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Speaker Asylum: REVIEW: McIntosh XRT-29 Speakers by hexenboden

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REVIEW: McIntosh XRT-29 Speakers

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Model: XRT-29
Category: Speakers
Suggested Retail Price: $18,000
Description: line-arrays
Manufacturer URL: McIntosh
Model Picture: View

Review by hexenboden ( A ) on April 11, 2006 at 18:45:57
IP Address: 65.219.208.220
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for the XRT-29


After three years listening to Soundlab M-1s in my dedicated listening room I decided to go out and look for a speaker that would have the same amazing coherence, crispness and accuracy without sacrificing dynamic range. When I had pretty much given up hope (the Dali Megalines did all this but were beyond my reach) I ran into the McIntosh XRT-29.

I can assure you that even taking the train to listen to these speakers required a certain effort on my part: I was never attracted to the quirky McIntosh aesthetics, and it always seemed to me that much of their gear’s engineering was overkill. I had clearly never listened to the wonderful McIntosh MC1201 and MC501 transformer coupled solid-state amplifiers or I would have known better. Know I do, even though my budget doesn’t yet allow buying any of these beauties. I even like how they look now…

The XRT-29 is a line array, and after reading and hearing for years about the benefits of this type of design --and although at $17K list (now $18K I believe) they were slightly above the edge of my budget-- I decided that I should at least pay these speakers a visit. The XRT line is visually stunning, with its multiple drivers, and although the columns are about 70” tall, their modest width and smart design makes them visually unobtrusive, even beautiful (my wife said). There are two basic models, the XRT-28, which includes two woofers at the bottom for true full range performance, and the XRT-29 which is meant to be used with subwoofers. You can get it with the McIntosh passive subs and it’s called an XRT-30 ($30K). I decided I would instead buy a Velodyne HGS-15X and use my Tact 2.2X as the perfect crossover. So I went for the XRT-29 and saved a lot of doe, but this can also serve as a review of the XRT-30s, which I have also heard. If anything, I believe that using the McIntosh subs may make the system just slightly even more coherent.

Each speaker has two columns of fifteen four-inch midrange drivers separated by a column of twenty-five one-inch soft dome tweeters, for a total of, yes, actually 55 drivers per side. But quantity is irrelevant, only sound is, so read on. You can either affix the XRT-29s to the walls in an HT setting, or you can buy a base (an extra $1.2K list!), which is what I did. Mounting them on the bases was relatively easy following the McIntosh instructions, as they are not that heavy, considering the number of drivers and the size. The speakers are spec’d to roll-off below 80 Hz. And that’s exactly what they do in my listening room, which has a suck-out mode at exactly 70 Hz; so in other rooms they may have an extra 5 Hz or so of bass extension. In any event these speakers must be partnered to a suitable subwoofer, and how you do that will have every bit of impact on how the speaker sounds.

How do they sound? Coupled with the Velodyne using the Tact 2.2X as a crossover, the McIntoshes are very close to rivaling the Soundlabs from memory in terms of resolution, apparent speed and overall sound clarity. They clearly exceed the electrostatics in terms of dynamics, by much, and in soundstaging abilities, by a little. They even have a slighter flatter frequency response than the Soundlabs, although they are a little bit shelved down above 15 Khz. (not necessarily a disadvantage). They are fully the Soundlabs equals in terms of loading a room with sound without exciting every possible reflection, as most line source speakers unfortunately do. Where no speaker I have ever heard can beat the Soundlabs is in the awesome clarity and overall quality of the low bass, and in the last bit of air. But the McIntosh/Velodyne combination is no slouch in these departments either; beating or matching almost every other speaker I have heard. These are small sacrifices to the Soundlab sound that I am happy to make in exchange for a more realistic dynamic range.

