SIMAUDIO’s MOON NEO ACE & MOON VOICE 22 - REVIEW
MOON Neo ACE AND MOON Voice 22
With the creation of the Moon Voice 22 speaker, Simaudio begins the inevitable next step of fulfilling their destiny as one of the most impressive one-stop high-end audio manufacturing centres anywhere. However, it took 40 years to complete the circle and create their first speakers. In a public interview, Costa Koulisakis, Director of the Moon training program, recalled that while visiting Moon’s retail distributors after the 2016 release of the Moon Neo ACE Integrated Amplifier, the question arose: what speakers would pair well with the new Integrated Amp? At this point, you can see Simaudio’s dilemma: recommend a competitor’s product or begin to entertain the heretofore unimaginable? Everyone in the long-term high-end audio business is leery of venturing into unknown territory. However, the germ of the idea to create a Gestalt model of hi-fi integration where your Moon Neo ACE Integrated Streaming Amp, an acronym for “A Complete Experience,” is harmonized with its own specially designed speakers--well, that type of integration was simply too good to say no to. Simaudio took the plunge.
The brains behind this trinity is the Moon Neo ACE Integrated Streaming Amplifier, a hi-fi totality in one box: a 50W per channel integrated A/B amplifier with a moving magnet phono stage, a headphone amp, an ESS Sabre DAC that can handle streams of up to 32 bit/384 kHZ, all of this coupled with two rear-mounted RCA inputs, a front-mounted stereo mini-jack for DAP tablet and/or smartphone and eight digital inputs that include aptX Bluetooth, USB, Wi-Fi, and Ethernet, in the company of the older Toslink and coaxial digital. Beautifying the front of the Neo ACE is the visually accommodating OLED screen, which deserves its own award for its readability from any angle and in any light. The build quality of the ACE is highly laudable, with an appealingly chic minimalist design, available in both black and silver. The controller is easy to use and solid enough to suggest a welcoming authority.
If the Moon Neo ACE is the brains behind the trinity, the MiND--Moon intelligent Network Device--is the digital “consciousness” of the entire system. This is the operating system, controlled through the downloadable MiND app, that supports and plays any audio file it can find on your network. Let me say that if I found setting up the ACE through Wi-Fi and Bluetooth easy, then anyone can do it. Not only does the Moon Neo ACE do everything--minus the CD player, which is easily accommodated through an external CD player hooked up to ACE’s generous digital and analog inputs--it had to do everything. Let me explain.
There is a maxim in the audio industry that folks start collecting music in their teenage years and continue collecting into their late 20s and 30s. These are the formative years of repertoire building, coinciding with a certain technical audio platform that naturally produces a behaviour bias in favour of that audio platform. Do folks continue to collect music on different platforms? Yes. But there is a behaviour conditioning that is set in motion in whichever decade in the Hi-Fi industry you began your listening. I began listening to music in the 1960s—everything from Frank Sinatra to the Byrds, the Beatles, Chicago, Blood, Sweat and Tears, Dvořák’s New World Symphony, you get the gist, all played on a Seabreeze turntable. I have quite a collection of CDs and some ripped CDs, lots of vinyl, and now my Apple Music streaming service, because I’ve experienced the big so-called innovations in the music industry and seen everything--so far. If you were born in the 1980s, there is a statistical probability you were a child of Napster, the “community shared file.”All this is a fascinating background story to the now ubiquitous streaming services of Tidal, Spotify, Apple Music and more. My point is that Simaudio read the tea leaves and brought together a “brain” that could accommodate almost all the evolution of the audio industry in one affordable box with a digital-conscious app.
From James Levine’s recording of Mahler’s Symphony no. 5 with the Philadelphia Orchestra on CD, to Christian Gerhaher’s magnificent recording of Mahler’s Lieder, with Gerold Huber supplying some of the most intelligent piano accompaniment I’ve ever heard, I hear a neutral soundscape, served up without fatigue, in a beautifully matter-of-fact manner, never sterile, but a revelation of the integrity of the recording and its artists. To use a well-worn cliché, the ACE gets out of the way; it presents the sound and leaves it to your speakers to further translate three-dimensional sound through two points of light.
The beginning of Fleetwood Mac’s Dream has an electrifying punch and vivacity. The classic vinyl edition of Dream played through the ACE’s phono amp revealed the same illumination, but only after having turned up the volume substantially. So the internal phono amp is certainly decent, but it is not my KC Vibe. However, everything sparkles and illuminates the micro-colour of the band’s opening. Bass is dry, audible, with the necessary punch from the drummer, and scintillating metallic cymbal sound that yells forward texture in spades. No masking, no recessed buried sound, just texture.
I am starting to love this ACE and the ease with which it can bring all my music to light. But let’s take a closer look at the speakers.
Beautifully finished in high-gloss black or white with a supremely fitted quality magnetic front grill, these babies enter a horrendously competitive and saturated market. We’re talking either genius or madness here.
On each interior left and right wall of the Voice 22s is Simaudio’s patent pending Curved Groove Dumping, or CGD. This is a routed half-inch-wide channel moving down the wall of the speaker at varying distances from the edge, filled with rubbery compound to accomplish one job--to reduce any and all superfluous and unwelcome resonances. This patent pending is expected to reduce unwanted resonances more than just the traditional use of bracing.
