New speakers

[Suteetat]

I have a pair of Usher BE 20 and could not happier. In the US, the price is a bit above your budget but BE10 would also be well worth auditioning. I have not heard the new diamond tweeter that Usher is bringing out to replace its Berylium/Titanium tweeter yet but a friend who heard Usher with new tweeter at CES says that it is a significant upgrade and it can be fitted to the old Usher speakers as well.

 

Sonus Faber Cremona M is also well within your limit although it is probably happier in a small to medium room. The 3M Grand Veena version two is well under your budget. I heard it in a longish room with the speakers placed almost half way out into the room and the bass was surprisingly very fast and very generous, considering the size fo the speaker and size of the room. I was not all that impressed with the first version of Grand Veena when I home auditioned it but version two is a different story.

 

[johniboy]

interesting that dynaudio and focal were not mentioned yet. both build incredible speakers and have systems in all price categories.

 

i am using the dynaudio c2, which already has very deep and well controlled bass. the c4 is even better in this perspective but is a bit too big for my room. dynaudios have the best midrange i have heard.

 

the focal utopia speakers are also wonderful speakers. already the smaller ones produce an incredible bass and their beryllium tweeters are one of the best in the industry.

 

just my 2c

 

[Part-Time Audiophile]

I think the Dynaudio are very interesting, but I don't know much about them other than they're on the pricier end of my spectrum. As for Focal, I like them, but even if that tweeter wasn't a bit hard, none of their models hit my target bass range (20s not 30s) in my price range (under $15k, preferably, under $10k).

 

I hear the Usher BE-10 and 20's are very nice, except for that so-called diamond tweeter, which is to all accounts, very very hard/lean/bright. Too bad. That last semi-Beryllium tweeter was okay. And anyway, $20k for the BE-20 is out of my league.

 

Sonus Faber? Amazing speakers. But to get anything approaching deep bass out of them, they cost more than a new BMW. Cremona M are beautiful, but they fall off a cliff after 40Hz.

 

Some other things I've learned along the way: no side-firing speaker ports. My room is too narrow, and I'm worried they'll phase all over the place.

 

Oh, and it'd be really cool if they could be driven by tubes ... not a requirement, but it'd be nice cuz I think tubes are cool. ;-)

 

I think right now, I'm most interested to hear the Gershman Avant Garde and the Focus FP90. Auditioning either will prove challenging! In the meantime, I've borrowed a DD-12. I'll hook that up in parallel with my Merlins tomorrow to see what's-what.

 

[Suteetat]

Wow.. this is the first time I heard negative comment regarding Usher's new diamond tweeter. I have not heard it myself yet. It is supposed to be available here in the next 2-3 weeks. So far I only heard good thing about it from my local Usher dealer who went to CES. The comment from Absolute Sound CES report was also quite positive. Nevertheless, I definitely plan to listen to one and may consider upgrading my Berylium tweeter if I think it sounds better. BE-20 may be over your budget but I think Be-10 is still well worth considering since some people actually prefer Be-10 over Be-20. Single Eton driver can still pump out pretty good amount of bass in a good size room.

 

[Part-Time Audiophile]

Yeah, not sure what to say about that tweeter. Have you actually heard it yet? Not actually diamond, of course, but some kind of carbon structure with "properties similar to" diamond. Whatever that means. That said, maybe it just takes 500+ hours or more to break in. Anyway, a local dealer is actually considering dropping the entire line b/c of the change. To me, this is totally an issue of taste so expect that YMMV, but all I can report is what my "proxy ears" (somebody who's judgment/taste most closely matches my own, at least to date) have told me. You know, it's a total shame that RMAF is in the Fall, b/c maybe we could all arrange a CA "group outing". Chris could be our group leader. ;-)

 

[johniboy]

you should also have a look at atc speakers. a friend of mine has a pair of ATC SCM 50s. Great sound. Very natural with a big bang. If you can live with the look (monitor like).

 

have fun with your search. this is the best part! ;-)

 

[Part-Time Audiophile]

Anyone heard the last-gen VR-4 Mk 2 speakers from Von Schweikert? Any comments? Comparisons to the Mk III?

 

[stevedollar]

My last speakers were LSA monitors. I was very happy with them. 1k new for the basic model. But you can sometimes find the "statement" version (retail 2500) for close to the same price on the resale market online. Great value and appealing cosmetics.

