JOSEPH PULSAR 2 & PERSPECTIVE 2

Speakers are arguably the most important part of your system and the most difficult choice you will make. They are by far the hardest item to design and manufacture because of their propensity to introduce a very large amount of colouration and inaccuracy into the sound. Engineering all the colouration and noise out of a transducer, so that it has no inherent character, so that it does not introduce any sound of its own, so that it acts only as a perfectly transparent and almost indetectable three dimensional window back to the music, is nothing short of a design and manufacturing miracle. So in short, there aren’t very many good ones.

There is one particular colouration or error, which does not get talked about much. I call it the energy colouration and I hear it a lot, in electronics as well as speakers I might add. The easiest way to describe it is to imagine if the music has an extra one or two volts added … all the time on all music. It is almost like everything is slightly over pronounced and hyped. Of course a system should feel pressurised and deliver abundant wideband energy to the room but this is something different, it is as if a true rest pose of nothingness has been lost and is no longer possible. Think of it like the faint throttle creep in an automatic car, the energy level of the music always has an extra fraction added. This might make itself felt in system forwardness or a certain heavy handedness or just a lack of delicacy and ‘rest’ when the music requires it. Many speakers make this error and personally, when I hear it I really don’t like it.

But we are talking about speakers here so there are a myriad of other problems that we often encounter too. An overly sharp sparkling treble, a faint boxiness, a midrange that is too excavated and hollow sounding for the sake of ‘uber openess’, extra subwoofer type bass that is indistinct and partially hanging onto the cabinet and not really in the recording, a bleached lack of harmonics and musical texture, a mechanical and tight feeling to the shape of edges and notes, a sterility that fatigues during prolonged listening, a presentation that has been excessively smoothed over or rolled off or warmed up, a general fuzziness and absence of high end transparency, structural and rhythmical confusion when the music becomes congested, a lack of separation with complex full range music, indistinct and fuzzy image outlines, cheap drivers and a sound that lacks refinement, bass that is disconnected to the rest of the music, a wood-like colouration, leaness, a wall of sound that is paper thin with little front to back depth, a nasal-like compression to a certain frequency range, the speakers don’t disappear and you can hear the music coming from them… We could be here forever !

Excuse the elitist in me but you can hear these sins in most speakers. Particularly the more mainstream brands. Price isn’t necessarily an assurance of anything either because even some of the most expensive and highly thought of designs make some of these mistakes. The accompanying technology, measurements and manufacturing standards may all be highly admirable but if the end result is designed to impress, rather than move you emotionally, then it won’t find a place here at Lotus Hifi.

Joseph Audio you may not have heard of. But Jeff Joseph has been around eons and so have his speakers. In their home turf the US they are very successful and highly thought of and when they appear at shows, often in tandem with Doshi electronics, people always sit up and notice, enjoy them immensely and write gushingly about them. This is what happened to me in fact, back in 2019 at Munich High End when Vitus Audio used a pair of the older Perspectives to very good use. That room was special and was talked about a lot. It was a tiny fraction of the cost of many of the big feature rooms that year but people remembered that sound with its high musicality. Kog Audio were set to bring the brand to the UK after that but then Covid got in the way, and then Kog branched into two and then wars happened and financial crises and it wasn’t until last year when I prodded them again, that we were able to finally get the deal done.

I am extremely glad we did too because these speakers are an absolute delight, something quite wonderful, a true lovable gem of the kind that comes along only once a in a while in this industry. First of all, they literally do none of those things written about above. In fact they nail all the loudspeaker credentials that I constantly seek out in vain year after year. In this respect they can stand proud, shoulder to shoulder with our other transducers from Rockport, Thrax and Tidal Audio but at a completely lower budget. Let’s look at the first two models in the range in some detail.

When myself and Tim from Kog Audio first set the demo £9995 Pulsar 2 standmounts up in my room we were genuinely taken aback, smiling uncontrollably and somewhat suprised at the results we were getting, not just for the tiny bookshelf size of these things, but the modest £9995 price tag as well.

Like all Josephs the Pulsars just completely disappear from one’s perception, as good if not better than all other speakers I have ever come across. You simply can’t hear music coming from them, you are not aware of a music making entity, a transducer, a speaker in the listening space. The music just exists in a huge three dimensional holographic soundscape all around the room in front of you. And it is huge ! The feeling of openness, of engagement, of perfect clarity, is stunning. The imaging capability is also amongst the best I have heard.

Some of this ability must be down to Joseph’s infinte crossover slope technology which allows the off-axis frequency and power response curves of the drivers to be more similar than they are on speakers with conventional crossovers, resulting in fantastic off axis performance. The Pulsars seem to fill the room and sound appealing wherever you are in the room, or even from a room or two away. It means they are easy to setup too and not especially room fussy.

