Although AV123 messed up my order a little bit by sending me the wrong color towers for my rears, I do like the speakers. They are not the cleanest or most revealing speaker I have ever heard but they were a black Friday steal at $200 a pair. I'll do my best to give you a little insight into performance of the speaker in my space. I will try to keep my thoughts off of the gorgeous veneer as there are plenty of reviews out their about how beautiful these speakers are for the money.
Setup
I listen in a 20'x20' space with no significant first reflection points as these are in a corner with enough air space behind to get good bass extension. I listen to music off of a media server as well as CDs from a Yamaha s1700 SACD player. My amplifier is a Yamaha rxv-1800 which rated at 150w by 2 at 8ohms. Most of my listening is jazz, to experimental rock, to classical, acoustic, and my favorite Radiohead.
Listening - Music
I find these speakers more revealing than anything else I have heard at the price range by far and away, however I wouldn't go as far as to say they aren't forgiving of poorer quality sources as some other reviewers have, some of my old MP3 stuff which sounded terrible on a set of Vienna Mozart Grands (one of the most revealing speakers I have ever heard at 10x the price) sounds good enough on the x-sls. The sound stage these throw is fairly airy to use a general reviewer term, I'm surprised though as my room is not usually very good at staging a speaker so I would assume they would be great in a better placement. The one thing I do agree with other reviewers on is the transparency of the sound, the speaker removes itself from the sound production very well. This might be as a result of rolled off high frequencies which to my ears tend to give this effect. The speaker has impressively good low frequency response, av123 rates it at 45hz but they were hitting cleanly at 40hz in my room. Overall good sound, slightly bright of neutral if I had to say anything but neutral when describing the sound.
Listening - Home theater
I have these X-sls towers as all four main speakers in the system with the x-cs handling center channel duties no sub. I really don't believe that the x-sub would pair up very well with this system as it is filling in such a minute frequency range although after hearing how well the speakers exceed their in room frequency response maybe the x-sub wouldn't be so bad, I will have to give it a try later maybe, if an MFW-15 doesn't find its way into my system first. This is my first venture into a four way tower system as multi-channel music and concert DVDs have become common place in my DVD/SACD player and with a Blu-ray player on its way this trend is inevitably going more in that direction. Let me just tell you I strongly suggest it.
The overall surround presentation is very good, my girlfriend noticed when compared to my old system their was a lot more "going on" in the rear channels. The bass extension of the speakers makes for very good LFE effects when all speakers are set to large, since it will be a month or so before I get a good subwoofer. Bourne Ultimatum and Dark Side of the Moon SACD were thrilling to say the least. Although to be honest, this is not really an adequate surround review without a sub so I'll cut it short there.
Conclusions
Good buy, spectacular for the money. Great secondary system for you golden ear two channel fellas out there. Good enough primary system for a college student like myself. I will give it a few more weeks to break in on my ears but so far no real negatives, I prefer these to comparable paradigm bookshelf speakers that I have heard and they blow away low end Polk Tsi towers for twice the price, but they are far short of the Vienna Mozart Grands I have heard, those Viennas are fed close to 200 watts per so maybe I should bring my receiver over there or feed these more power and see what happens. Good work Mark L. Schifter.
Wow I made it through the whole review without saying how gorgeous they are, oops damn.
