The first thing you'll notice about the Steinway Lyngdorf Model-D Music System, a sound system the piano maker will unleash this fall, is the price tag: a whopping $150,000.
What will make you forget this ludicrous sticker price are the sounds that emanate from it when it's plugged in. In May, Peter Lyngdorf, the audio guru who partnered with Steinway to develop the system, demoed it for Wired News.
After a long, brain-breaking discussion about digital-to-analog converters and transient waves, he put on the theme song from The Pink Panther. I could almost smell the brass of the high-hat. After that, we listened to assorted symphonies, Peter Gabriel and New Order. It was an almost schizophrenic experience – I heard background voices, breaths and sounds that I'd never perceived before on other speakers.
The Model-D – named after Steinway's hoary concert grand piano – is among the first completely digital, ultra-high-end audio systems. It can process signals encoded at 104 MHz, even though the best studio equipment can currently only record at 192 KHz. Meanwhile, each speaker tower has a solid aluminum casing and weighs 500 pounds, so it won't vibrate when sounds pour from the four 12-inch drivers, two 5-inch midranges and single ribbon tweeter. "The system can reproduce a full symphonic orchestra with no compromises in sound," crows Lyngdorf.
It can also blast that sound in all directions, since the speaker towers are open in the back. To make sure they still sound good throughout every corner of your penthouse living room, Steinway will send a sound technician to install the system, then take a mike reading from the couch (or wherever you'll be listening to music most) followed by random readings throughout the room. The speakers' RoomPerfect technology then creates a 3-D model of the surroundings, and adjusts its output to ensure the best sound quality over the widest possible area.
It works startlingly well: During our test drive, in a grim, vaguely polygonal meeting room, the music followed us everywhere – even behind a huge column – with only barely perceptible drop-offs at midrange.
Such remarkable sound quality puts any music collection in the peculiar spot of having to live up to the system. Digitally remastered CDs don't sound as sharp as the original releases, because the process makes every frequency louder, to sound more dramatic on the average system. To counter that problem, Lyngdorf is organizing a concierge system to get original recordings for Model-D owners.
Before you liquidate the kids' college accounts and sign up for one of the 100 Model-D units that will be built, there's one catch. Though built with the apex of digital amplification, the system only plays CDs or MP3s on disc – except for a miniscule audio jack,1 it makes no concessions to the world of iTunes, or the fact that most people now seem willing to trade a smidge of fidelity for complete portability in their music collections. It is therefore a weird, quixotic product, a bit like a 1985 Chrysler LeBaron assembled in 2007 by hand, using space-age materials. But if you've got the dough, the Model-D has the do re mi.
