Here ya go! David's review, sans photos...
I have a very non-uniform work schedule. The only “constant” in my schedule is that I have every other Sunday off, and this was a Sunday that I was supposed to work. My work schedule was up in the air until Friday, and it turns out that was because multiple people had made odd requests. Anyway, it turned out that I did not work today. Late-night forum browsing led me to a short-notice offer from a friend of mine to listen to speakers I’d never heard of. Before even Googling the company, I RSVP’d my slot. Afterwards, I did a bit of research to find out what I was in for, but I figured I’d go in with an open mind, so I avoided any real reviews.
I got to Dave’s place, to find it looking very different than I had seen it a couple weeks previously, with a pair of what looked to be bookshelf speakers on powered subwoofers. In a very small sense, I was right. Dave began to explain how the speakers worked, and their design philosophy.
They were designed from the crossovers on up, I believe he said “the crossovers drive the drivers, and the drivers drive the cabinet” or a variation thereof. From what I heard, the designer, Phil Bamberg, uses computer modeling to tweak the crossover first. He is a believer in designing really incredible sounding speakers that utilize a very steep crossover slope, but to do that you have to carefully select the drivers for such a design. He uses all Scanspeak woofers/drones in the bottom enclosure, and an upper enclosure which consists of a Seas soft-dome tweeter and midrange driver with a gold phase plug. The tweeters are offset to create left and right speakers. The lower cabinet has risers that come up and bolt into the upper cabinet. The lower cabinet contains the woofer amplifier/crossover assembly, a 12” woofer and two passive radiators, which Mr. Bamberg calls drones. The whole system is slightly tilted back. Fit’n’finish was quite excellent, I believe that the cabinets were made by Steve Fay and Phil. I like the use of noticeable driving mounting hardware on the midrange and tweeter. As an aesthetic choice, I like seeing how things are put together. The woofer and passives are covered by grilles.
The speaker system is somewhat unusual in the audiophile world, I think. The user sends the line level signal from the preamp into the woofer amplifier, where a crossover removes the information destined for the woofer, then sends the high-passed signal (remember, high-pass = low removed, low-pass = high removed) back to the user’s power amplifier and then that drives the midrange and tweeter. The plate amplifier also includes controls for gain, dampening, and a parametric EQ with shape controls, along with phase inversion. The mid/high unit has a 0, -1db, -3db switch for the tweeter Ancillary equipment used was a Monarchy Audio SM-70 Class A 25wpc amplifier, Musical Fidelity CD player, and a preamp whose name escaped me.
The speakers were set up by the designer, with an X marking the sweet spot, as designated by the designer. I eventually found my preference was about 3 feet behind that, the speaker drivers were approximately on axis with my ears, I would guess 15 feet behind the speakers. The speakers themselves were about 18” from the sidewalls and 4 feet from the rear walls. The room itself has an uneven ceiling, which caused some very very sleight artifacts to the sound, but didn’t detract from anything.
When I sat down, Dave cued up Cyndi Lauper’s The Body Acoustic. Music, music like I’d never heard before poured forth from the speakers. I don’t play with this level of equipment at home, and I was taken aback at what I was hearing. I’m not used that sort of information presentation in anything other than a live environment. The sheer accuracy with which every instrument and voice portrayed both in tonal quality and delineation within a mix was startling. The soundstage extended out to the walls, but extend well beyond the rear of the speakers.
Bass was solid, well-controlled, and extended. Organ tones were reproduced very well for such a (relatively) small enclosure. I’ve heard more bass weight, and lower bass on about 1% of speakers, but never the combination of such speed, range, and expressiveness. On Bach’s classic Tocatta and Fugue in D minor, from the Telarc Organ Blaster sampler, the quite bombastic changes in level and low frequency output were handled effortlessly, and while a live pipe organ could pressurize a room, these come damn close. On Pink Floyd’s One Of These Days, It was very clear that Roger Waters was playing two bass lines, one plucked and one thumbed. It was something I had never noticed before. The midrange could only possibly be described as accurate, laying bare everything there was to hear in a recording, and I was fortunate to demo things I had recorded and mixed myself, which although lacking in some respects, was able to truly illustrate what a speaker sounded like (at least to me), and how my production choices were handled by something so esoteric.
The top end suited the recording, where the recording was harsh, it was laid bare, when the recording lacked high frequency extension, it was conveyed honestly. Overall, the sound of the speakers was accurate from top to bottom, with some of the best imaging I’ve heard-ever. The high-slope crossovers help with this. The drivers used seemed to have a very smooth polar response across all axes’. There were no obvious in-room bumps or dips in the frequency response. I may have wanted to drop the tweeter control -1db, if I owned them, as I felt that they could get a bit hot at times. This also could have been the way the source equipment (which I was somewhat unfamiliar with) mated to the speakers. All volumes of music from background to a point where the 25w amp had no more to give were reproduced effortlessly, with no dead spots or sweet spots discernible.
But what I kept coming back to, especially in music like Blackmore’s Night’s Diamonds and Rust. A recording with a dense, filled, soundscape with all sorts of instruments and a somewhat ethereal female vocalist coupled with Richie Blackmore’s noodling overlaying everything. The Bambergs allowed us to hear into the music, and clearly delineate every instrument, ambient texture, and inflection was different from everything else, something I have never heard any other reproducer do, with the exception of electrostatic headphones. We listened to all sorts of music, from Amy Winehouse, in which the Bambergs laid bare the rounded off clip-limiting of her vocals on one track, to part of Rutter’s Requiem and Seth MacFarlane’s new Sinatra-esque album, which clearly demonstrated the Bamberg’s ability to do something that many higher end systems do not: play actual music. I was able to just sit back, relax, and enjoy the music, focusing on the performers musical styles, but when I wanted to, critique the engineering and production choices. My system sometimes has a hard time doing that, focusing more on the technical side of things, and it was incredible to hear something that presented music so clearly, in every respect. I can’t comment on comparitive value, since I haven’t heard many speakers over $1000, much less the $9000 these command, but I do know I would recommend them to anyone looking in that budget range.