Speaker Help

Posted by: NYGIANT

Speaker Help - 06/30/08 05:06 PM

I would like someone's opinion on the purchase of two main speakers. I currently have a 990/7500 with an Orb Mod 2 surround speaker system along with their Super Eight Subwoofer. Planning to purchase two outlaw 2200 amps to drive one of the following speakers: Anthony Gallo Reference 3.1, Aperion Intimus 6T1, Klipsch RF-83 or possibly something from AV123 or Axiom. Any suggestions as to which if any one reccomends?
Posted by: tonygeno

Re: Speaker Help - 07/03/08 03:14 AM

I'd recommend Outlaw Bookshelves as your best choice.
Posted by: gonk

Re: Speaker Help - 07/03/08 01:32 PM

For what it's worth, I'd second tonygeno's comment about the quality of the Outlaw Bookshelves. Having said that...

I am always cautious about recommending one speaker over another when you get into the domain of good quality speakers, as there is some personal taste that enters into the equation. It doesn't help that I haven't heard the Orb, Gallo, Aperion, or Klipsch speakers in question. What's your budget?
Posted by: Retep

Re: Speaker Help - 07/03/08 06:12 PM

I have the Klipsch RB-75 surround sound system. It's a good system for movies and classic rock sounds good as well.

That being said, I don't like it at all for classical music or electronica, which I listen to a lot.

Just remember that Klipsch uses horn loaded tweeters and they tend to have a focused stereo image, so you essentially need to point them at the listener.

I really like my Klipsch, but if I were buying new speakers again, I wouldn't get horn loaded speakers. I have and old pair of Polk Audio SDA-2's from the days when Polk was a more respectable speaker company. The SDA 2's have silk dome tweeters and I prefer the sound of them over the Klipsch, although the Klipsch are better for movies.
Posted by: NYGIANT

Re: Speaker Help - 07/04/08 07:41 PM

Thank you all for your response. I fully agree with you Gonk
that speaker selection is purely subjective but there are not many high end stereo stores around VA Beach where I live. I have two Dalquist DC-10 that I purchased in 1972 but they are large Nad have seen their day. I remember shopping with my records and finally chose the DC-1o over the Mags of that period. For years I had them powered by a NAD 7600 which believe it or not still works. Budget is under $3000.
Posted by: XenonMan

Re: Speaker Help - 07/04/08 08:05 PM

I'm with Gonk. I think you can audition the Outlaws and the Aperions in your home for 30 days for very little $$$. The Aperions will even ship back for free. The RF-83 are similar to my front L/R RF-82s. They are very efficient and do not need much power at all to drive them to a very high SPL. I would try to match the efficiency of the new speakers close to the old ones to level the sound field somewhat.
Posted by: edcrash1

Re: Speaker Help - 07/05/08 02:09 AM

I am new to the HiFi game as I wanted to upgrade to my first "real" system when I moved about 10 months ago. Therefore, I read a lot (including a lot in the Outlaw Saloon) and ended up loosely modeling my system on some of the systems I read in HiFi related magazines that were installed for famous people, including Oliver Stone and a couple other directors/producers. I now understand that my modeling after film industry folks may have caused the system I ended up with to have a bias toward movies rather than music--but I am new and really don't have much to compare it to so the movies, and music, sound pretty terrific, clean, and "HiFi" to me!.

In any event, I say "I loosely modeled", because I substituted Outlaw products for the Amps (a 7125 amp driving my center, 4 surrounds, and second zone, and 2 2200s driving my 2 mains) and Processors (a 990). I substituted Outlaw because they seemed in many reviews to compare well to the ones the famous people had, but Outlaw was much less expensive which helped my sell to my wife.

But, when it came to speakers, I really could not compare reviews as I did not believe there was any good way to compare features for such an important yet subjective component of a HiFi system. And, when I went to various dealer and installer showrooms, I really did not know one reputable source from another and besides the various HiFi speakers, which incidently were never the same brand, sounded pretty good to me in the showrooms. Therefore, I really did not have a enough knowledge and experience in HiFi to make a truly informed decision in a reasonable amount of time and effort by listening to and trying out various speakers.

Given these limitations, I took the only practical course of action I thought was available to me, I chose the speakers some of the directors/producers I had read about installed--which in 3 separate instances, including in Oliver Stone's home, were NHT Evolution speakers (and Oliver Stone said that he knew how his movies were supposed to sound, including his movie "The Doors", and his NHT speakers delivered). Based on these votes of confidence, I have 3 NHT Evolution M6 speakers for left, center, and right mains, 4 NHT Evolution L5 wall speakers for surround, and 2 NHT Evolution U2 subwoofers (with the paired subwoofer controller and 200 watt subwoofer amplifier). My NHT speakers really sound great to me--and apparently to some directors/producers too. Moreover, the price of the NHT speakers over the internet were extremely reasonably priced (and cheaper than the Outlaw bookshelves).

Therefore, NYGIANT, because you don't really have an opportunity to listen to the speakers you are going to buy, and you may not want to try out several different speakers with no practical ability to compare them side by side, perhaps you might want to consider the NHT speakers. With that said, I am sure the Outlaw speakers are terrific, and they do come with Gonk's recommendation, which in and of itself is probably one of the most objective opinions you could hang your hat on.

