Maybe The Micro Grand Reference Should Be Named The Nola Outperformer

To loosely paraphrase Samuel Johnson’s enduring quip about 18th century London, When a music lover is tired of Nolas he’s tired of life!

We’re huge fans of Nola speakers, especially the flagship Grand Reference, which we included in Lyric’s Super-Fi System, the ultimate two-channel home audio component combination. The Nola Baby Grand Reference is also a favorite of everyone at Lyric.

So we were delighted when we received a prototype of Nola’s far less expensive Micro Grand Reference. It’s small enough to rest on a stand, but similarities between its sound and that of the Grand Reference and Baby Grand are striking enough to make ears perk up and eyes widen.

We’re not just talking about our ears and eyes. Soon after the Micro Grand Reference arrived at Lyric, two very serious home music listeners conducting comparison tests heard it and found that it has more magic than a certain other speaker that audiophile magazine reviewers have been effusively touting (and which happens to cost more than twice the price of this giant killer).

These seasoned listeners did more than pay lip service to Nola’s magnificent Micro. Each of them bought a pair.

Lyric Manhattan’s sales associate Mike Deutsch, a veteran audiophile, is so fond of the Nola Micro that he volunteered to relate his experiences with it here. We follow up his comments with a profile of Nola’s proprietor/designer Carl Marchisotto, who built his first speaker as a teenager more than half a century ago.

After that, we’ve added a few technical details about Nolas, and speakers in general, which we think will interest every serious listener who hopes to step up to new and better-sounding units in the foreseeable future. So please read on.

The Wonder Of It All
by Mike Deutsch

“Wow!” “Fantastic!” “Stunning!”

Those reactions are typical of the ones we’ve been hearing from customers auditioning Nola’s Micro Grand Reference loudspeakers.

Nola’s Carl Marchisotto, who previously designed Dahlquist and Alon speakers, created the Micro as a small, stand-mounted version of his world-famous Nola Grand Reference and Baby Grand Reference. While those speakers are large and considerably more expensive — $145,000 and $55,000 respectively — the Micros sell for far less: $14,000 plus $1,200 for their stands.

The Micros use the same drivers as Nola’s largest models, but there are fewer of them. And Carl designed these drivers to respond to musical signals with speed and precision. He uses dual magnesium woofers, a midrange with a powerful cobalt magnet driving a low-mass cone, and the best true ribbon tweeter available anywhere. Like its imposing siblings, the diminutive Micro has an open baffle around the midrange and tweeter while its woofers are mounted in a closed cabinet.

Dimensions are 24 inches high — the speaker is actually 27 inches high when you include Carl’s unique ball-bearing-equipped isolation base, and the stand adds another 18 inches — by 9.5 inches wide and 9.5 inches deep.

These specifications suggest just how simple the Micro Grand Reference is to place in an average listening room. Sensational as they are, the Nola Grand, even the Baby Grand Reference, would overwhelm most typical listening rooms. (Click here to see the Grand Reference in Lyric Manhattan’s Soundroom A) That’s not true of this puppy. It will perform optimally in just about any small- to medium-sized space.

Given his expertise and previous achievements, when Carl personally delivered a prototype of the Micro to Lyric we expected it to sound good, but this little speaker performed beyond our wildest expectations.

Less Is More

Maybe most amazingly, the Micro doesn’t sound like a small speaker. It sounds like a speaker that's two, even three times its size.

Every audiophile appreciates a lifelike soundstage, and when a good classical or jazz recording is played through a pair of these units you feel you can walk right into the performance.  A lot of that is due to the absence of cabinet distortion, which Carl’s open baffle design virtually eliminates. It gives the Micros the ability to make recorded music all the more real.

Transparency? Truly unbelievable! This is where the excellence of the drivers and the open baffle design really make music come to life. Singers’ voices sound natural and endow the listening space with a presence that seems to bloom, so much so that it’s sometimes hard to believe.

Imaging? Let’s just say it’s magnificent, really astounding.  Instruments are stable and precisely positioned.

These are not only my thoughts, but those of my customers. The very first customer I played the Micros for wanted to purchase a pair.

But wait! Houston, we have a problem. These demo units are prototypes. I don’t have a price for the Micros. Or any idea whatsoever about availability.

I called Carl, and he was able to give me a price — a price that really surprised me. Along with the news that production models were about six weeks away.

“No problem,” said my very contented customer. “I’ll wait.”

The next thing you know, I’ve sold three pairs of Micros — and that’s after playing the speakers for only six customers. Two of the buyers had already auditioned and had seriously considered buying another small, stand-mounted speaker from a company that has gotten considerable attention in recent issues of the leading audiophile magazines.

More Costs Less

Can you imagine their elation when they discovered they preferred the sound of the Micros, which cost less than half the $30,000 price of the speakers they had previously thought they wanted?

My associate Bob Herman also sold a pair of Micros to the first person he played them for, and that customer, like my first three, was willing to wait weeks for delivery. I’ve since spoken to all four of these buyers, and they’re all delighted with the Micros — which, by the way, are now available without the wait.

The moral of this account is not that Bob are I are so good at sales (though I like to think we both fit my definition of a good salesperson: one who finds the best product solution for each particular customer and his or her household).

The point is this: the Nola Micros sell themselves. No other speaker I’ve heard to date that is so compact and sells for a price that isn’t substantially higher — very substantially higher — performs the way Nola’s Micro Grand Reference speakers do. Maybe Carl should have named this sensational loudspeaker the Nola Outperformer.

But buyer beware. Don’t trust my recommendation. Don’t believe one single word of praise you’ve read here. Because you have heard this kind of thing from salesmen before.

