Meanwhile, the Veritas SE have arrived and have had time to become acclimatized. I still well remember their sound in conjunction with the Soulnote A2 from one of my previous tests. This has impressed me to such an extent that I decided to purchase the Phonar speakers. I wasn’t up to believe that the Ultima Integrated could surpass this in terms of sonic performance until I heard the first few chords of Eric Clapton's album Unplugged (Live) streamed via Qobuz. With silky, beautiful overtones, the Chord Ultima clearly opens up the stage in depth towards the back and also a little towards the front. It lends the guitars and Clapton's vocals even more space. The sonic imaging with the A2 is quite inspiring and has its strength in the fundamental range, where it seems to provide a little more substance. This can be quite pleasing, but the Ultima doesn't just win it over when you merely limit it to its spatial capabilities. Another advantage emerges from its enormously clean sonic image. The Soulnote doesn't play impurely at all, but the Chord wins the listener's sympathy with its outstanding accuracy and, thanks to its velocity, reproduces the music completely free of acoustic slag. It opens up the space as if it had taken me into a concert hall - that's a fascinating difference. The Soulnote delivers no less of a detail, which I proved again through the Qobuz-streamed Bee Gees oldie "New York Mining Disaster 1941", for example. The Soulnote identifies the voices of the three Gibb brothers no less well than the Chord. However, the amplifier from Kent conveys a different sense of space as soon as the recording does. The Ultima Integrated sounds a touch less dry in the bass than its Japanese counterpart. Although it makes the much lower-priced Soulnote very appealing with some bass instruments, the Ultima, on the other hand, doesn’t play soft or undifferentiated. Its diction is the result of its enormous speed, which produces a vivid, colourful bass. The joy of playing, dynamics and authenticity form the musical character of the Chord Ultima. It brings the instruments and voices into a fascinating three-dimensional order. Each voice, each instrument is presented on stage with its own individuality, in an impressively contoured and three-dimensional manner. The image doesn’t seem torn in any way, but rather organically connected, thus allowing the listener to listen into the recording room without strain. The fact that this phenomenon, this particular ability of the Chord Ultima, is revealed in the same way on both, yet so different loudspeakers, clearly shows that it’s the Chord Ultima and not the speakers themselves that is mastering this art.

Classical music also confirms this beautifully. It’s a pleasure to listen to the wide-ranging strings with their delicate melodiousness and the orchestra's spacious performance in Hector Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, performed by the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Sergiù Celibidache (Qobuz 24/96). The Ultima powerfully conveys the energy of the low strings, while subtly and vividly celebrating the woodwinds in the third movement or the menacing atmosphere towards the end. In "Nisa", taken from the album Sotho Blue by Abdullah Ibrahim & Ekaya, the wind instruments sound energetic and downright magnificent. The Chord Ultima seems to extract every last ounce of information from the music file - at any rate, I have never experienced such an abundance of tonal colours and fine dynamic evolvement here.