PMC and Bryston at Ber Street, Thursday 1 October
On Thursday 1 October, we are handing our Norwich demonstration room over to PMC for the day. Three sessions — 11 am, 1 pm and 3 pm — each running an hour to ninety minutes, with Craig from PMC presenting all three.
Two systems will be set up. The fact.12 signature driven by a Bryston Bi-200 integrated amplifier, and the IB2 SE with a Bryston BP-19 preamplifier and a pair of 7B monoblocks behind it. Chord Company cable throughout. Eight boxes altogether.
Two things make it worth the journey. The first is that this is the first time Bryston has been heard at Martins. Four of their amplifiers arrive at once for it.
The second is that PMC brings Bryston into Britain themselves — they have handled the Canadian company's electronics here for years and introduced the Cubed range in 2016. So every box in both systems, bar the cabling, has been chosen by people who make one half of it and import the other. You could call that a rigged demonstration. We would call it the fairest one you are likely to hear, on the grounds that nobody knows what a PMC wants from an amplifier better than PMC do, and one of the two pairs on show wants a great deal.
Speakers that never really left the studio
The IB2 SE has the manners of a monitor because that is what it is. Forty-nine kilos before the stand goes underneath, and thirteen more for the stand. Behind the grille sits a 250mm carbon fibre and Nomex bass piston built to shift air. It is 740mm tall and squat; PMC quote 25Hz to 25kHz, 89dB sensitivity and a four ohm nominal load. It makes no apology for any of it.
Speakers of this shape earned PMC their reputation long before anyone thought of them as a domestic brand. Peter Thomas came to loudspeakers by way of the BBC and started the company with Adrian Loader in 1991; their first product, the BB5-A, ended up at BBC Maida Vale, Metropolis Mastering and Decca. There is an Emmy on a shelf at PMC, which is not a sentence you can write about many loudspeaker companies.
A metre of cabinet, three metres of transmission line
The fact.12 signature comes at the same problem from the other end. It stands 1110mm tall, with a cabinet 168mm across — narrower than a sheet of A4 — and folds 3.3 metres of transmission line into a cabinet you could walk past without noticing. Twenty-six kilos each. It is the speaker you buy when the domestic argument has to be won alongside the audio one.
One number matters before you come. It is 84dB sensitive and asks for between 40 and 500 watts. Underpower it and you get a well-mannered loudspeaker that never quite wakes up, which is the most disappointing way for a speaker to fail: nothing sounds wrong, it simply never starts.
More amplifier than PMC ask for
Bryston have been building amplifiers for longer than PMC have been building speakers, and they are the sort of company that publishes its distortion figures and then dares you to find the noise.
The fact.12 signature gets the Bi-200, which is Bryston being practical: a BP-19 preamplifier and a 3B power amplifier inside one dual-mono chassis, so you save a shelf and a pair of interconnects. Two hundred watts per channel into 8 ohms, 300 into 4. Convection cooled, with no fans anywhere. Six analogue inputs, and a phono board on the options list.
The IB2 SE gets the full separates — a BP-19 feeding a pair of 7B monoblocks, 600 watts into 8 ohms and 900 into 4. PMC's own recommendation for the speaker stops at 500. That looks like showing off, and partly it is. But headroom does its work in the half-second after a kick drum.
If the pairing strikes you as the wrong way round — the less sensitive speaker on the smaller amplifier — it is a fair question, and Craig is the man to put it to. The Bi-200's 200 watts sit inside the fact.12's 40 to 500 watt window; the monoblocks give the IB2 SE rather more than PMC ask for.
Bryston have since revised the Cubed platform into a 2.0 version, and the new 7Bs are on their way to us.
If you like your specifications in advance, we have gone through all three Bryston components separately.
What each one asks of you
The IB2 SE wants space. It was drawn for a control room and it behaves like one: give it room to breathe and you hear immediately why studios bought them. Put it in a small lounge and you will hear a large speaker in a small lounge, and no amount of amplifier will talk it out of that.
The fact.12 signature has the opposite quality, which is to say it will go where the IB2 SE cannot. What it will not forgive is a modest amplifier. Eighty-four decibels is not much to work with, so if the plan is to drive one with something you already own, check that figure before you fall for the cabinet.
Neither of them is background music, which is meant as a recommendation.
Bring the records you already know
A demonstration is only useful if you know what the music is meant to sound like, so bring two or three things you have heard a hundred times. Something with a real double bass on it earns its keep on the IB2 SE — Scott LaFaro on the Village Vanguard recordings, where a lesser speaker turns him into a general low rumble instead of a man playing notes. Then something with weight underneath it. "Chameleon", off Head Hunters, asks a fair question of a 250mm driver and an unfair one of most speakers costing rather more.
The comparison worth making is between the two systems. They want different rooms and, arguably, different owners, and hearing them an hour apart will tell you more about which sort of listener you are than any amount of reading will.
Eleven, one or three
Sessions start at 11 am, 1 pm and 3 pm on Thursday 1 October, each running an hour to ninety minutes, with Craig on hand for the awkward questions. Places are limited by the size of the room, so tell us which time is best for you: call 01603 627010 or drop us a line, and we will put your name down.
If the day is no good, both speakers are on our website along with the rest of the PMC range. But nobody has ever heard a specification, and the only reason for writing any of this down was to get you into the chair.
