I will be having a small GTG at my house on FEB 10th... so Milwaukee area people chime in if you would like to join the shootout..
I have not set them up side by side with the Paradigms just yet... but I can tell you that IMO they are a softer less aggressive speaker then the Paradigm... The Tweeters are just right, not piercing - no EQ'ing needed at all... the mids and mid bass is true to the material.... not as forward as the Paradigms. I do have to take them out to my bright room Hard Wood Floors, lots of high ceilings - echoey...
They seem to me to be more of a natural sound... The Paradigms have some coloration or punchiness to them and the tweeters ring brightly with the metal domes, so much that my delicate ears can't handle them, I have to EQ them down...
Last night I hung my Bookshelves on the wall, and let me tell you that was no easy task, they are heavy, and they look much bigger then I had in mind when thinking about wall mounted side surrounds...
WOW
I'm sure that when the women get a look at those in there,, they will just shake their heads... "MEN
"
So this whole time I have been running in 3 channel mode with no EQ or delays or distances as I never ran the Auto-Config on my receiver, just speaker size and x-over, they sounded fantastic... just clean, smooth, accurate. Anyways, after getting all 5 of them hooked up, I ran the MCACC on the Pioneer, to see what it would do to them, got all the distances perfect, delays were good... speaker size wrong - but it just downright slaughtered them with the EQ - it was all over the map and they sounded obnoxious...
So after resetting them all down to small x-over 80hz and taking out all the EQ back to flat... they were even better then before, where the Receiver accounted for the reverb, delay, and possibly phase in the room...
I continue to appreciate how accurate they are... sometimes to a fault, if you have bad recordings you'll hear that edge of it... with some ****** MP3 stuff, it was noticable... I have a ton of MP3's on my server that I stream, and I could really tell with some of the stuff.
One of my favorite albums that I keep going back to is Michael Hedges - Taproot, Grammy Nominee, (Did alot of recording with Windham Hill Studios) If you haven't heard his stuff, check it out..
http://www.nomadland.com/Point_A.htm Grammy "Rootwitch" & "I Carry Your Heart"
Explosive solo acoustic guitar work... Spectacular voice... They just play so nicely on that material.. If you want to seal the deal with a womans heart, play "I carry your heart", she'll fall for you in a second, if she's listening...
Another fantastic, somewhat obscure/strange album I love -
Circue du Soleil - Mystere a type of rock symphony with a western/russian flare to it, saw the show in vegas, had to have the CD... Amazing... Spectacular Vocals - deep bass tracks, great electric violins, plucky electric guitar, AWESOME... Makes me really appreciate what the MTS lineup has to offer... Would I run them without a Sub... no... I wouldn't with my Studio 100's either.
The only thing I have a problem with is - and this is just nitpicky, but they just sit too low for my bedroom, so I am going to build some 4-6" speaker stands to raise them up a bit higher... but that is my room, and I'm sitting on bed up higher then normal..
Well thats all for now, tonight I can finish setting up my equipment with the Pronto TSU- 9600 and then move all the equipment down to the basement out of site... so I have alot of work, but no more ugly equipment or wires everywhere...
