Sorry about being away so long with my new speakers (but if the South Carolina governor can disappear . . . , anyway, I bet I was having more fun than he did - no, really!). It takes a long time for me to write up something, and take and prepare pics, and take care of other things unrelated to music
.
Here is the obligatory FedEx truck pic, plus a never before seen look inside.
A new delivery option from Salk is the two-legged auto-unloading version of the shipping container.
"They don't feel like 105 pounds" said the FedEx delivery guy when he left the truck. Now on the porch, his face tells a different story. I helped him carry in the second one, walking backwards, and managed to fall with the box on top of me (no photo thankfully), which scraped some skin off my ankle! The fall being broken by my body, the box containing one of my babies was completely unharmed!
Earthbound decided to celebrate D-Day (Delivery Day) by dusting off his old Birkenstocks and wearing his fanciest (and only) Grateful Dead T-shirt. Earthbound also ignores the included directions while his wife reads them and points out the errors of his ways (the speaker is upside down instead of on its side while installing the plinths and spikes). Earthbound hopes that posting this pic will not void his warranty!
The new babies are now set up next to the now disconnected, 30+ year old M&K sub/sats..
Which would you rather have been listening to for over 30 years?
The standard cherry finish is gorgeous. The grain is matched so each speaker is almost a mirror image of the other. Add to that the black plinths and black spikes and, oh my - Absolutely Stunning!
So on to my impressions which can pretty much be shortened to one word, WOW!! I never dreamed I would have speakers this good, but here we are, together at last! If you take all the nice things that have ever been said about these speakers and list them out here, that would be a good starting point for my experience with them so far. The first thing that jumped out at me was the mind-blowing clarity. It was like I crawled out from a dark cave and was blinded by the light, at first it was almost too much because it was not at all what I was used to. I played Jim's CD first which has a variety of really good sounding music. As I settled in and tried a few different CDs I started to realize how incredibly true to the source they sounded and how much I had been missing with my old
crappers speakers.
I felt like the bass was a little shy at first, but they were way out in the room, so moving them back about a foot from the fiberglass wall really helped smooth everything out. Very nice bass now, and at times it sounds like Jim might have somehow crammed a subwoofer inside. On the other side of the audio spectrum, that tweeter rules! I love how sounds like triangles just sort of hover out there on their own, so clear and realistic! I can also finally hear the hiss in
Raising Sand that some have talked about, but the recording is still a good one. I've also been playing music louder and for longer periods at a time than I ever could stand to before. I just don't get fatigued like I used to. Right now I'm playing the Talking Heads
Brick remixed collection and am thoroughly enjoying it, especially the newer stuff, and yes, the enhanced audio side of the disc is better (one side is CD with bonus tracks, other side is DVD audio with a couple videos thrown in).
I haven't tried moving my babies around much because my walls are still not done yet, and I know that having hard walls will almost certainly change everything for the worse. I have plastic covered pink insulation on two walls and the ceiling so the room acoustics are fairly dead. One wall is part of the original 1890 barn that I covered with 3/4 inch plywood to get a flat surface for the drywall. I have a crew coming in on Monday to put up some drywall and install the new window.
I also think that I have some sort of anomaly going on in my right ear, but toeing in the right speaker seems to compensate for it. I was suspicious of this with my old speakers but couldn't be sure. Maybe it's just a reflection problem caused by the 8.5 foot wide window on the right wall.
BTW, thank you Jim for including a blurb on how the grilles should be removed for critical listening. After my wife read that she just asked that I put the grills back on when I'm done. Cool!
So a very satisfied customer here. Thanks to all who made this possible!
PS - if you reply to this post, and I know some of you will, please delete the images so people don't have download them again and again.
Mike
26 July - Edited to fix some typos