How about overall “musicality”? What a misused word, so let me be clear. This is amongst the most musically satisfying systems I have heard ever, period. With a truly great recording, like Skrowaczewski’s Bruckner’s 9th on Reference Recordings (RR-81CD), it can recreate a great deal of the presence and impact of the full orchestra. Use the volume to decide whether you sit on row C or F. But either way the orchestra is laid out before you; the violas and the winds in the opening string tremolo each occupy their space in the sound stage, the instruments are clearly discernible but form part of a continuum, as they do in the concert hall. When seconds later the orchestra crashes into the pit it is impossible not to experience goose bumps (courtesy of Bruckner), although I have heard this recording dozens of times. The violin pizzicato in the Scherzo in D minor (track 8) is rendered with beautiful delicacy, which is uncanny given the realism with which seconds later the McIntoshes blast you with an accurate depiction of the winds at full power. Good dynamics is not just loudness, but rather gradations of loudness, and the XRT-29s did this wonderfully.

Equal prowess is found when the McIntosh/Velodyne combination tackles Prokofiev’s impossibly beautiful 1st Violin concerto played by Tedi Papavrami with the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra (Naxos 8.553494). This is one of the sweetest, clearest and most poignant violin performances available today, and for me the McIntosh speakers capture the work’s emotional suspense even better than the Soundlabs, and a notch above most other speakers I’ve heard recently.

One of the well-known acid tests of an ambitious speaker system is how it reproduces the piano. The McIntoshes excel in this regard, not only with piano concertos such as Volodos’ Rach’s 3rd piano concerto (Sony 64384), a great sounding recording but somewhat overestimated performance in my humble view (ye olde Byron Janis on Mercury is still unsurpassed), but also in solo performances like Nojima’s Ravel Reference Recordings CD (RR-35CD). In Alborada del Gracioso aside from lightly but clearly hearing the pedals, the speakers essentially transported me into the recording venue. The impact and dimensionality of the piano were clearly laid out. Communication between performer and listener was virtually unimpeded. It’s great to perfectly hear the acoustics of the venue even before the music starts, just from the “sounds of silence”. That is possible on the XRT-29. In fact, these speakers would be a music reviewer’s paradise, since they lay bare a recording’s shortcomings without ruining the performance. They do not exaggerate anything. That was true with the ever so slightly limited dynamics in Jose Carreras’ otherwise fantastic recording of Ariel Ramirez great Misa Criolla (Philips 420955-2), or the delightful late-sixties recording tube-euphonics in the Romero’s interpretation of the Aranjuez guitar concerto (Mercury 434369-2), which was simply enthralling, and as alive as I have ever heard it.

Needless to say the McIntoshes’ ability to play cleanly full range, and with great dynamics, was a boon for the few well-recorded rock performances out there that I listened to in the last few days. Watching and listening to Clapton’s DVD of the Crossroads Guitar Festival (which was quite rightly recommended by Stereophile’s J. Atkinson) was simply orgasmic. The DVD’s full sound and extraordinary clarity (for a live event) came through and it was impossible to stop until the DVD was over. Voices were clear and natural and very much alive in Rebecca Pidgeon’s The Raven (Chesky), several well sounding James Taylor CDs, and particularly with 24/96 material such as John Lee Hooker’s Mr. Lucky on 24/96 Classic records (DAD 1007). The second track, Mr. Lucky, was the definitive example of amazing dynamics, clean loud sound, clear and warm sounding vocals, well defined rhythm section and unbelievable rendition of Hooker’s unrivaled electric guitar sound. No one note bass sound here. The same was true of well recorded tracks in Keb Mo’s Slow Down or Trampoline’s Maverick, to name just a few. This speaker will make you pull quite a few all-nighters.

