When I returned to the listening room and listened to the first short excerpts from my favourite musical pieces, I was surprised not to miss anything in the first place – even though I had been enjoying the Børresen 05 SSE, which are several times more expensive, for quite a while: In terms of timbre, dynamics, resolution and spatial imaging, the Comtesse left nothing to be desired. What particularly amazed me is that the Comtesse sounds so much bigger than it really is: It’s an easy task for the Divin to reproduce sound events also occurring above its cabinet. I usually close my eyes automatically when I concentrate on listening. With the Goebel speakers, however, this is almost obligatory: otherwise, the visual impression reduces the sonic image to the height of the speaker itself. Without eye contact, however, you feel as if you are facing a much higher sound source. This is really awesome.

But that wasn’t the end of the line. Oliver Goebel insisted that I also took a closer listen to one or two female singers. And that was much more pleasant than I had fearfully expected. You could say that voices are the Comtesse's prime discipline, if it didn't perform at the same very high level in all other areas as well. Here, I make a short leap to when the 05 SSE had returned to the listening room, playing a few songs through them during which the Comtesse had excelled in the reproduction of vocals. My highly esteemed Børresen, however, could not reproduce female vocals as homogeneously and holistically as the Goebel speakers. But let’s jump back again.

The reason why the Comtesse didn't stay in my study for too long, despite all its merits, was that after the initial euphoria it became increasingly clear that it wouldn't be able to perform miracles and solve the acoustic problem of my listening room. The sonic advantages and disadvantages of the room, I recently described in detail to some extent: It has almost no anomalies, behaves neutrally and allows the sound to completely detach from the transducers. However, the frequency response of most loudspeakers comes up with a very narrow-band, quite low dip around 64 Hertz. As with all transducers with woofers on the baffle near the floor alone, this is also noticeable with the Comtesse. I have found this increasingly annoying since the Børresen 05 SSE, with the upper of its four woofers only being positioned a short distance from the sloping roof, stimulates the room in such a way that the gap in the bass range disappears: It can neither be perceived nor measured.