The famed Joseph openness has not been brought about by any trickery, any projection of frequencies, a treble lift or a thinning of lower frequencies. The sound is simultanously linear, full, rich and superbly balanced. They categorically do not sound “monitor like”. This is a tiny speaker but you feel like you are getting the whole sound with plenty of meat on the bones and incredibly tight, tuneful and holographic bass when you play some punchy electronica for example.

The Pulsar 2 is also very dynamic, fast and rhythmical, and like all Josephs, pleasingly alive sounding; the music is happening right there in front of you, dancing all around the room. The tone of instruments is beautifully correct as is the relative loudness of notes and the character of their edges and transitions, further helping the speaker to disappear from the listeners perception.

Fun, joyful, engaging, but also very serious … these are the words I first scribbled down in my Iphone notepad.

The other very obvious Joseph standout is despite how revealing they are, the presentation is a few grams relaxed, a few notches warm, a degree or so sweet and organic. So they manage to sound both opulent, warm and creamy but in a neutral uncoloured way, with very senior levels of transparency and superb articulation.

As experienced dealers/distributors and given the miniscule size of the things, that whole day we were kind of half waiting to hear their limitations, expecting to wince at some point or another – the amount of bass on offer, the tailoring of lower frequencies making itself felt, a limit to how low they go, a lack of realism creeping into the tweeter, a lack of dynamic range – but this honestly never happened. They just gave more and more, much like a manufacturers flagship model. At one point we had them rigged up to the mighty Wadax Studio Player front end and the £80,000 JMF pre-power, one of the most revealing amplifier combinations in existence, and the result was remarkable, these little bookshelfs just stepped up to the plate in a £160,000 system and showed us everything in the way you only expect from speakers that are £40k or £50k plus.

After a handful of favourite tracks, what’s also obvious is that the Pulsar have a kind of comforting sound, almost slightly hypnotic. There is an ease to their presentation, an effortlessness that makes them sound naturally right, and so you connect with them very quickly. As you spend more time, you never question them or really notice them, they just give you pure unadulterated clarity back to the music. I think people are going to fall for them instantly; we sold a set already in a very quick home demo and the few customers who have heard them here in passing have been also taken aback somewhat.

The Pulsar are an easy inviting experience and one that you would enjoy for long long periods. But then you could never call them sleepy or laid back. They hit hard, thrill and deliver the music with much keeness and enthusiasm. Harmonically they are extremely capable as well. There is a sense of super black backgrounds, an adept absence of noise, and this surely must be the reason why music sounds so tangible and present, and harmonics and timbre feels so well developed and wrung out.

They also nail that thing about neutrality of energy; your music always feels vivid and pressurised but there are no extra volts being tagged on – no superflous chilli oil – and when the music is emotionally poignant and thought provoking, the Josephs will vapourise gossamer sheets of beauty and elegance into the air. A speaker has to have stability to do that as well, positional stability, a sense of authority and calm. This is needed for fine expression as much as it is thumping rhythms and unbreakable steadfast 3d imagery. With the excellent Track Audio speaker stands the Pulsars sounded very firmly grounded and commanding with exceptional image stability and outlining. When we rested the Track Audio spikes into a set of HifiStay Stella footers, this only improved again.

The Pulsar of course might not be the ticket for listeners dedicated to orchestral music, large scale symphonies or intergalactic film scores. If you want final boss levels of scale, slam and drama then of course you are going to lust after a bigger speaker. But the point is that the little Josephs do not lack. They are not a specialised application for a narrow audience but rather a fully fledged high end solution that will satisfy many customers and fit into all sorts of systems, almost no matter how high performing. Unless you’re in the category above, they are one of those components that kind of make you wonder why you would ever bother buying anything bigger, more cumbersome or more expensive.

What happens when you do go bigger though ? The Perspective uses the exactly same technology as the Pulsar. Highest quality SEAS carbon based Graphene drivers (light, stiff and with superb damping), Jeff’s patented asymmetrical infinte slope crossover technology for seamless driver integration, the same Sonatex Hexadyn fabric dome tweeter but an extra 5.5” magnesium cone woofer mounted below the first. Inside the rear port there is a foam liner and you can remove it for more bass at the expense of some clarity and articulation. We personally preferred it in place on most music although some albums it was useful to allow an even greater dose of low end; the difference is not slight.

Visually the Perspective is very obviously the floorstander version of the Pulsar with the same widths and depths and overall build but one should note that it is still a very small compact speaker, smaller that it looks in pictures. If you have ever seen an Avalon Idea then that’s the sort of miniscule size a Perspective is in the flesh, much smaller looking than say an Avalon PM1, Kudos 808, floorstanding Audiovector or ATC, or a Wilson Sabrina. But do not let size, or the faintly giveaway price of £16,995 mislead you because like the Pulsar, the Perspective is a fully fledged full range loudspeaker that can do full justice to one hell of a system in front of it.