What you should do is bring a few favorite CDs in to our Manhattan store, where the Nola Micro Grand Reference is up and running, and hear it for yourself.

At worst, you’ll probably have given up something far less enjoyable. At best, you’ll love this remarkable speaker and find yourself exclaiming, “Wow!” “Fantastic!” “Stunning!”

Mike Deutsch contracted chronic audiophilia at about age 13 and has worked in audio retailing for three decades. He's also an avid photographer.

Now It’s Time You Met Nola's Carl Marchisotto

Great hi-fi products don’t just happen. They’re often years, sometimes decades in the making. That’s because, along with their electronic and mechanical parts, they invariably embody convictions that have been slowly leavening in the minds of their designers.

In the case of Nola speakers, the underlying beliefs are those of Carl Marchisotto, who grew up in New York with the sound of live music in his ears. His father was an amateur pianist and violinist, and Carl himself studied piano for 12 years.

His mother took him to the Metropolitan Opera, which in those days was housed in an 1883 building with superb acoustics, and he was lucky enough to hear such luminaries as Franco Corelli, Mario Delmonico, Leonyne Price and Renata Tebaldi to name just a few. “I loved being in that grand old theater,” he recalls. "The sound of live music became part of my soul where it remains to this day.”

He’s quick to add that “it wasn’t long before I started wondering how we could make music at home sound more like what I was hearing at the Met.”

Starting Out

Carl also attended all the New York City hi-fi shows, and in 1956, while still in high school, built his first loudspeaker. His earliest jobs as a graduate engineer were with large companies, where he designed defense electronics, but he left weaponry behind to start his own musical instrument electronics business. His initial contract was with Gibson, and he manufactured sound effects devices for use with their guitars.

His fascination with hi-fi continued unabated, however, and he recalls a memorable event from the early 1970s: “I walked into a room at the New York Hi-Fi Show and saw Saul Marantz with another, much younger man — I was told his name was Jon Dahlquist. They were playing a speaker shaped like the Quad 57, but it was a dynamic speaker, and there was a big sign saying, ‘This Is Not An Electrostatic Loudspeaker.’ They were playing a tape of a live recording of a marching band through a Tandberg 64X. The sound was so live I couldn’t believe my ears.”

In 1976, Carl went to work for Saul and Jon as chief engineer, and his first assignment was to develop an electronic crossover for a Dahlquist subwoofer. That resulted in a product known as the LP1 variable low pass filter. (Nola’s Grand Reference uses an upgraded version of the same design.) Carl did the electronics while Saul handled graphics.

Moving Ahead

Carl was soon deeply involved in Dahlquist full-range speaker design and was ultimately responsible for DQ10 modifications and all the Dahlquist speakers that followed that model, including the DQ8, the DQ12, the DQ20 and DQ20i, and the firm’s box speakers series.

He was thrilled to be working with two of the hi-fi industry’s first-generation legends, Saul Marantz and the brilliant engineer Sid Smith, who had done groundbreaking work on the fabled Marantz 10B tuner of the 1960s and was involved in a Dahlquist amplifier project.

In the 1980s, Jon Dahlquist was severely injured in an automobile accident, and his company was sold. Carl and his wife Marilyn went on to start Acarian Systems, which manufactured Alon speakers, units still sought after in the used equipment market even though Acarian Systems is gone. They founded Accent Speaker Technology to build Nolas in 2004.

Keeping The Faith

In an age where speaker designers often stray far from the goal set by the high fidelity industry’s founders — creating home listening equipment that duplicates live music and the venues where it was recorded as precisely as possible — Carl Marchisotto’s persistent emphasis on that objective may seem a bit quaint. But the proof of any pudding is ultimately in the eating, and the acclaim that Nola continually receives from discriminating listeners says it all.

As Carl puts it, “Nola speakers may look a little different and sometimes sound very different when compared to other loudspeakers, but when their sound is compared to live music they don’t sound different at all.”

Carl’s Credo: About Open Baffle Design And Dipolar Radiation

Open baffle design, in tandem with midranges and tweeters that operate in a dipolar mode, are the most important keys to unlocking the remarkably lifelike sound that Nolas are known for.

Nola proprietor/designer Carl Marchisotto is quick to note that open baffle technology eliminates several specific types of resonance — along with the coloration they can cause.

For one, the technique prevents enclosure panel resonance. It also eliminates air column resonance, which is caused by air trapped within a closed cabinet. Air column resonance is a source of standing waves, which color sound and distort its transients.

Delayed resonance is eliminated as well. Delayed resonance is caused by sound pressure that has radiated into a cabinet from the rear of a speaker driver and remains there until, after a delay, it’s re-transmitted into the listening room. It can cause sonic smearing, which is most obvious in the midrange, a part of the frequency spectrum to which the human ear is particularly sensitive.

A fourth form of resonance that closed cabinets can cause occurs when the stiffness of air compressed inside them changes a driver's resonant frequency, bringing it too near the operating range of the driver. That, too, colors the midrange.

As for dipolar midrange and tweeter operation, Carl is convinced it’s essential for lifelike reproduction. After all, he points out, voices and instruments don't project sound in one direction only.

Dipolar speakers radiate sound from the same diaphragm forward and rearward in a time-coherent manner. But, because their front and back waves are out of phase, they cancel sonic energy that would otherwise be propelled laterally toward side walls, up toward the ceiling and down toward the floor.

That means there are fewer listening room reflections to reduce the purity of recorded musical performances. You hear clear, open, natural sound, and a soundstage with unusually realistic depth and breadth. It's a sound that has evoked wave after wave of applause for Carl Marchisotto’s speakers.