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RE: What would be your box speaker if you did not own stats or planars?

A long time planar man I know had been extremely impressed with Focal Nova Utopia Be speakers and tried for a year to make them work in his room, going to some extreme damping strategies. He recently gave up and went back to ML Summit X speakers. He owned Sound Labs and MG20.1s.

Another friend is far too much into high impact "classic" rock to look at planars seriously I listened to the speakers he churned through over the last few years. The Revel Ultima Studios were very good on all counts and imaged well. The Sonus Faber Cremona M were missing the bottom octave and lacked bass dynamics but performed close to planar levels in imaging and detail. The Pulsars were disappointing in this crowd but they do alot given an appropriate space. The Nova Utopias are only lacking in scale of their soundstage which I guess is due to their wide baffles and hard surfaces that despite being rounded do not seem to deal as well with creeping waves as do the Sonus Fabers.

I would not trade my Tympani/Neo8 for any of them.

That said, nobody ever sets up box speakers correctly for producing a full scale soundstage with good imaging. That requires pulling the speakers 1/3 of the room into it and spacing them 1/4 of the room away from the sidewalls - and the distance to the sidewalls has to be greater than 4' and preferably 6'. I did so with Vandersteen 2Cs to great effect with full sized holographic soundstages, but failed to convince anyone else to do so.
EDIT: The main reason folks don't like this is that it requires adjustment of the bass upwards (or mid and tweeter downwards) to get tonal balance because there is no wall reinforcement. So you need EQ or to have adjustable bass or mid/treble levels as Vandy's do.



Edits: 11/24/14

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  • RE: What would be your box speaker if you did not own stats or planars? - Satie 20:06:50 11/23/14 (0)

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