How is this extraordinary performance in an audio system possible? For starters, the XRTs are well-designed line sources, as opposed to point sources, and this means that they are less prone to room interaction, something that many speaker manufacturers and audiophiles unwisely disregard. While a point source radiates uniformly into all directions as a sphere, the line source radiates in a cylindrical wave. The measured frequency response of the brethen McIntosh XRT-28 is remarkable in that it offers a very flat response from the mids up, almost devoid of (a reasonably treated) room effect (Dr. Greene of TAS measured frequency response with different listening windows and concluded it virtually doesn’t change). Aside from exciting fewer room modes, its sound wave topology also means that a line source needs to radiate only 1/3rd of the power of a point source. Having said that I believe these speakers do need plenty of power to really sound their best, probably courtesy of a somewhat demanding load (they are rated at 4 ohms). They gladly gobbled up my Parasound JC-1’s available power (the JC-1 has been measured to clip at well over 1,000 watts at 4 ohms) in order to play as cleanly as I heard them, and I think that or a McIntosh MC501 amplifier would be a good partnering choice. Another advantage of a line source is that each driver needs to do a lot less work, and will perform at a more “comfortable” point in its design, even during demanding musical peaks. Remember that classical music has huge dynamic peaks, often requiring 25 or 30 dB of headroom from your amplifier for not-so-short bursts. And power requirements double every 3db so you can do the math. Even for the compressed rock recordings one finds today, dynamic headroom can be north of 15 dB, so I suggest you pick a powerful amp. The speaker has the ability to withstand these power bursts with poise. In addition, I think that the soft cone tweeters are a sensible decision. The amount of musical information above 12 or 15 Khz. is pretty limited, but these tweeters do give a very good appearance of air without ever loosing their composure or acting in nasty ways. Finally, another advantage of the McIntosh/Velodyne combination is the absence of ports. This has quite an effect on bass and midrange quality, in my view.

There has been some discussion about the possible effect of the duplicate drivers on the sound, through the interaction of sound waves coming from the different drivers (comb filtering effects and the like). I can only say that the McIntosh engineers have done their homework in that I detected nothing of the sort. It is unusual to have a line array with two columns of midrange units (as opposed to just one) beside the column of tweeters, but I did not find any negative effect on the sound, and the designers are clearly convinced this is actually an advantage. On the other hand the XRT-29s do sound at their most coherent at the listening position. You can comfortably move around in your chair without noticing anything, but if you stretch far out horizontally (or move away) you will hear a change in tonal balance. This behavior is however true of most good speakers (arguably all). On the vertical plane the coherence is more forgiving. The fact that a column of sound stretching all the way to the floor is coming at you greatly reduces issues related to vertical dispersion. So even though to some the idea of multiple drivers may be inconsistent with overall coherence, in practical terms it is quite the reverse.

A couple of final comments. First, as with any virtually uncompromised speaker system, the partnering electronics are key, and it is also paramount to have a clean power source at your disposal. Otherwise any hash present in your lines is liable to end up in your music. I have a direct power line to the mains and yet had to turn my printer off if I wanted total silence. Second, I would give these speakers at least 300 or 500 hours of break-in before truly assessing their capabilities. Mine were playing continually for about a week before they really started to open up.

In sum, for about $20K list price (and considerably less de facto) I assembled a speaker/sub combination that I think is competitive with all-out designs I respect such as the Megalines, only perhaps giving-up to them the last iota of resolution and low noise floor, but at half the price (iotas don’t come cheap). Not a bad deal in my mind. These speakers are likely to stay in my listening room for a long time, so bear with me please.


Product Weakness: price
Product Strengths: small and large scale dynamics, flat response, soundstaging, naturalness


Associated Equipment for this Review:
Amplifier: Parasound JC-1 monoblocks
Preamplifier (or None if Integrated): Tact 2.2X
Sources (CDP/Turntable): Muse Model 9 Signature
Speakers: Soundlab M-1
Cables/Interconnects: Magnan Signature speaker cables
Music Used (Genre/Selections): see review
Room Size (LxWxH): 21 x 27 x 12
Room Comments/Treatments: cathedral ceiling, treated for mids and highs
Time Period/Length of Audition: two weeks
Other (Power Conditioner etc.): PS Audio 300
Type of Audition/Review: Product Owner




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Topic - REVIEW: McIntosh XRT-29 Speakers - hexenboden 18:45:57 04/11/06 ( 6)