Audio Show Deluxe, Whittlebury Hall, March 2023 - Highly Commended - Definitive Audio

 

Living Voice brought along their 600Ah battery pack power supply

The new Living Voice R80 loudspeaker

Kuzma front end, SJS Arcadia amps

Grand Prix Monaco 2 TT with Kuzma arm

Living Voice brought along their new (4 years in development) R80 speakers to listen to.  They look like a much larger evolution of the R25 / OBX lineage and sit between those speakers and the Vox Olympians in the range.  Here they were fed analogue signals from Grand Prix Monaco 2 and Kuzma turntables into SJS Arcadia valve amplification. This is a stunning system having a nicely balanced mixed of attributes - dynamic, clear, confident, full of substance and intent but no signs of edginess nor an over-aggressive nature. For me this is LV's best speaker, clearly fed by a top quality signal and significantly outperforms the Vox Olympian in terms of musical enjoyment. This is another system that could potentially have taken a sound of the show award but on my second, third and fourth visits were playing simple unchallenging jazz twiddling. Come on exhibitors, have some conviction and play some music representative of what most people actually listen to.