 

[Part-Time Audiophile]

Well, my handy-dandy local dealer had a DD-12 he let me take home to try out. As you may or may not remember, I was rather non-plussed with the bass my Totems were putting out. They're "rated" to 16Hz, but my suspicions is that this is largely a 10dB point, not a 3dB, or something worse. Whatever. Anyway, out they came and in went the Merlin VSM-MME "towers". Maybe I could "get by" with them, if a subwoofer would do the heavy lifting if you know what I mean.

 

In mucking about with this one sub (its all he had, and I'll be most likely looking for a dual-sub solution if this is the route I take), I moved it all over before settling on an up-against-the-sidewall position as the curve produced the least "choppy" response curve. In so doing, however, I managed to create a loop, which is fun. Love sending the amp into short. Yep. Sweet. See, I'm running the sub on the high-level ins (as in, the so-called "speaker ins"), which means running speaker cables from your amp terminals into these screw-down terminals on the sub. Given that the the posts on the sub are small and close together and the spades on my spare Acoustic Zen Satori speaker cables are over-sized, and that the posts are also not capable of really bearing down and immobilizing the spades ... one shift of the sub and the spades all tilt to one side ... and touch ... BOOM.

 

Anybody have a 10-amp slow-blow fuse handy?

 

On to amp #2! I dusted off my Ars-Sonum 25wpc Class A EL-34-based integrated amp and promptly had to re-jigger my rack. No way that this amp fits into the rack (too hot), so the turntable and the amp switch places, and all is good with the glowing bits all up top. I then start fiddling with the Cardas binding posts ... and after much finagling, finally manage to slip two sets of spades under the single pair of posts, running both my Merlins and the DD-12 in parallel.

 

Sound is coming out -- Check. Bass? Um, yeah. At the default of "30" for volume on the DD-12, yeah, I have bass. LMAO. Volume ... D-O-W-N. Ok, volume now set to "2". Yes, "2".

 

And the bass is there -- big as yo' Mamma's bee-HIND. I set to the one of the defaults, the "Jazz" setting, which gives me the highest Q rating (tightest bass). I'm gonna need to dial it in quite a bit more, but now, for the first time, I actually need bass traps. So THIS is what "full range" would be in my room. VERY interesting.

 

I'm going to preliminarily say that this isn't my cuppa. No, I don't have the settings right -- there's too much boom -- but I'm dubious that this is ever going to produce the kind of response I'm going to be happy with even when dialed in.

 

[coot]

http://www.gedlee.com/summa_.htm

 

Looks interesting - Don't know how they sound. Multiple bass boxes might be a pain or might be the best way to do bass. Meets your budget requirements.

 

[Part-Time Audiophile]

I like the idea & philosophy behind the Geddes (which is similar to speakers from EP, Martin Logan, Wilson and Avant Garde), but controlled dispersion speakers are probably not what I'm shooting for here. All can sound amazing, but the way these speakers work is to "beam" the sound into a rather narrow sweet spot. Very interesting designs to be sure, and some even have amazing sound, but I suspect I'm hunting a different beast. I could be wrong, but that's my guess.

 

My room is killing me, I think. At 13' wide, I don't have a lot of options that I might have otherwise been really into -- namely, towers with side-firing woofers, or horns. Horns would have been really nifty, and I've always drooled over the AG Uno Nanos.

 

Anyway, this hunt is turning out to be pretty fruitless. There's lots of great speakers out there, but few doing everything I think I'm interested in -- and the more I look, the more reading I do, the slipperier my criteria become. I may need to give up some of my new-found wouldn't-it-be-cool-if goals, but that'd be a bummer. Alternatively, I could magically come into some money (Megamillions, here I come!). Ah, well. Anyway, my (current) wish list:

 

90+ efficiency

Flat 8+ ohms

No side-firing woofers

Flat (+/- 1.5dB or so) response below 30Hz, with the +/- 3dB point in the mid-to-low 20s (or lower!)

 

I'd really like to drive them with tubes. It's a nostalgia thing, nothing more, but it's something I keep coming back to, so what the hell. So, I'm expecting that the amps will be less than 150 wpc, which means anything below 90dB efficiency/sensitivity is out, regardless of how stable it is. I'm not afraid of powered woofers, but I'd prefer an integrated solution over one with separate subs.

