John, thanks for your hard work pulling this meeting together given the fact that you arrived home from an extended east coast trip just hours before the meeting.
I really enjoyed meeting and speaking with Bob Smith, the designer of the speaker. His pro sound background is evident in his design approach. The analogy of trucks vs. sports cars has been used to compare pro audio speakers to high-end audio speakers. Trucks are great for hauling heavy workloads, but they don’t have the exhilarating speed, agility and sexy looks that we like from our sports cars. Well Bob has built a solid truck that out performs many of the tweaky sports cars we audiophiles have been driving.
First off, the Nuforce is a cool looking speaker with its contoured baffle and multi-layered baltic birch cabinet construction. From what I heard, the speakers really got the spatial cues right in terms of reconstructing the recording space. The soundstage was deep, detailed, holographic and detached from cabinets. Tonality, from what I could tell given the environment, was right on through the midband. Bass was a bit muddled, due no doubt to room interaction, but showed good pitch definition. And the top end, though very clean and transparent was a bit tipped up. Bob did acknowledge to me that though the speaker measures flat to beyond 24khz, that response can put an uncomfortable amount of HF energy into many listening rooms. So they are playing with the idea of putting a HF contour switch in the speaker.
Nuforce has found a great partner to help them produce their first speaker. I think it’s going to be a winner.
Russ
