After almost 2 months' waiting (it feels like two years), I finally received my front ported HT2-TL in dark curly cherry
I received the speakers last Wed, but was too busy to take pictures (you know what I was doing: listen to my new speakers
). Finally I got some time, and here are a few shots:
More can be found in my gallery
http://www.audiocircle.com/index.php?action=gallery;area=browse;album=4351The speakers are veryyyy heavy. Fedex is showing about 110 lb/box when they are packed. It took me and one of my friends quite some efforts to drag these big boxes all the way upstairs to my media room.
After plugging them in my current system (flac files stored on a PC with coaxial out, Onkyo 707 as pre-pro, and Rotel RMB 1075 as amp), I found big smiles on everybody's face in the room
I'll not waste time here repeating the airy clarity of the highs, the fullness of the mids, and the deepness of the lows, which have been repeated 10,000+ times by all the previous Salk owners posted here. In short: I'm a happy and proud Salk owner
To give you an example of the bass: my sofa is sitting on top of a raised platform. While playing some music pieces with very deep bass, I can feel the slight shaking of my sofa (and yes, I'm sure the subwoofer is off)! I tried to see how deep the speaker can go by playing some single frequency tones, and I can clearly hear the 25 Hz signal.
Initially I placed the speakers about 10 degrees toe in, and found the sound stage was not as 3D as I remembered (I auditioned a rear ported version of the speakers at Bigload's house about 3 months ago, and were extremely impressed with them). Later I put them without any toe in, and the sound stage becomes much better. However, I still feel that the performance of my speakers is not as good as Bigload's. I'll continue to tweak with the placement of the speakers to see if I can get a better result. I did some measurement with a radio shack SPL meter on the frequency response of the speakers at my listening position, and found that there are two dips at 400 Hz and 800 Hz (the SPL is below 50 dB with a 70 dB reference at 1KHz). It is most likely that the dips are caused by my room. I'll try to move the speakers around to see if it will change the location of the dips. The measurement was performed in the pure audio mode of the receiver.
Also, I feel that I like the sound better if I turn on the Audyssey on my Onkyo: it sounds a little bit warmer. Probably I'll also do some measurements by leaving the Audyssey on.
