coherence is the uncanny ability of the De Capo’s to present precisely localized images.
Now I know that some of our fellow audiophiles deride imaging as smoke-and-mirrors artifact of the recording process. “You don ’t hear imaging at a live concert,” they say, which is largely true. But in my opinion, imaging can be one of the great pleasures of recorded music, and if the recording engineer went out of his or her way to provide imaging effects, then I want to experience them to their fullest.
Case in point: near the beginning of “Night Train,” the third track on Rikki Lee Jones’ musically sublime and beautifully recorded self-titled debut album [Warner BSK3296 on LP] a plucked electric guitar enters after a few measures. It is panned toward the right of the soundstage: not all the way to the right, but distinctly right of center. And on the De Capo’s, the firm plucking of that string is so palpable, and the guitar itself so precisely located, hanging in the air just to the right of center, that the effect is simply startling. The background vocals on this cut are also rendered beautifully, choral in nature, yet the individual lines are not obscured or blurred.
This seems like a good point to mention that not long into my ownership of the De Capo's, Reference 3A announced that their entire line was being upgraded by the substitution of a new, beryllium dome tweeter as a replacement for the fabric dome previously utilized. I was hesitant to do the upgrade because of the bad reputation that metallic tweeters have for harshness. I got on the phone with Tash Goka, Director of Reference 3A (and very nice guy to talk to on the phone). He said something to the effect that "the metallurgy of beryllium is much different than that of the materials used in other metallic tweeters such as titanium and aluminum. You're not going to hear the kind of harshness associated with metallic drivers."
I ordered my replacement drivers, got out my soldering iron and giddily installed them when they arrived from Canada. I can confirm what Tash Goka said: there is absolutely nothing harsh about these tweeters. The sound is smooth, full of air and extension and very resolving, but not sibilant or harsh. I'm mentioning the tweeter upgrade here because to the extent that spatial cues are dependent upon high-frequency information, a perception that I felt not long after installing the new tweeters makes sense: the De Capo's ability to retrieve ambient information like recording space or auditorium echo and to place images in three-dimensional space is even more impressive with the new tweeter. At this point, you could say that I own a pair of "almost" De Capo BE’s, as the latest model is called. The only thing lacking is the slate gray, Nextel finish on the latest cabinets (which is said to further reduce the transmission of unwanted cabinet resonances).
Let me also say something about the low-end of these speakers (they are rated down to 42 kHz). In my medium small (and quite acoustically compromised) listening room, the De Capo's provide what I’ll confidently call a satisfying and convincing bottom end. No, they don't plumb the depths of the lowest octave (I suppose that pipe organ music aficionados need not apply without a subwoofer) but I have yet to play a genre of music through the De Capo’s that they haven’t rendered with conviction.
Allow me to share two very different examples:
I was 14 years old in 1972 when the album "Chicago V" [Columbia LP KC 31102] was released – I raced down to my local Sam Goody on my bike to buy it (on sale for $2.99…) It’s probably my favorite album by that band and I can't even begin to imagine how many times I've listened to it and how intimately familiar I thought I was with every lyric, note and horn riff. But in playing the track "A Hit by Varese" that opens Side 2, I heard something I had never noticed before. In the closing bars of that song (with the horn section playing triplet figures over the rhythm section playing four beats to the bar) I noticed that Pete Cetera – an underappreciated bass player if there ever was one – is playing a very deep bass note on the third and fourth beat of each measure. To be surprised with low-frequency information on a track that I thought I knew inside and out is a testimony to how well these modestly sized speakers "do" bass.
One other example: I was fortunate enough to be in the San Francisco Bay area recently while the California Audio Show was taking place and I managed to get to the show for a few hours. I picked up a couple of anthology CDs at the Reference Recordings table. It goes without saying that they are immaculately recorded! I was pleased to see that the classical sampler “Tutti!” [RR-906CD] concluded with the last couple of sections of the Maurice Ravel orchestration of "Pictures at an Exhibition." (Okay, maybe it is an overplayed "war horse" of the orchestral repertoire, but I love it anyway.) The orchestra really pulls out the stops during the final section of the piece, “The Great Gate Of Kiev.” To their credit, the De Capo's never lose their composure throughout the mounting volume and thunder of this climactic section of the work. But, getting back to the low-end, I was startled by how thrillingly the De Capo's managed to pull off the pounding and crashing of the timpani in those final measures of the piece. The big drums are somewhat "miniaturized," of course (insert audio review cliché about not being able to circumvent the laws of physics here…) But you get enough of those big guns to feel satisfied.
So, what's wrong with these speakers? Frankly, not a lot that I can put my finger on. Like their younger sibling, the Dulcet, I am regularly struck not only by how good they are, but also by how they keep getting better with time and break in. Of course, there is a lot of competition for your audio dollar at the roughly $3000 price point and only you can decide whether the De Capo is ultimately for you. But I will go out on a limb and say that this design, which has been refined fairly constantly for decades, is considered by some to be a classic and a reference with good reason. They are really quite something.