 

On the agenda: auditioning some Mark & Daniel speakers! Yes, these pretty much violate 3 out of the 4 criteria (low efficiency, hard to drive, and no deep bass), but I have a local dealer who thinks they're amazing, 6moons loves them, and Catastrophe mentioned them, so why not.

 

Also on the agenda: room conditioning. I have a call into GIK and hopefully they'll get back to me soon on what might be a good first step.

 

[Happy]

I travelled this journey and ended up with the system below.

 

If I were to do this again I would seriously look at the Linkwitz Orion++. I like the open baffle design, the room interaction (especially if you have a T shape) and especially the phase coherent active crossovers which have been designed by Linkwitz himself. The price is good $2k-$8k. The downside is that you need to construct them and you need to place them 4' from the back wall and 2' from the side wall.

 

/Paul

 

[barrows]

I think you will have difficulty meeting all of your criteria within your budget, unless: do the Merlins do everything you want with the exception of bass? If they do, I would suggest the following: get 2 JL Fathom 10"-12" subs-these subs are tight (non ported design) and after trying a lot of different subs for use with different speakers at RMAF and CES, I found the JLs to be the best by far. the JL subs are the most music friendly subs I have heard, and properly set up they can flesh out the bottom octaves seemlessly with many speaker types. The key with subs is setup, first one must believe that a seemless integration with the main speakers is possible (otherwise one will settle with a less than optimum set up). Then you must be patient setting up the subs.

Personally, I prefer to have a speaker that can "do it all", but the fact of the matter is that it is almost impossible for a speaker to achieve deep bass response, when positioned and designed for best midrange/treble and imaging. Of course, if you could afford Vandersteen 7s... The Merlins are great speakers, I think with some effort that you can make a full range setup around them and a pair of good subs. The JLs can be run off of the amplifier speaker binding posts (recommended for best integration) but this does require the addition of some impedance matching (as they are only equipped with low level type inputs)-JL Audio can help with a simple impedance matching circuit to allow for direct amp connection.

2 10" subs might be enough for your room-I have had very good results (some of the best controlled deep bass I have ever heard) with 2 12" JLs matched with Avalon's 2 way "Ascendent" speaker in a big suite at RMAF. A lot of the subs out there are not all that accurate, and end up adding uncontrolled bass-the JLs are very well controlled and do not have these problems.

 

 

[Nyal Mellor]

I am biased seeing as I own them but the Orions are good in narrow rooms. And they sound world class at a reasonable price. You can use tube amps on the mid and high and use solid state on the bass drivers.

 

The idea of using separate subs is something I am strongly in favor of. It is MUCH easier to get good bass response using separate subs - you can put them where they need to go to get good bass and put the main speakers where they need to go to get good soundstage focus, depth and width. Most of the times its a trade off between these two elements and being able to use separates just makes it a lot easier to get good sound.

 

[earflappin]

Nyal, I agree 100% with you on the multiple small subs point. For years I struggled to get flat LF response with full range mains. It took spending big bucks on a highly engineered room and even then once you moved out of the listener window you had room mode issues. When I bought my Geddes Abbey speakers I had no choice but to use a sub since they roll off at 50hz so I bought into Earl's multi-sub kool aid and now that I have I would never do it any other way. LF response is now very flat throughout the room.

 

Someone mentioned the JL's. They are excellent. However, for less money the Rythmik servo subs are also very, very good. Someone tested them head and head and while the JL was slightly better it wasn't by much. I've sure there are many other excellent subs to choose from as well.

 

[earflappin]

Scot, controlled directivity (CD) speakers most definitely do not imply a narrow "head in vise" like sweet spot. I can see, however, how you might think this since the very term implies since the directivity is "controlled" that it might also be "small or narrow". Probably an engineer that coined the term - those guys rarely make good marketeers!

 

Anyway, CD speakers have one of the largest sweet spots of all speaker designs - horizontal and vertically. As I noted in a previous post, I own the Geddes Abbey speakers after having owned a large array of high speakers including electrostatics, line arrays and conventional omni-directional multi-driver designs such as Wilson and Dynaudio.

 

I can't speak for all CD designs, but in the case of the Abbey's you basically have a two way design where the tweeter (a spherical waveguide with patented foam insert to deal with any diffraction issues mated to a compression driver) and pro woofer both have a 12" diameter. Therefore, the wave launch from both drivers is matched. The speakers are toed in such that you get a wave cross 1-2' in front of the listener. As opposed to omni-directional designs which radiate out at 180 degrees the Abbey's radiate out at 90 degrees with a very flat on and off axis response. This is more than enough to create a very large, stable and deep soundstage. When you move from the center listening position your perspective on the soundstage just changes.

