At first I ignored the manufacturer's power amp recommendation of 150 Watts. Somehow I imagined the owner of a large Krell amp who prefers the recordings of Yello. I don't know how long I would enjoy that. But regardless, my own Mayer 211 Elrog had absolutely no problem with the loudspeaker, and it can “only” do 25 Watts. It should be said, though, that the amp features an extremely potent power supply. A quick calculation will reveal that the Chiara under such conditions can produce a maximum sound pressure level of about 100 dB, which is equivalent for some heavy metal fans to a pleasant tinkling of background music. But they'd be in the market for something else anyway. In general, more power is never a mistake, as long as the amp can keep up in the realm of sound quality as well.

For the sake of completeness, I borrowed a 200 Watt transistor amplifier from the editorial office and connected it with the Chiara. To be honest, I could not pinpoint any advantage over the 211 Elrog. On the contrary, several disadvantages became obvious: resolution, clearness, dynamics and emotionality were all lacking. This may not apply to all 200 Watt amps, but the qualities of the Chiara are quite evident with the 211. Nevertheless, I could easily imagine good results using a tube amp of 50-70 Watts, probably of Push-Pull design.

This loudspeaker can do things that I have never heard in this size. The playback is very clear, or, for want of a better term, purged. The mere thought of this would often lead to a belief that your relative portion of non-listenable music would increase exponentially. But this is not the case at all. The playback remains completely stress free and relaxed. The feeling of presence is never “in your face.” All in all, I get the feeling that I associate with Sunday evenings when the power grid is less loaded and contains less interference. On such evenings, music sounds calmer, is more relaxed and clean. I can easily imagine that the sophisticated resonance draining technology is largely responsible for this effect. The housing has practically no self resonance and the back reflected sound emission from the bass driver has apparently little effect on the membrane from within.

I cannot hear any transition between the AMT tweeter and the bass. It's a very well integrated transition. Some readers may remember the first ESS models with the original air motion transformer, where the bass could never keep up with the racing fast speed of the tweeter. Music flows out of the Chiara in a homogenous way. The advantages of small loudspeakers, namely the pinpoint precision of the stereo image, is blended in the Chiara with sovereign, mature sound quality. Whether on or off, this loudspeaker is really quite fascinating.

It's also fascinating what this loudspeaker does with a recording such as Benny Goodman's Carnegie Hall Jazz Concert. This recording has no special audiophile traits. It was made in 1938! I know this recording by heart in both vinyl and CD versions, and in both cases, the imagery is as flat as a pancake and the sound colors all white as snow. The Chiara manages to pull the very best out and to make the music enjoyable. And it does this in the most exceptional way. The whole seems much more cleaned up and one believes for the first time to recognize a breath of structure. Because of the poor quality, this recording has been on the shelf for some time now. But in this recording, Goodman managed to collect almost all of the jazz greats of that time for this momentous concert. Jazz at that time was still considered widely to be something somewhat sketchy, so a concert in the famous Carnegie hall was truly an exceptional event. It is rumored that trumpeter Harry James said as he went on stage: “I feel like a whore in a church.” Played through the Chiara, this milestone of the swing era is brought to new life. In closing let me paraphrase Loriot: A life without Chiara is of course possible, but not meaningful. Of course, as we all know, in the original he said pugs.