Spent some time with these speakers in the same setup that I did the last time I wrote my initial impressions. This time around we listened to his digital rig mostly (CDS3 system). Again I'm left stunned how good speaker playback gets, and how petty and overpriced my headphone system looks.
We listened to mostly rock, jazz, blues and classical. First up spun some "modern" Megadeth. Hidden Treasures is one of their 90s EPs that sounds damn good and didn't fall victim to obscene amounts of compression. Angry Again has a real wallop to the kick drum, and a nice bass line that sounded absolutely real if you closed your eyes. Electric guitar sounded so sweet as well. Male vocals came off aggressively just like how it was supposed to but without sounding harsh. Paranoid is a badass cover of Black Sabbath's original version that is played a bit faster/more aggressively and didn't make the SET amps (300B monoblocks, WE300B driven by ECC99, tube rectified psu, Lundahl iron) fart out. Live blues courtesy of Robert Cray, SRV, and Albert King. The Duos showed off how awesome electric guitars should sound, and just how good live recorded music can get (IMO the delineation between live recorded music and studio recorded music is much less obvious and enjoyable on headphones). Poorer (squashed, bright) recordings didn't sound unacceptable like audiophile speakers tipped up in the treble/upper midrange can make them sound. For example Opeth's Ghost Reveries sounded great and had us rocking out and even though the compression was clearly obvious, it didn't take away much from the music or make us want to stop listening. Same with Bowie's EMI remasters, bright and tinny but still listenable. Shit like Rush's Vapor Trails was still...shit.
To show off dynamics and sheer scale we listened to the redbook layers off the Shostakovich #5 LSO SACD, Mozart's Requiem (Harnoncourt), John William's Star Wars Ep 1 and 3 soundtracks and Wagner's Ring cycle. Attack was very fast, and sounds like tympani drum hits felt like you were hearing them from far away. Sounds decayed into space abruptly or slowly. Dynamic movements taking place in the background were appropriately softened and scaled, while those in the foreground had more presence. On some MP3s of Jon Bonham drumming we didn't hear any compression even when played back at what must have been well over 100 db. From soft passages to crescendos symphony and opera pieces just sounded very lifelike. And these were using the stock CTRL pro subwoofers on the Duos; I don't even want to know how good it would be with bass horns...
For imaging we chose well mastered live jazz discs. Again the speakers didn't disappoint and it was as if the musicians were playing in front of us- in their own space and any movement was heard in the room. At the start of an Art Blakey disc there is some crowd noise, chatter and then someone steps up to the mic to introduce the quintet, as that happens it sounds like the man is dead center between the speakers making the announcement, followed by him stepping back and the music beginning. Sounds very simple? I suppose, but it's one of those things that made me say "holy shit". The only fault I can attribute to these speakers is that sometimes images can be projected larger than they should be. This didn't happen all the time so it might be recording dependent, but on some recordings images sound like they're six feet tall... not sure if this is normal or not; but again only happened on certain recordings (so mic placement, venue, mixing all might have something to do with it? Or not?). The speakers were also capable of filling a pretty large space when called for, a 26/16/10', dedicated listening room (with the speakers pulled out far from the back walls).
Tone and timbre seemed spot on to me, once again I wasn't able to detect any aberrations. Someone on Headfi linked to demo recordings of various acoustic guitars of the same music piece a while back and the Duos portrayed them with wonderful realism. Of the little female vocals we listened to the female voice sounded very faithfully reproduced. Oddly female vocals might be one of the few areas where headphones might be better since they're more intimate.
Hope those impressions made sense, speaker listening is so different from headphones that a lot of stuff was hard to describe what I was hearing without it making sense to anyone but me.