 

One of the big advantages of CD designs is that because you have 90 degree dispersion vs 180 degree you get dramatically less wave spray to the side walls, ceiling and floor. Unless you have a well engineered room which effectively diffuses these early reflections the soundstage at the listener position "muddied". When you add the fact that the vast array of speakers do not have flat on and off axis response you get a doubly whammy - lots of early sound wave reflections with uneven frequency response. Bottom line, CD speakers typically will sound very good in non-treated or engineered rooms at the HF and MF. Of course with the LF you have to deal with room modes. After trying multiple small subs in my room I'm a believer that this is the best way to get flat LF response.

 

Like Happy, I also like open baffle designs like the Orion, but in my current situation I could not manage a placement with them 4' off the back wall and 2-3' off the side wall. The Abbey's are a sealed box design and can be sit right into the corners of the room with excellent results, although one gets a deeper soundstage if you can put them a little bit off the back wall.

 

Aside from the CD design, the other big thing I like about the Geddes design is the realistic high frequency and mid range the waveguide/compression driver produces. It makes the majority of hard and soft dome tweeters sound colored and compressed. I've listened to a live Cream DVD on these speakers with SPL peaks at 110db with no ear strain or bite.

 

After 30 years of being an audiophile and having owned primarily mega-expensive speakers that are pushed by the mainstream high end audio industry, I am amazed that I am getting the best sound from a pair of $3600 two way speakers. I should note that I have no commercial interest in Geddes Audio and....these babies will not win any beauty contests! A trade off with their design is a wide front baffle and a boxy shape.

 

 

[machinehead]

earflappin, so when is our summer bbq at your place? I wanna hear these!

 

[EuroChamp]

I like Dynaudio very much. The sound is very true in my opinion.

 

All of them are very interesting:

A highlight in the Focus range are the 110, 140 or the 360. If you need good bass richness, have a look at the Focus 220.

Confidence series is similar in overall sound, but higher resolution und more silence (you know what I mean). Their quality is state of the art.

Contour, I cannot tell you anything, never heard.

When money is no object, they have the Evidence, too.

 

You should not forget Verity Audio, their sound is very real.

 

But Verity and Dynaudio are no showmasters. When you do not hear their quality at first sight, I am sure you will realize it in long term listening.

 

 

FYI, I own a pair of C1. :-)

 

Bernhard

 

[earflappin]

Ha! I live in Richmond, VA. Where are you?

 

[EuroChamp]

I'm sorry, I am in Austria (Europe) - same miles away. ;-)

 

[earflappin]

Bernhard, I owned a pair of Evidence Temptation's. They replaced my Wilson Watt/Puppy's. When I lived in Boston I was 15 minutes from Goodwins High End....one of the nation's premier high end dealers. They sold me my Temptations and I had a chance to hear lots of speakers in their showrooms including Avalon's, Verity's, Devore's, Magico's and Rockport's. I loved those Temptations, but I routinely listened to live music and I could never shake the feeling that they didn't compare well to how live music sounded.

 

[EuroChamp]

I do not really know, that you want to tell me. What's your solution now?

 

[earflappin]

Austria - very nice place to live. I lived in Stockholm for 5 years and Brussels for 4 years and travelled throughout EMEA. I love Europe. I hope the EU can get through the financial issues faced by PIIGS. Anyway, I don't have a solution for you unless you get over my way.

 

[EuroChamp]

Hey Earflappin,

 

I don't need a solution.

 

You told me, that you owned a pair of big Dynaudios, but they didn't compare against live music. Now I wanted to know your solution to your dissatisfaction.

Or did I misunderstood you? Sorry, my english is not very well.

Bernhard

 

P.S.: PIIGS. Interesting shotcut! I had to use google to understand it. Nobody hear uses this synonym. The disaster has swapped to Europe and these countries are not very stable, so they are badly off now, I think.

 

[earflappin]

EuroChamp, my response regarding where you lived was directed at Machinehead who suggested a barbecue this summer at my place. That's where the confusion started. Sorry.

 

My solution to get more live sounding music from my speakers was to sell my Dynaudio Temptation speakers and get Geddes Abbey speakers. I didn't mean to infer you needed a solution.

 

Happy listening.