If you’ve been previously listening to the Pulsar then the switch to the Perspective is almost exactly what you would expect. There is no change in the overall fingerprint and all the properties outlined above are still present. The same enormous and deeply holographic soundstaging, the total cabinet invisbility, the sweet relaxed delivery, the feeling of life and joy to the music, the pristine clean dynamics and well defined tuneful low frequencies. But whilst the Pulsars have been designed to emulate the sound of a much larger speaker, the Perspective actually are that. The Pulsar but with greater weight, fullness and bottom end but thankfully without any of that subwoofer-esque colouration bass that sits in the cabinet, the evil of many a floorstander. The bass is still fast then with great clarity and transparency but Perspective do sound a touch fuller and weightier at all times.

The Perspective are 40% more money so they are a different price category but I feel most people will opt for them if the budget is there. Below a £39,000 Rockport Atria in my shop they might just be the ultimate pick as far as floorstanders go and certainly, if you buy a set and want a meaningful upgrade several years down the line, you are going to have to go to something as expensive as a Rockport or a Tidal; that is just how good these things are.

But there is something else that I feel. The Perspectives in a way also shine a light back to the Pulsars and tell you how amazing they are in their own right and what great value they are. I can imagine that some people will keep hold of the extra £7000 and choose the bookshelfs instead, and depending on music taste some might even actually prefer their leaner, faster and slightly more direct way of doing things.

Overall though, the Perspectives are the speaker for all men and all systems with very wide and instantanous appeal. They do everything astonishingly well and will need something very tasty and horrifically expensive to outclass them. Because of their slight warmth and sweetness and forgiving nature, I think they will fit beautifully into more modest systems too. Have a Naim or Linn system with any of the usual suspects from Kudos, Sopras, PMC, B&W, Audiovector, Dynaudio, Harbeth ? Josephs are going to be a huge performance upgrade and a whole new insight into your system, probably for less money too.

Over the course of a few weeks I tried both Josephs with most of the amps I sell here, especially the Integrateds which will be paired with them often. To be honest they worked superbly with everything. So revealing and honest are they that they keenly elucidated the amplifier differences too.

The powerhouse Class AB Vitus RI-101 made for a great paring with both models. The Vitus’s slightly reserved character was offset well by the Josephs high tangibility and tingle factor. The RI’s strengths in bottom end stability and high frequency refinement were also very much in line with the Joseph way of doing things.

Both Thrax units, the transistor Ares and vacuum tubed Enyo, worked beautifully too and countered the Vitus’s iron-clad surefootedness with increased transparency and holographics. Both units have stunning imaging capability and are extremely transparent for a single box at only £12,995. The results in both cases were superb. The Ares was impressively delicate and gentle and the vibrant Enyo made the Perspectives sound even more holographic and spacious … as if that were even possible !

The mighty Soulnote A3 Integrated was almost certainly my favourite pairing though especially with the Pulsars. The A3 seems to energise the room with so much life. It sounded more pressurised and vibrant than the Vitus but with the same resolution levels and imaging capability of the Thrax. The result was a cavernous and fully liberated sound that was fast, direct and lively.

Truth be told, we had some prior inkling about the symbiotic Soulnote / Joseph pairing and it was one of the core reasons for bringing the speakers to the UK in the first place. You will note that importers Kog Audio are the distributors of both brands. Yes, Soulnote with Joseph definitely has a certain magic and my feeling is that once it gains traction, it may go down in the halls of hifi fame just like Vitus/Avalon did all those years ago.

The Soulnote P3 preamp and Monos were next up and this took things to a whole new level. With the Thrax Maximinus Dac as source, there was so much more to give when we moved up to Soulnote’s flagship amps. The weighthness of the M3x monos mated beautifully with both speakers as well.

After Soulnote’s best, we rigged up the £80,000 JMF PRS1.5 and HQS6002 pre/power and it was a memorable setup. Substituting the Wadax Studio Player into the system proved the icing on the cake. In this configuration the Josephs were being stretched to the full and they responded amazingly well and did not really appear as a weak link. Short of pulling out the Wadax Atlantis Reference DAC I could not have stress tested the speakers any further.

The Pearls, now also updated with Graphene drivers, are the Joseph flagships and they will be coming here soon too. At the £50,000 mark they will represent a great alternative at this very competitive place in the market. We heard them extensively at Munich High End this year and they sounded fabulous, very much the same Joseph sound but so much more of everything. Like Atria and Piano G3, they are still relatively compact so will find some happy homes here in the UK for sure. A 4th model is also expected soon. This will slot between the Perspective and Pearl so we anticipate a high 20’s to mid 30’s price point. Stay tuned for that.