In the past months Ola Björling achieved great succes with his Ukiro Music Youtube channel. Recently he published a series of active loudspeaker reviews and since Ola loves our MU2 so much he was eager to check out the LS1c with SB1 subs and MU1 source. He soon got deeply impressed by the amazing resolution of this system. So he invited Eelco Grimm for a (long) video interview. Together, they delved deep into the backgrounds of the LS1c design and of other Grimm Audio products. Please enjoy the review in this video and the interview here. Some excerpts of the review are copied below.
“The Grimm LS1c’s are in many ways an assault on compromise, an effort to do away with as many performance glass ceilings as research and engineering allows. (…)
There is a degree of resolution here, not artificial sharpening and not spectral tilt and not distortions masquerading as texture, but true sonic information from the recording that makes me think of like videos of kids getting corrective glasses that lets them see their parents clearly for the first time. (…)
The reverb retrieval is exponentially better than anything else I have ever heard. Yes, that is a bold sentence, but I stand by it. It’s not just like the amount and the length of reverb, but its color and texture and dimensionality. It’s like an entirely new layer of the music has been made available. (…)
A different but related quality is that some records that I had mentally flagged as a bit dull and uninteresting suddenly showed a lot more nuance than I knew was there. Wa Wu We’s “108 dimensions of green”, went from “I should not have bought this” to “I can’t wait to play it again and again”. (…)
This incredible detail retrieval carries over to low-volume performance, as you would expect, which has made me listen at quieter levels with these than in a very long time. It is truly incredible to experience how much detail and clarity remains, even at like 45-50dB listening levels. (…)
After reviewing bass-competent speakers previously, I braced for a thin and compromised lower octave here, but the LS1c’s as two-ways on their own is almost shockingly viable as a complete system. (…)
But when the recording quality, the playback level and the frequency depth all line up, the bass with the SB1 subs is by a considerable margin the cleanest I have ever heard. I was genuinely not aware that bass could sound this clean and non-boomy in a regular room. (…)
The thing about these is that the glass ceiling of performance potential isn’t just lifted, it’s shattered. It’s gone. (…)
With the very best recordings, something happens here that I don’t quite know how I can go through the rest of my life not having access to. I’ve only had this feeling once before in my life, and that’s when I got into high-end in the first place.”
“The thing about these is that the glass ceiling of performance potential isn’t just lifted, it’s shattered. It’s gone.” – Ola Björling, Ukiro Music, Sweden.
