One word kept coming to mind each time I thought about writing about the Qln Reference 9 Loudspeakers—Yes.
Within minutes of getting them situated in Barn, which took all of a few minutes once Mark Sossa of Qln did all of the hard unpacked work, I was nodding my head in affirmation along with the music. Yes.
You may remember my review of the Qln Prestige Five written back in May of 2022 wherein I wrote, among other positive things:
The Qln struck me as hitting that delicate balance between micro and macro on the slightly fleshier side, which in my experience and according to my tastes means—fasten your seat belt, this is going to be one helluva fun ride.
After spending about 8 weeks with the Reference 9s playing music on the Barn’s A-Side, I will tell you up front, it was one helluva fun ride.
The new Qln Reference 9 are the company’s “statement level speaker”, a 3-way design that incorporates a new proprietary 7” Kevlar midrange and 9” woofer with a coated thin Carbon sandwich cone that join a 25mm soft dome tweeter, a further refinement of the tweeter found on the QLN Signature Stand Mounts.
The slanted front baffle is so raked to provide “perfect time alignment between the drivers with a focus on correct phase behavior.” A single pair of WBT Nextgen binding posts await around back along with the rear-firing port. The cabinets attach to solid aluminum bars that sit on Qln’s footers to stabilize their 145 lb. heft.
The company specs the Qln Reference 9’s sensitivity at 91dB (SPL 2,83V 1m, 100-10kHz), with a 4 Ohm impedance and low frequency performance reaching down to 25Hz (-3dB). The Ref 9s are designed and manufactured in Gothenburg, Sweden, which is where the company was founded in 1977 by Nils Liljeroth and Lars Quicklund, while Mats Andersen, the Ref 9’s designer, joined the company in 1982.
To my eyes and taste, the Ref 9s are an elegant looking speaker without shouting, which is my favorite kind of design as I find shouty design, HEY LOOK AT ME!, annoying real fast. These Qln’s are also manufactured to a very high standard, as were the Prestige Five and every other pair of Qln speakers I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing first hand at shows. And let me sneak this in here—in the grand scheme of hifi things with all things considered, looks + performance, the Qln Reference 9 strike me as offering a lot of refined pleasure for the buck. While it does no one any favors to talk about value when talking about pleasure, heck some people just don’t enjoy experiencing joy so why pay for it, you can certainly spend more than the cost of the Ref 9s and get less.
Here’s a quote about the Ref 9s taken from the Qln website that’s worth sharing:
We at Qln prioritize designing speakers that faithfully reproduce the human voice and natural instruments. It is the balance between driver size, cone material and cone weight that determines how a speaker will sound and perform. The integration between all parts in a speaker is to us the most important thing in music reproduction. We don’t want to listen to any aspect of the speaker, we just want to listen to music and come as close to the original recording as we can. The Reference 9 embodies these principles better than any speaker we have ever made.
While it’s been over 2 years since the Qln Prestige Five left the Barn, I have no doubt that the Ref 9s are a better speaker.
During much of their Barn stay, the Ref 9s were driven by the recently reviewed, and well loved, Vinnie Rossi BRAMA Integrated Amplifier (review) while the review Octave Audio V 70 Class A Integrated Amplifier (more info) also took a well deserved turn. The Barn resident Grimm MU1 (review)/totaldac d1-unity w/Live Clocking Option (review) handling the bits but I also sent pure analog their way in the form of records spun on my Michell Gyro SE/Sorane SA1.2/EMT HDS 006 front end with the Aurorasound VIDA MK.II Phono Stage in play. Cabling was all AudioQuest and consisted of Firebird and Thunderbird interconnects, ThunderBird Zero speaker cables, and Thunder High-Current AC power cables. Hiding in plain site is my custom, by me and Box Furniture, Fallen A rack (see full Barn and system details).
Have you ever tuned a guitar by ear or sung along with a song? When you get it right, it’s obvious, as obvious as hitting a long ball with a bat as opposed to fouling one off or buying a pair of shoes that offer nothing but comfort as opposed to pain. Listening to music through the Qln Reference 9 sounded and more importantly always felt that kind of right.
Wild God is a big splash of a record with choruses rejoicing beginning just moments into the first track. Nearly cinematically.
Here’s one thing Nick Cave had to say about it:
Wild God… there’s no fucking around with this record. When it hits, it hits. It lifts you. It moves you. I love that about it.
Big records that are meant to hit and lift are better served by a hifi that can hit and lift in a big way, filling a room or Barn with inescapable energy, transforming listening into a kind of contact sport for the soul. In my experience, the better the quality of reproduction, the deeper and richer the experience and the Qln Reference 9s driven by the Vinnie Rossi BRAMA with the Grimm MU1/totaldac d1-unity turned the Barn into a resoundingly lovely and rich world for Cave & Co’s secular sermonizing. Every pair of Qln speakers I’ve heard offer some of the smoothest and perfectly saturated sound I’ve experienced but the Reference 9s add a refined richness, greater reach, and a more physically involving sound that acts like an open-armed invitation to losing one’s way in music.
