I would like to thank fishinbob for opening up his home to me & my wife this morning to listen to his ST RTs. The black finish with silver baffle was very nice looking.
The listening experience was very interesting to me. I know speakers are notoriously hard to compare if you don't have them right next to each other to listen back-to-back, but I really felt that today.
Last night I had gone through some of my CDs to pick out a few to take with me to audition. I recently got a new Pioneer 1018 receiver, and an Emotiva UPA-7 amp in preparation for a new sound setup I'm building, and had them hooked up to my low-end Klipsch speakers, and had run the room auto-correction (which definitely did balance the sound better). When listening to the CDs last night, I was impressed by the sound just from new electronics, and was really enjoying my current setup. I went in this morning expecting to be blown away by the SongTowers, but... I wasn't.
When I listened, I noticed the instruments were a lot clearer and well-defined, the bass was also well-defined, but not boomy (it seemed well-balanced and actually musical), and overall the sound was very clear. I spent probably an hour-and-a-half listening at reasonably loud levels (not ear-bleeding, but I don't normally listen at super-loud levels) and didn't find them at all uncomfortable after so long. Overall, I certainly enjoyed listening to them, and felt that the SongTowers were better than my current setup, but were they really
that much better?
I had some time to listen to my setup back at home this evening, even putting on some of the same music I had listened to on the STs. Suddenly I noticed how muddy my speakers seemed, how there was no clear bass, how they didn't reproduce the sound nearly as clearly, and how they could get fatiguing after listening to them fairly loud for a while.
Now I'm very impressed by the SongTowers. They reproduced the music as it is supposed to sound, probably about as accurately as the recording allows. They played the music the way I expected it should sound (and I just didn't quite realize before what I wasn't hearing). It's almost like hearing the sound directly from the disc (OK, I know I'm exaggerating a bit; I'm sure the HT3s do a better job...
), such that there is no surprise or astonishment because of the sound from the speakers; they just sound
right.
I plan to audition the ST QWTs soon, thanks to ArthurDent; my big question now is if I'll be able to tell the difference between the QWTs and the RTs...