After having the HT3's here for a few days it's time for a few words.
This is a tale of two speakers. One that was not very good and one that sounds very nice indeed.
Why two speakers? Well, that is the interesting part.
Wayne dropped the HT3's off on Saturday morning and of course I couldn't wait to get them in the system. Once set up and connected I was very disappointed in the sound. My wife popped out of the bedroom upstairs and said they didn't sound good and that I was making bad noises. Apparently I was vocalizing my unhappiness. I didn't know what I expected them to sound like but what I was hearing was most certainly not it. In addition I had to turn the volume way up just to get a decent listening level. I knew they had a lower sensitivity than my BH2's but this was pretty severe.
Thinking that perhaps they did not mate well with my amps or my fairly large volume (5500 ft3) room I moved them into the basement into the room where I keep my records and CD's. That system was a modded Denon 2900, Decware ZSLA preamp (buffer really) and a pair of Odyssey Extreme mono's. With considerably more power I figured the lower sensitivity wouldn't be a problem. This is also a very small room, about 11 x 13.
I tried moving them around, putting the woofer on both the inside and outside. All sorts of toe in angles, different speaker cables and I was still not very happy with the results. A little voice in my head kept saying that if I didn't know better I'd say they were broken... I kept trying to get them to image halfway well and just couldn't do it and I knew on the recording I was playing (88 Basie Street) that there was supposed to be an electric guitar dead center. Then it hit me, it sounds just like one of the speakers is out of phase with the other. Checking my connections for about the hundredth time I assured myself all was connected properly. Having nothing to lose, I swapped the connections on one speakers.
Ta-da, here was sound much more like what I was expecting. Images were where they were supposed to be and I was much happier. Of course this meant that indeed something was wrong internally.
A call to Wayne and I learned that he had heard something clunking around in one of the cabinets when he first unpacked them but not since and he had not had time to check into it. A email to Al about the phase problem and I found that someone had pulled one of the speakers apart of a demo at which he was not present and apparently had not reassembled it correctly. Al was kind enough to send me the schematic so armed with the needed info and the permission of the builder I set about repairing the speakers.
Wayne was not hallucinating. One of the big, and I do mean big, like beer can sized, caps had been ripped lose during shipping. It had managed to wedge itself in so that it no longer thunked around but it was not connected on one end and of course this could not be doing good things to the sound. A liberal amount of hot melt glue and some solder and that speaker was back to factory specs.
The other speaker had both the midrange and tweeter wired out of phase. Easy enough to fix now that I had a schematic. I know Al would not have shipped these wired like this and I'm certain that it occurred after he built them given his email.
Once everything was buttoned up I fired up the system and sat down for a listen. The first track ended and the only word I could say was "wow". They could not have been more different. The HT3's went from shockingly bad to shockingly good. I listened until I had to go to bed and I was really enjoying the sound.
Tonight I brought them back upstairs and put them into the main rig. All the troubles I had before were gone. Now they sounded very good in my main room. No problem with room filling volume, bass was nice, clean and extended. Images were clearly defined and there was also nice layering to the sound stage. Plenty of body to wooden instruments but without extra resonance from the cabinets. In short, I thought they sounded very nice and are exceptional at the $1,600 price. I think Wayne will be pleasantly surprised when he hears the HT3's again. They are a very different speaker than what he heard the first time.
A huge thanks to Al for sending these out for demo and for allowing a stranger to work on his product. It turned out the little voice in my head was right, they really were broken. Listening to them now is a true pleasure and it's hard to believe the difference in sound considering that none of the parts have changed, only the connections.
A plea to any other folks who demo these. Please don't take them apart as it's all too easy to get it wrong and it would be an injustice if you didn't get to hear these as they are supposed to be.
From my perspective, these offer an outstanding value and not just for the money, they are an excellent speaker regardless of cost. Can you do better? Sure, but it will cost you and the small footprint and high WAF make these a very nice choice.
Mike