And Wild God is a record you want to dive into all the way without any strings of past favorites, and for me Nick Cave offers a rich mine, attached. A kind of free floating engagement buoyed by some of the most engaging reproduction I’ve had the pleasure to live with in Barn, thanks in large part to the Qln Reference 9.
Romance from Fontaines D.C., the band’s fourth studio album released on 23 August 2024 on XL, is a big splash of a record, bigger and splashier than their previous records, all of which I loved. And I’m loving this new arena-sized Fontaines D.C. that sounds freer and musically richer, less raw than their previous work. Scale, some brute force, and the ability to remain calm and resolving through even the heaviest squalls are all required traits for the hifi in charge of delivering all of Romance’s largess and the Qln Reference 9s, now driven by the very capable Octave Audio V 70 Integrated Amplifier and its very hearty 50 Watts of output power (into 4 Ohms), projected a stadium-sized and highly refined sound image in Barn.
The Qln’s, whether driven by the Vinnie Rossi BRAMA or Octave V 70, offered full range sound with deep hefty well defined and formed bass and a kind of rich silkiness all the way up to the highest strings and things adding up to some of the most inviting sound I’ve had here in Barn. In these terms—a rich, rewarding, and inviting sound—the Qln Ref 9’s remind me of my beloved DeVore O/96, which is among the highest compliments I can give a pair of speakers.
Recorded live in Berlin in 1975, Terry Riley’s hypno-masterpiece Descending Moonshine Dervishes recently got the reissue treatment from Beacon Sound. And as they say in hifi reviews, I bought it (the LP). This recording captures Riley playing his just intoned tuned Yamaha YC 45D electric organ fed through delays over the course of nearly an hour and I am convinced that given our full attention for that span of time, our mind and body will offer nothing but thanks in return. This is hypnotic stuff, trance-inducing electronic ragas whose subtle shifts in tone, timing, and chord structure draw us in to the timeless space of Riley’s fervent, near fever-pitch, music rich mind. Here, you need a hifi that can reproduce the tiniest micro-shifts in terms of resolution, dynamics, tones, textures, and overtones, along with the bigger picture that moves along like swells in the deepest of deep seas. Once again the Qln proved to be more than ready for Terry Riley and every sound and movement, no matter how subtle, he coaxed from that Yamaha YC 45D, creating a rich cloud of sound that filled the space of the Barn with living energy.
While it’s coming up on a year since I reviewed the Rockport Atria II Loudspeakers (review), that at the time cost $38k/pair, I can still remember how “stunningly real” and “shockingly present” they sounded. Based on that recollection and a re-read of my review, I’d say the Rockport’s excel at lighting up reproduced music with a kind of kinetic full range energy that makes the Qln Ref 9s sound tilted more towards rich, warm, and inviting. These words are not meant to describe a binary choice, i.e. better or worse, rather they are intended to highlight differences in voicing that directly translate into our experience of music. Or to put it another way, listening to music on the hifi is not a sprint with a medal waiting for the winner across the finish line. I will also note that I reviewed the Rockport’s mainly using the Soulution 330 integrated amplifier (review) that is among the most refined and exciting amps I’ve had the pleasure to spend time with so its voice is also part of the equation. While I wish I had the Soulution 330 here to pair with the Qlns, reviewers, and this may come as a shock to some, do not get to keep everything we review.
Fritz Hauser’s Solodrumming is a Classic Album that belongs on every audiophile’s to-do list.
From the liner notes:
On the occasion of the exhibition “Idea, Process, Result” we have searched for the correlation between architecture and music. Throughout “Klangenthüllungen” (Sound Revelations), as we labeled the concerts, the participating musicians developed their performance in accordance with the spatial conditions. with its long reverberation [7 seconds], the glass-roofed court of the Gropiusbau is a subtle partner; delicate in its silence and powerfully surging when charged up rhythmically.
Fritz Hauser has, from my point of view, made the best use of its acoustical peculiarities in a most elemental way. The Sound Pictures of Fritz Hauser lead from the real, limited, architecture to the insubstantial, endless space of our imagination. The symbiosis of architecture and music, in times of unlimited acoustical-synthetical possibilities, is genuine. ~ Bernhard Strecker, Berlin July 1985
In addition to being a great record for testing a hifi’s merits, Solodrumming captures a true master at his craft, live with no electronics or overdubs which, if you give it a listen, seems impossible coming from one human. And if Solodrumming is a test, the Qln Reference 9’s passed with flying colors as they reproduced the cavernous space of the Gropiusbau and Hauser’s crazy super-human mastery of it and his kit playing together, turning time and space into shimmering, resounding timeless energy. When a system is capable of reproducing this music at this level, the experience is transformative in that it focuses one’s complete attention on the music, sounds, space, and time (and timing) to a smile-inducing, head-shaking, time-bending degree. Masterful.
There is no doubt that the Qln Reference 9s are among the most musically moving and sonically engaging speakers I’ve had the great pleasure of spending time with in Barn. In many ways including their rich, rewarding, and inviting sound combined with their refined quiet elegant appearance allow for complete and easy entry into deep communication with any music you ask them to play. To my mind and in my experience, the Qln Ref 9s are an end game speaker that requires but a one word directive—Yes.
