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The Absolute Sound - Aug/Sept 2004

Rockport Technologies Mira Loudspeakers

By: Wayne Garcia

As you’ve probably gathered by now, last January’s Consumer Electronics Show was by far the most exciting in many a vintage. Among the impressively high number of good-sounding rooms and intriguing new product introductions, one notable standout was the mid-sized floorstanding Mira from Rockport Technologies.

Even within the normal limitations of a show environment— lousy room acoustics, questionable AC quality, high-levels of ambient noise— the Mira communicated a sense of musical “rightness,” a natural warmth, a fine sense of balance and dynamic ease that left me wanting more. Plus, while costly at $13,500/pair (Soundscape note: as at Oct 2005, the Mira now retails at USD 16999), the Mira is the newest “entry-level” model from artisan designer Andy Payor, a guy whose flagship Hyperion will set you back about the same price as a Porsche 911 Turbo.  Shortly after returning from that Las Vegas trade show, Andy and I agreed to have a pair of Miras shipped to San Francisco for review.  It took a while for the speakers to loosen up—they needed at least a week of non-stop playing before they shed their mechanical tightness—yet once they did and I’d fine-tuned the setup, I was struck again by how many things the Mira does well, and also by how beautifully it integrates these strengths into a complete-sounding whole. I will expand on these shortly, but what first deserves attention is a certain kind of energy that Andy Payor was shooting for and got with his newest design.  Particularly because this energy lies in two frequency ranges where all but the finest speakers tend to fall short, and that is the midbass and lower treble. Considering that Payor’s wife is a piano player, and that Andy hears a live baby grand at home on a daily basis, it isn’t surprising that these two frequency blocks would become something of a fixation for him.

“I was shooting for a synergistic entity that conveys musical enthusiasm,” he would tell me later.

To get a feel for what Andy has achieved in these critical areas, I’ll try to describe what I hear from a single and very well recorded jazz album—the Sonny Clark Memorial Quartet’s Voodoo, a closely mic’d studio affair from the Italian label Black Saint (available on
both LP and CD). Although there’s some deep digging bass work going on here, which the Mira reproduces beautifully, filling my room with waves of lusciously fat harmonics, I’m going to focus on this record’s realistically captured piano and alto sax. While reproduced pianos all-too-frequently sound like granny’s dusty old spinet, the Mira’s way with them is, to me, revelatory. Here, Wayne Horvitz’s grand projects an uncommon richness, intensity of force, and lightning fast transients— strikingly so in the midrange-to-lower registers— that is so physically present that you can virtually touch the instrument’s keys, the felt-covered wooden hammers, metal strings, and curvaceous body.

Indeed, I’m hard-pressed to name another speaker of this size and price that delivers the sheer physical presence of a piano the way the Mira does.  Equally noteworthy is the way the Mira handles John Zorn’s alto. The way horns project, when heard relatively close up, is so direct, and such a product of air blowing through their tubing (particularly the bell-like opening), that because most midranges and tweeters (and the tricky crossover regions they fall in) can’t quite cope,  what we normally get are horns that sound like cardboard cutouts instead of something like full-bodied instruments.  But because the Mira’s drivers (discussed below) launch these frequencies with less compression than we’re used to hearing, Zorn’s sax cuts through the band like a siren through traffic, all the while maintaining its brassy, ringing bell tones, strangled squawks and howls.

The Mira’s frequency extremes exhibit the same kind of uninhibited strength, making it one of the most dynamically balanced speakers of my experience. A solo violin, such as Nathan Milstein’s [Bach Sonatas and Partitas, DG LP], displays great quickness and agility, as do instruments such as cymbals and the upper reaches of guitars.  At the lower end, along with the rich harmonics described above, the speaker brings a matching energy to the bass region (I’d estimate that in my room the Mira reaches somewhere around a low-30Hz), be it acoustic or electric bass, the concert drum used in Stravinsky’s Petruchka [Ansermet, Athena LP reissue], or Roy Haynes’ kit on Analogue Productions fantastic sounding 45RPM edition of Thelonious in Action, which will raise the hair on the back of your neck. Check out his brief solo toward the conclusion of Monk’s “Evidence.” Even if you’re lucky enough to hear live drums in an intimate environment (and it’s hard to, given even the smallest venues’ obsession with amplification), it’s easy to forget just how staggeringly loud and visceral a drum set can be. In my small listening room, the Mira delivers that kind of thrilling percussive pressure to the torso.