I'm curious, in the demos you've done, have you heard them versus the HT1s?
I thought someone would ask me that, and I'm afraid the answer is no, I have not done that direct comparison. Although the price of the HT1, starting at $2200, is closer to the SongTowers’ $1500 than other Salk products, I think it might be an apples vs. oranges comparison.
What I consider a better question to ask of the SongTowers is, what other speakers commercially available in the $1500-$2000 price range are serious competition for them? A few years ago I listened carefully to the Vandersteen 2ce, Monitor Audio Silver 9, NHT 2.0, Meadowlark Kestrel, and Dynaudio Audience model ??, and concluded that each of these were missing something or had a noticeable flaw. The SongTowers succeed where those others failed. I don’t think there are any other speakers available for a similar price that do as well.
Back to apples and oranges… The drivers in the HT1, the Seas W18 magnesium midwoofer and the G2 ribbon tweeter are quite different than the SongTower’s Seas CA15 coated paper midwoofer and Hiquphon OW2 silk ¾” dome tweeter. They each have advantages and disadvantages. In my prior listening experience, I have preferred the sound of coated paper drivers to that of metal drivers. That may be due to genuine preference, and it may be due to the often higher cost of properly designed and executed metal coned speakers.
CostThe W18 costs more than triple the cost of the CA15, and the G2 ribbon tweeter costs nearly double the cost of the Hiquphon tweeter.
SizeThe smaller diameters of the 5¼” SongTower midwoofers allows for greater midrange dispersion than that of the 6½” HT1 midwoofer. I’m not sure how to compare dispersion of a ¾” dome vs. a ribbon tweeter. They are different technology.
Cone MaterialThe W18 is magnesium-aluminum alloy and the CA15 is coated paper. In general metal alloy drivers are said to be more dynamic and detailed sounding than paper drivers. But there is a downside, metal cones suffer from severe break-up noise at higher frequencies, where coated paper cones can be very well behaved at these same frequencies. Sometimes metal coned midwoofers can generate speakers that sound fatiguing or even harsh. To make good sounding speakers with metal midwoofers, it requires greater effort by the crossover designer and greater success in the design. Translate that into greater cost. Although I have heard other speakers (Monitor Audio Silver 9) with metal drivers that ultimately failed to my ears for this reason, I do have confidence that Dennis Murphy has successfully dealt with this problem in the Salk Veracity HT series. In contrast, paper coned midwoofers present an easier design challenge, and (as is the case for the SongTower) allow the crossover frequency to be at a high enough frequency so that it is above the range that human ears respond to best. Placing the crossover frequency higher allows most of the midrange to be produced by the midwoofer. Dennis or Jim, I don’t know the crossover freq of the HT1, so correct me if I’m wrong.
The aluminum ribbon tweeters also are more dynamic and detailed sounding than fabric dome tweeters. The few I’ve listened to do sound spacious and airy in a way that no dome tweeter can exactly reproduce. They also have a rather narrow vertical dispersion compared to a small dome tweeter. I’m not sure which is better, and I suspect a clever marketing writer could spin you in either direction.
I have listened to the Veracity HT2 last October. It has two of the W18 drivers, and a different ribbon driver, the LCY, and may be close enough to the HT1 to draw some comparisons. In short, it sounds excellent: detailed, spacious, and airy. I don’t recall well how it’s bass performance was. At $2700 or higher, it is better than the SongTower, but not by so big a margin that I would want to pay the difference.
