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In the Forum: Horn-Loaded Speakers
In the Thread: New superlative horn build - ESD acoustic
Post Subject: Saturday?Posted by anthony on: 5/18/2018
 martinshorn wrote: |
So thinking stereophile was there thursday...
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Reichert mentions Saturday twice in the article. Not that is really matters. He did not like them, the youtube video sounds horrible but you heard something interesting and for me that is hardly a conundrum or something to stress about.
I think that Romy does make some valid points though. Like he, I am struggling to understand the how ESD expects to make market inroads with a product that costs US$835,000 but looks half-arsed and half finished. Those big bass horns are never going to look good in any room and carbon fibre is pretty much the last finish I would opt for on any luxury item...it is not nice! The horn stack seems uninspired and very Cessaro-like and ho-hum for something that costs half a million clams...crikeys, where is the imagination?
Please do not think that I have something against big and heavy speakers, my system weighs 2 tonne and I have made little effort to make things lightweight or even particularly small, but at least I have used some imagination in designing and putting the system together whether people like it or not. The ESD stuff seems quite slapstick, sort of like it is a first draft of something that might need another two or three big revisions. The room limitations that the big bass horn introduces means that they will have to be stuck in the corners and then there is the carbon fibre thing again...what room is that going to look ok in? How do you decorate with carbon fibre? In Kodomo's thread Romy used the words "typical audio torture chamber" and I think that there is no way these speakers can be placed in anything but a room that is not nice to be in.
Then there is the competition. There are plenty of big horn speakers that can look really nice in a room and are a fraction of the price: Tune Audio and Avantguarde come to mind or some of the WE replicas. These are luxury items that first and foremost need to fit into a luxury environment and carbon-fibre and big stacks of silver boxes just do not cut it...not even in the same league. That's three times that I have mentioned carbon-fibre; four now; what were they thinking? Or am I just a little bit too sensitive?
Of course, all of this is quite apart from the sound of the things. They may be able to be made to sound transcendent given time, and even if they do manage to get over the limitations of the bass-horns, time-alignment and who knows what else I can't see someone paying a tremendous sum to put something into their room that will make the room into something not pleasant to be in.
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