The second claim to uniqueness is the waveguide—you can see this at first glance. The waveguide surrounding the tweeter is cut low, indeed very low, so the tweeter’s dome is as close to the mid-range woofer as possible. Couple this with the tweeter sitting further back from the front baffle, aligned with the lower driver, and you create a significant level of coherence between the two drivers. This translates to a wider dispersion and a broader sitting position where you can enjoy the sweet spot. And the very low crossover frequency point of 1500 Hz brings the added bonus of an obvious heightened clarity to the midrange. This will become apparent when we discuss some of my listening examples.
Classically trained pianist Hania Rani’s second most recent album is On Giacometti, an intriguing winter-like soundscape written to accompany a documentary on the life and works of Swiss/Italian sculptor Alberto Giacometti. Giacometti lived in Paris after the Second World War and took long silent walks with Samuel Beckett, drank in cafés with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and was a seminal painter and sculptor of that incredible period just before and after the Second World War.
I am streaming the opening piece, Allegra, once again through my iPhone 10, using Apple Music through the ACE Neo and finally through the Moon Voice 22 speakers. Over four minutes, we hear her prepared piano sounds—echo-laden and muted acoustic piano-synthesized keyboard sounds, real strings and what we would call musique concrète sounds, in a layered textured organized soundscape that does not offer motivic and rhythmic development but a dream-like stream of ear-catching pitch and non-pitched sounds, through a purposely blurred and pleasant texture of arpeggiated sounds with doleful string melodies. Difficult to describe, easier to get hooked on.
Background, middleground and foreground on this recording are displayed wonderfully by the Voice speakers. The tone clusters in the strings are presented with a neutral and silky sound, never any sense of glare or harshness; midrange cello melodies play effortlessly, absent any exhaustive listener response; and on Struggle, the cello C2 note—65.4 Hz played and repeated with a modest crescendo—is displayed clearly and audibly, without the often heard “bass bloom.” There is an unpretentious opening through which Rani’s improvised and yet organized anarchy--yes, I am aware of the apparent contradiction--flows honestly from the ACE and through the Voice 22s without any added colour to the original sounds. We rejoice in four minutes of an engaging soundscape pouring through two bookshelf speakers that offer us both clarity and smoothness of sound, and with a surprisingly wide soundstage.
“Um Mitternacht,” the fourth of six poems by the 19th-century poet Friedrich Rückert, set to music by Gustav Mahler, is my favourite, employing a Protestant chorale-like ending, with the inevitable probing darkness that is so characteristic of Mahler’s music and the words of Rückert’s opening stanzas. I am going to use Christa Ludwig’s superb rendering of the Rückert lieder from 1967 ,with Otto Klemperer conducting the Philharmonic Orchestra.
Listening to Ludwig through the Voice 22s, there are so many details to note. The pianissimo descending motif sounded by horns and assisted by the tuba descending to a low A just before rehearsal Number 9, and then ultimately to a low E, three bars before the end of the piece--the A in the tuba is remarkably clear; less audible is the super low E, with an approximate low frequency of 32 Hz. Coming from a bookshelf speaker, the tonal clarity of these low notes is quite good. But for me, one of the most impressive details is the unequivocal fluidity and continuity throughout the expansive range Mahler wrote for mezzo. From a low B in the mezzo-soprano’s range to a high G, first space above the treble clef, there is not a hint of separation from below, at, or above the crossover point of 1500Hz. No obvious handover point can be heard in the singing; the drivers are fully integrated. Ludwig’s voice is seamlessly reproduced by the Voice 22s. And thus we can say about the Voice 22s without equivocation: their projection of the human voice is simply outstanding.
In conclusion, I would like to give Simaudio’s--and I don’t wish to be sacrilegious--holy trinity, the Neo and the Voice 22s, a highly recommended status for all audiophiles. The system’s clear and tonally pleasing neutrality offers the discerning audiophile a completely welcoming soundscape, whether with vinyl or streaming, or with an added CD player. The ease with which the MiND can be accessed in order to play any audio file is simply remarkable. The Voice 22s, in spite of obvious generic appearances, are anything but generic. The engineering details noted earlier in the review yield a sonic ability that transcends your average bookshelf speaker, offering a treble range that is silk to the ear, with the midrange bringing forth the sun of clarity. Separation of instrumental colours and the warmth of these colours is quite remarkable; from Rani to Mahler, to Berlioz’s Requiem to Fleetwood Mac, the Neo does its job, steps out of the way and allows the Voice 22s to express the original sound with added complements of beautiful clarity, balance, and a warm tonality. I can honestly state that the harmonic soundscape of all the pieces I listened to had the balance my mind expected to be there. That’s saying something. This may be one of the most unique adventures in the Hi-Fi industry where a company successfully builds cross-platforms in order to achieve a Gestalt ideal that can service just about all the evolution of the music industry in one integrated amplifier, and can proudly claim to finally fulfill this brilliant amp with its own specifically designed speakers. Whether you buy the Trinity, the Neo or the Voice 22s alone, you will gain outstanding quality from Simaudio’s components. What was heretofore unimaginable for Simaudio is now imaginable. Bravo!
SIMAUDIO LTd.
ACE All-in-One Music Player: $4,200
Voice 22 Loudspeakers: $3,200
1345 Newton Rd.
Boucherville, Quebec, J4B 5H2
CANADA
T. 450 449-2212
simaudio.com/en/