I think Peter brings up a very useful point. On the one hand, the installers who handled Stone's system would have only "offered" it to manufacturers that they trusted would be satisfactory to their client, so whatever ends up there should be good equipment. On the other hand, Stone saying that it's good is somewhat diminished in my mind by the fact that it was a fairly significant freebie and the fact that he didn't do the research himself - sure, it's good, because his installers didn't want to get the irritated phone call from their high profile client after the system screened its first movie, but the kudos are of a lessened value in my mind. We are actually hearing him evaluate a system assembled for someone by others, with the final selection process based on the client's needs and the deals that could be swung with different manufacturers.

Here's my two cents: any review source has built-in biases, and you have to keep them in mind when reading them and determining how much weight to apply to their conclusions. Take my own sig for example - there are a number of reviews there, with more on my site and one more in the pipeline (got to finish writing my my review of URC's MX-900 remote when work and life permit), and they all include my personal biases, tastes, preferences, and notions (good or hairbrained). In the case of feedback from Oliver Stone on speakers that he got for free and that someone else picked out for him, here are the questions that I would have to ask when determining how to filter the information. (1) Are they good speakers? Yes, I would wager so - if they weren't, I doubt they would have made it into the system or remained there long, even at the eye-catching price of zilch. (2) Are they the best he found for his budget? We don't have any way to know for certain, since he didn't shop around for them and he didn't pay for them. (3) Are they the best in their price range? (Not necessarily the same as his budget, after all.) We have to look elsewhere to find any answer to this question, because Stone's use of them in this case tells us nothing. (4) What are his preferences in speaker voicing and design, and how to they compare to mine? This is the one that can really trip things up when talking about speakers, no matter who is offering the comments or under what circumstances the comments were made. In the most general terms, you can have differences between British, Canadian, and US designs as well as differences in driver type (silk dome tweeter vs. metal dome, cone vs. horn vs. electrostatic), speaker configuration (sealed vs. ported, line arrays, full-range towers vs. bookshelves and a subwoofer, and so on). If you have a real fondness for electrostatic speakers but you are looking at comments from someone who doesn't, that person's comments are less useful to you than they might be to others. Reviews, user feedback, and online forums are all useful resources, but they must always be taken with a grain of salt - whether they are positive, negative, or indifferent.

Please be clear on this - I'm not invalidating the approach you used to build your system, as I suspect you've put together a very sweet system. Instead, I'm just tossing out some personal thoughts on reading and evaluating reviews, forum comments, or even recommendations from sales people. Take these comments with as little or as much salt as appropriate.

Gonk, I think all the points you and Peter Tribeman made are entirely valid and should be taken to heart by people building a system. And, if I had any knowledge, sufficient time and inclination, and (most important in my situation) spousal support on building a system in a reasonable period of time, I would have tried out the various methods that you and Peter Tribeman recommend. As I noted, it was you (and Peter too), that continued to bring me back to this site and gave me (i.e., a complete neophyte) the rudimentary knowledge to build a system, even the unconventional way I felt I had to approach the project given my extremely limited knowledge, time, inclination, and spousal constraints.

Now, I am looking forward to upgrading my 990 when Outlaw's replacement comes out.

Edward Christian aka edcrash1

Since I own both the NHTs (I've owned a complete M6 set up and currently own an M5 setup with M5s all around except the rears which are taken over by L5s, all anchored with an Outlaw LMF1EX) and the Outlaws let me comment.

For home theater, the NHTs are wonderful: their sealed enclosures work very well with subs and they have a nice clarity that does a great job at decoding soundtracks. For music, they are good, but just a tad dry, not M&K gritty dry, but the "venue" of a performance is less obvious than it is with the Outlaw BLS. The Outlaw gives you wonderful imaging, a huge soundstage, and sounds that extend well beyond the cabinets, placing sounds to the left and right of their respective speakers. The NHT, on the other hand, has a much narrower soundstage and has been noted elsewhere, works particularly well in narrow rooms due the the virtual focus image geometry where the sound is projected towards the listening area.

For theater, at the closeout prices (the M5s were going for $229) the NHT were a steal. For a mixed system, the Outlaws would work better. Since I'm an audionut, I keep a number of systems available that I pull in and out depending on my mood. The Outlaw gets a lot of serious listening, particularly two-channel music.

In my work, having involved both movie directors and musicians, I have found that neither have any more discerning tastes in audio gear than anybody else in the general population.

