OK, I'll give it a shot. But I am going to spend a little time talking about the genesis of these speakers. Pardon, in advance, to Dennis Murphy if a get this story a little wrong.
A number of years ago, Dennis developed a bookshelf speaker called the SPCA special (yes, he is a dog lover). This used a Peerless SK0 130 woofer and a TB1 tweeter. Later, the speaker was redesigned as the MBOW1 using the slightly smoother M130 woofer and the Hiquphon OW1 tweeter.
About this time, we started work on the Veracity HT1's. When they were finished, I went to a DIY speaker building event and thought that the our new baby's, the HT1's, would be the best speaker at the show. Since I had just finished a pair of MBOW1's, I thought I'd bring them along as well.
I think most people there were in agreement that the HT1's were the best speaker at the event. But the next day, when I went to read people's comments online, most mentioned the superiority of the HT1's, but the majority of comments were how impressed they were with the over-achieving MBOW1's. I vowed to never make that mistake again.
Over the years, the MBOW1 evolved into the CAOW1 and the drivers used in that speaker design were the same basic drivers used in the SongTowers (the OW2's were used in place of the OW1's since higher sensitivity was required).
We get comments from time to time that our SongSurrounds should be renamed. The gist of the comments are that they are simply too good to be relegated to surround duty. I agree. I still have a couple of pairs of these bookshelf speakers and they are certainly over-achievers.
So when Dennis first began talking to me about the SongTowers, I thought I knew what they would sound like since they used the same basic drivers as the CAOW1's.
I knew the SongTowers would be good, but I wasn't particularly interested in bringing a speaker in that price range to market. We were building speakers one pair at a time and I didn't see how we could make money without being more production-oriented.
Dennis continued to lobby for the design and about 8 months later I said I would build a pair and give them a listen. Now, I thought I knew just what to expect. But when I fired up that first pair, I realized within the first 30 seconds (literally) that I was listening to something very special. This was a speaker that deserved to have an audience. And I would simply have to find a way to produce it in an economical fashion.
While no speaker is capable of doing absolutely everything (the SongTowers will not play bass to 20Hz), the thing that really makes them stand out to me is they do not do anything wrong. From the very beginning, I could not find a single thing that I would change where that design is concerned. I feel strongly that no other speaker being sold today at or near that price point can equal the SongTowers in terms of performance. Some may play deeper, perhaps, but certainly not better over all.
Once the SongTower was established, John Fallows, one of our associates, came up with the idea of doing a single woofer version of the speaker. It made sense. We knew the CAOW1 (SongSurrounds) was a stellar bookshelf speaker that that the SongTowers with their transmission line cabinet generated bass response you would not normally associate with 5" drivers. So we gave it a try.
As I have said many times in the past, speaker design is all about managing trade-offs. If you ask a driver to play deeper, it will go deeper at the expense of power handling. It will need to move more air as the bass extension increases, and this will take ever increasing amounts of cone movement. At some point, the cone will simply bottom out as it will run out of XMAX.
So we knew from the start that the SongBird's will not handle as much power as the SongSurrounds (because we were asking it to play deeper). But we also knew the bass response would be quite a bit more extended.
How do they sound? In a word, fabulous. They image like crazy, are very detailed and accurate and have more bass extension than you should rightfully expect from a 5" driver.
It is obviously unrealistic to think they can play as loud as the SongTowers without running into the limits imposed by the XMAX of the ER15 driver. (Yes, the CA15 was recently replaced by the ER15.)
They are also not tuned quited as low as the SongTowers so they do not play quite as low. But at moderate levels, they sound simply wonderful. In my opinion, they sound every bit as good as the SongTowers. They are amazing speakers.
They are perfect for bedroom speakers, surround speakers and main speakers in a smaller room where high volume reproduction is not required. If you like to crank things up once and a while, the SongTowers are a better choice. If you listen at reasonable levels, however, the SongBird's are a hard act to top and provide sound quality worthy of their breed.
I hope this helps.
- Jim
