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RE: Calling Bob Neill about yourTocara speakers

Posted by Bob Neill (D) on July 5, 2013 at 12:22:31

In Reply to: Calling Bob Neill about yourTocara speakers posted by Frihed89 on July 5, 2013 at 00:12:34:

Developments, yes. And to be honest, somewhere around 300 (!) hours they made me wish I’d waited longer to report on them. Now that the Tocaro 40D’s are close to fully broken in (Tocaro importer Creston Funk of Austin Hifi says they break in forever) -- a lot more bass and refinement and even more clarity -- as interesting as they sounded before, they now sound like almost different speakers: less eccentric, more...definitive. What that comes to is that whereas before they struck me first (in Austin) as interesting and then (in Amherst a year later) as a fascinating alternative to Reynauds and Audio Notes, they have now moved to center stage, altering their stablemates. They have now forced me to hear exactly what my Reynauds and Audio Note speakers are doing, and not doing. And they are causing me to talk less about them than about the others.

Going from the Tocaros to Reynauds and Audio Notes now brings more of a shock. Reynauds sound somewhat less neutral and transparent but warmer, meatier, even more physically expressive than before. Audio Notes sound more conspicuously (and exclusively) beautiful, less like transparent speakers that feature and favor beauty. Both sound like speakers with points of view. The maturing Tocaros have forced the others to come clean, to reveal and take specific positions within the spectrum of loudspeakers. This is what genuinely innovative speakers tend to do: rearrange our sense of the speaker spectrum.

The Tocaros themselves now sound less like speakers with a point of view than like instruments and singers. Really. People who come through my house are now beginning to admit that their preferences for Reynauds and Audio Notes are just that: while they still love the specific things that Reynauds and Audio Notes do, they concede that they are not ‘windows on the world,’ assuming they thought that before. Their affection for their favorite speakers is essentially intact but it has changed. Most of them are fine with that. But at least for now and in my house, it’s the Tocaros that have taken over the trick of fooling us that the real world of music is before us.

I didn’t really expect this with the Tocaros, though Funk their apostle warned me they eventually would. References almost always eventually do become audible in the face of genuine innovation, I just hadn’t considered the Tocaros candidates for that. Almost ten years ago, Reynauds enabled me to hear what Harbeths are and are not really about; Audio Notes enabled me to hear Linn Isobariks, Spendors, and even DeVores for what they’re up to. (Though curiously neither Reynauds nor Audio Notes exposed each other!)

So yes, the Tocaros have developed. They have become sufficiently definitive to alter the loudspeaker landscape around here. And Tocaro 42D’s are due in later this month. Ask me about them again later this summer -- if I haven’t become a dealer by then (!) -- and I’ll provide a full update. Meaning, no, I still don’t sell Tocaros, but yes, I still wish I could. Not enough speakers coming into the country, not enough of a margin for the importer to take on dealers. Yet. Maybe the arrival of the 42’s will change that. There are a couple of us up this way beating on Creston, so who knows? My history, as many of the old timers around here know, is to fall for something and then somehow end up selling it.

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