Being a movie director or famous musician doesn't automatically bestow any particular powers of evaluation of any particular product.

Well, as an owner of a pair of NHT Classic Threes, I find all this talk fascinating. Peter Tribeman's story of NHT's "largesse" is pretty insightful, especially given the fact that the company pretty recently discontinued quite a few of the products that edcrash1, tonygeno and NYGIANT are talking about. (The "Classic" line is still available.) I also read something on the NHT guy's blog about the company that holds Snell Acoustics putting it on the auction block (alongside Marantz and some other entities). Since it was recently disclosed in the forum that Snell has something to do with Outlaw's BLSes, it just made me kinda wonder.

I'm not sure I follow you, but what does this discussion make you wonder?

Nothing big…just read everything with interest is all. There's also a bit of curiosity about how one thing (a company changing ownership, say) might effect another (production obligations or whatever). When you're making decisions about what to buy, it's always good to know how the company's doing. I only found out recently that NHT was undergoing some real difficulties a couple of years ago, right around the time that I bought my speakers. I'm completely happy with my purchase, but I'm sure if I'd known it might have given me pause.

I'd be fairly surprised to see D&M Holding sell Marantz (since it's the "M" in "D&M"), so I don't know how quick I'd be to put much stock in the blog comments about Snell without some other source of information. Of course, even if Snell were sold, the day-to-day operations of the company and its manufacturing facilities would not necessarily be impacted - after all, D&M Holding didn't always own Snell.

All of your responses have been remarkable and very helpful,for that I am thankful. What I have trouble getting my arms around is the thought of a speaker such as the Outlaw Bookshelves and the LCR being on par with speakers such as the Paradigm or the like. When I bought my DC-10 in the early 70's they were $2500 for the pair and box speakers were horrible.The obvious technical improvements over the years is noted, I still have resevations about a box speaker such as the Outlaw being superior to a tower spaeker. So I guess the only way to tell is take advantage of the home trial offered and make the determination. Again thanks for all your help.

By "box" speakers, I take it you are talking about bookshelves, right? There are two things that I think deserve keeping in mind if you are worried about bookshelf speakers' sound quality.

First, the basics of speaker design are well established and have been for some time now. Advancements in construction materials offer some advantages today - you can find some pretty exotic alloys and interestingly-formulated composites in driver cones, for example - but the basics of producing sound from a mechanical device are such that you won't see the sort of revolutions that video display technology or data storage have enjoyed. It's all about refinement, quality, and filling the market need. This can be done in a tower or a bookshelf equally well, with the only difference being the lowest octave (although there are certainly some designs like electrostatic where a bookshelf isn't really an option). That seques nicely to...

Second, even tower speakers are rarely true "full range" speakers. They are likely to roll off somewhere between 30Hz and 50Hz (plus or minus about 10Hz), giving them an advantage over bookshelves that might start to roll off anywhere from 50Hz to 80Hz or above. Even with that advantage, though, they typically still can't reach all the way down to where human hearing stops. For a very long time, that limitation was not enough to bother most music listeners, but movies and certain kinds of music routinely venture deeper than that - at which point even towers fall short. That's why you see subwoofers as an integral part of most home theaters, and once you add a good subwoofer (or more than one, depending on the person and the space) you can start crossing over to it high enough that the tower's better "reach" ceases to provide an advantage. Once you hand off everything below 80Hz to a subwoofer, a bookshelf speaker should be able to match a similar tower speaker if everything else is equal.

Take your Orb Mod 2 system as a somewhat extreme example of a modern sat/sub system. The satellites are listed as having a frequency response of 80Hz to 20,000Hz, with an "optimal" frequency response of 120Hz to 18,000Hz (which I take to mean the first set of numbers are at -6dB or so and the second set are at -3dB). This is actually fairly respectable for a one-way speaker design. Compare that performance to what the Outlaw Bookshelf can do without help from a sub: 54Hz to 22,000Hz +/-3dB (which plenty of comparable ported bookshelves can match, while sealed designs like the LCR typically won't go quite as deep). You can start to see that bookshelves can do a lot on their own. Also, I did some reading up on the DC-10, and while frequency response data eluded me I did find one write-up that indicated that it was often used with a subwoofer (Dahlquist apparently even made one specifically for it, called the DC-1W), which takes us back to my second point - even towers are rarely "full range" speakers by themselves.