Thanks for the hard work and the great write up. The real winner here is the customer…as your review clearly shows, there are a number of really good choices for under $1k.
A year ago, when I began my own search for a new loudspeaker for a 2 channel setup, I really liked the sound produced by the folded motion/ribbon transducers in the Motions and Goldenears (very smooth and 3d)…so I’m not surprised that the Arx sound so good with their planar tweeters.
I ended up buying the Tekton Lores, probably because of their dynamics and low end. Your evaluation of the Lores at the 20 hour break in point is pretty similar to my own experience.
If you manage to get another pair of Lores for extended evaluation, I suspect you will find that with extended break in (I’m now around 220 hours), the mids, highs and soundstage keep getting smoother and more dimensional while the low end just keeps getting deeper.
RonN5 said:
Based on the frequency response, it seems a little odd that the Lores would be bright or harsh.
What I noticed on my own lores was that that the "just out of the boxes to 50 hour sound" had a little more high end emphasis...but not bright or harsh...then as the 10" eminence drivers broke in....around 100-150 hours, the mid range filled out, the tonal balance was better, the bass went deeper and the soundstage became even bigger. But never was the music bright or harsh, no matter how loud the volume was turned up.
From a reference standpoint, I'm using an Oppo 103 into a Parasound 2100 into a Crown Drivecore 2000.
I had a nice phone visit with Eric at Tekton Design earlier this week. We talked about our experience with the Lore's and about his design philosophy and approach. He believes a design should be as simple as possible, but no simpler - didn't Einstein say something like that? - and my read on that is that his designs may look simple in the end but it takes a whole lot of work and consideration to get them to that point. Elegance is not free, it usually results from an understanding of every variable and finding a way to get them all working together harmoniously in a way that
appears simple.
I will tell you that the guy LOVES what he does, he loves speakers and speaker design. He definitely has the right job.
Eric made no apologies for the Lore design or sound. He readily admits the design of the Lore's to be a bit forward, referring to it as a "lively" sound that can be appreciated without the need for higher volume levels, although they can certainly deliver them.
Here are a couple alternate views of the Lore's response as we measured it. It is a little hard to see in the 1-octave averaged plot, but there is a midrange plateau from 400 to 2K that sits 1.5 to 2.5 dB above the rest, enough to really stand out. When Sonnie was auditioning the Lore's, we left our measurement mic running into REW's Spectrum Analyzer, set to average "forever," and could see that very same region of build-up on the Analyzer screen. The 1/3-octave averaged plot shows a peak just below 2 KHz that definitely stood out. The detail was terrific, very clear and precise, but it felt like it was being beamed right at you in the LP, like the Lore's directionality characteristics might be different over that frequency band. That is what I suspect, anyway. Other speakers had 2 KHz peaks that did not stand out nearly as boldly as with the Lores. That range is handled by the 10-inch driver, by the way, not the tweeter.
I will not disagree that it is possible that further break-in time could have tamed our Lore's somewhat, but I have to go with my own engineering and listening experience that the effects are usually not of the magnitude that we would have needed to see to turn them into the kind of speaker we were looking for. This is not a statement against the Lore's or the design or Tekton or anything else, just that they are of a different voicing than we were after.
The possibility also exists that driver variations batch-to-batch resulted in a brighter set of speakers that we heard. The pair was well matched, no doubt, as witnessed by their performance. But I can see in more "elegant" design that tiny design parameter variations could pass spec but sound different in that design while not elsewhere.
As I said in the review, their soundstage was monstrous, the imaging sharper than anything else we heard, the hass was deep and smooth... I can see falling in love with a pair and taming the mids with EQ or working with Eric to find an electro-mechanical solution. I still need to read up on what he has suggested to others. And there are two other Lore models that do not use a driver with a whizzer cone - a tamer midrange might be found there, but I need to follow up with Eric on that for sure.
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More on Eric's designs... When I took a close look at Tekton's open-baffle model, with the second driver cancelling the rear wave and providing deeper bass via the lower tuned enclosure, it really knocked me out! The guy is an innovator. I would love to hear the high-end version of that with the added tweeter. I am guessing he is able to control the rear wave even better by selecting a driver with a natural HF rolloff where the tweeter takes over, needing less behind-the-baffle HF wave cancellation and giving better HF control along with improved HF responss. Nice.
Eric also hinted at a totally new design and we (HTS) hope to be able to get early evaluation privileges with a pair in the year-end time frame. He gave no details because the intellectual property legal side is still being finalized, but he said he believes it could be a game changer in some markets. Don't know about you, but I am a bit excited already!
I think Tekton is going to be a company to watch, and is certainly on my short list for speakers to evaluate and/or own as opportunity arises.
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As Sonnie has said, we will be auditioning Tekton Pendragons in November, and I believe they are slated to see some cinema duty as well as being part of the 2-channel evaluation. Sonnie says to plan on two movie nights, so we will give them a good trial in that setting. Alright, Sonnie. It is tough duty, but someone has to do it.