In the next half hour Hermann Winters tried to convince me that it's not an exaggerated expense, that it's not even really necessary, to have the smallest Acapella loudspeakers with Ion tweeters to enjoy pure listening pleasure. Perhaps he wanted to bring me back down to earth after my enthusiasm for the unattainable Poseydon. So we listened to a chain with the Basso Nobile, a two-way construction with hyper-spherical horn, which only cost a little more than a tenth of the Poseydon. And really, nearly all pieces, which he called up from the music server via iPad, had a special something. At the time when I was a regular customer in Audio Forum, I would have worded it like this: the colourful mix of different genres sounded like they were all Direct-to-Disc recordings. In the ‘80s it was said that they sounded especially dynamic, open, and lively. The equipment that we listened to at that moment did that too. If you looked closely then it was clear that, in comparison to the ones previously listened to, the only moderately priced components were the Basso Nobile. The LaMusika integrated amp took care of the amplification, where the component tolerances are consistently in the thousandths. Then the basic price of 80,000 Euros is not really surprising, and it can easily be boosted by adding a few extras. As a source, The Beast by ReQuest Audio, which Hermann Winters has really taken to due to its sound and simplicity to use, is a worthy match. Finally, the most impressive experience for me was how impressively the Basso Nobile brought the qualities of the upstream world-class electronics to the fore.

When Alfred Rudolph took over the showroom again, he demonstrated the influence of his wooden rocker near the tape heads of the M15 once again during playback. Thanks to it, the musical flow was more intensive; the playback came out a little bit less "technical." Especially interesting for me, as when comparing digital components I have always preferred the ones which suggested a larger room, was Alfred Rudolph's cable comparison. Although the second cable apparently transported less energy, which you could hear immediately, I initially thought of this as the worse one for a few seconds. However, it proved itself to be the more harmonious one after a few minutes; the playback sounded more down-to-earth, not quite as "nervous." The developer worded it like this:  "Now the energy flow is right." Sometimes less can be more.

Finally, Alfred Rudolph told a little bit about the beginnings of his loudspeaker development. He, like many others, started with the loudspeaker books by Klinger, but quickly recognised the limitations in them. With his early developments there were very different concepts, such as a four-way loudspeaker, a combination of softly fixed Isophon low-to-midrange driver with a soft dome, as well as a transmission line with the Isophon orchestra coax chassis. Today he develops the "Silver Edition" of a model first, which with their silver cables offers the best possible resolution. From that he creats a "friendlier" tuned version, as the "Silver Edition" only works in perfectly attuned chains.