P.S., Gonk, if you read this, who are you and what do you do for a living? If you are not already on Outlaw's payroll, you should be as your contributions to this site are invaluable to the industry generally and Outlaw in particular. In fact, you are one of the reasons that I own Outlaw products; it was your general HiFi knowledge and insights that kept bringing me back to the Outlaw site and to their products.
Posted by: gonk

Re: Speaker Help - 07/05/08 04:06 AM

Quote:
P.S., Gonk, if you read this, who are you and what do you do for a living?
I am a life-long Memphian (aside from 4.5 years spent away at college) approaching my mid 30's with a wife and a 3-year-old daughter. I've got a BS in mechanical engineering and am a licensed professional engineer and LEED Accredited Professional, working as a design engineer and production manager for a small engineering firm. I design the HVAC systems for buildings.
Quote:
In fact, you are one of the reasons that I own Outlaw products; it was your general HiFi knowledge and insights that kept bringing me back to the Outlaw site and to their products.
Glad I could help!
Posted by: PeterT

Re: Speaker Help - 07/05/08 05:16 PM

edcrash1,

I read your post with great interest and I thought long and hard about writing this. Maybe now is a good time to relate a tale "from the Dark Side."

First let me comment on the NHT Evolution series of loudspeakers. I have heard them on more than one occasion and, in my opinion, they are really good in all respects. You have made a fine choice.

Now for the story:

A while back at my "day job" at Atlantic Technology we were contacted by the group responsible for designating all of the components for Oliver Stone's state of the art home theater. We were told that the integrators had evaluated a lot of speakers and had decided that an Atlantic Technology THX system was their number one choice. They also said that a major magazine was doing a story on the installation and that it would receive a great amount of attention.

As you might imagine, we were quite flattered and pretty excited about the potential magazine artcle. We were then informed that we were expected to provide the speakers at no charge. The people responsible for designating the components claimed that the great publicity surrounding the installation would be payment enough. After explaining to them that we provide nothing free (except to a charity for auction), we chose to take a pass on this "opportunity".

Companies like Atlantic and Outlaw get approached all the time with offers of placement, especially for home improvement or technology TV shows often shown on cable. They too want free goods and the answer is always no.

As for Outlaw, we have sold a number of our products to high profile customers. For example, over the last two years we have sold about forty model 990's to one of the world's most famous video game software developers. There is a good chance that some of you might be listening to 5.1 games mixed on an Outlaw pre amp. We don't talk about this company and neither do they talk about us.

So what is the point behind all of this? Be skeptical of any third party endorsements. The best way to find out what's right for you is to evaluate the components (or speakers) in your own home, where it counts the most. That's why so many reputable on-line companies offer a 30-day, money back, home trial guarantee.


Peter Tribeman
Posted by: edcrash1

Re: Speaker Help - 07/06/08 12:07 AM

Peter, I am very glad you decided to weigh in on this topic and that you provided further insights about Oliver Stone's installation. Actually, I almost wrote basically what you said in your response about Oliver Stone receiving free components and speakers but I thought I was already being too verbose.

In any event, I knew generally that "comping" is what happens for famous people (it is ironic that the rich and famous with a lot of disposable income never have to pay for anything!), and in particular I knew Oliver Stone was comped for his NHT speakers because I spoke to Oliver Stone's installer (as I wanted to hire them to provide some limited "consultation" on my installation given that I didn't really know what I was doing) who readily admitted to me that everything was given to Oliver Stone for promotional/advertising good will.

Notwithstanding this, I still read that Oliver Stone and the other directors/producers were quite happy with their compenents and speakers. And, given that the directors/producers, as well as the installers who where catering to them (including the one I spoke to), had reputations to uphold, I thought that was good enough for me to hang my hat on. As I said in my initial post, I did not have the ability nor inclination, nor spousal patience, to effectively demo different speakers.

Given that NYGIANTS seemed to be in a similar position as me (i.e. he did not have an easy way to demo--and he did not seem inclined to demo several speaker sets), I thought that I would weigh in on what I did; although I am sure that some people are shaking their heads in frustration/confusion as to my admittedly flawed methodology. At least I am glad to hear that you believe my unusual methodology led to a decent choice: NHT.

Edward Christian aka edcrash1
Posted by: gonk

Re: Speaker Help - 07/06/08 03:50 AM

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. wink
Posted by: edcrash1

Re: Speaker Help - 07/06/08 02:04 PM

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
Posted by: tonygeno

Re: Speaker Help - 07/06/08 03:34 PM

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.
Posted by: Altec

Re: Speaker Help - 07/06/08 04:00 PM

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.
Posted by: tru blu

Re: Speaker Help - 07/06/08 06:21 PM

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.
Posted by: tonygeno

Re: Speaker Help - 07/06/08 06:44 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by tru blu:
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?
Posted by: tru blu

Re: Speaker Help - 07/06/08 07:29 PM

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.
Posted by: gonk

Re: Speaker Help - 07/06/08 08:45 PM

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.
Posted by: NYGIANT

Re: Speaker Help - 07/07/08 03:33 PM

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.
Posted by: gonk

Re: Speaker Help - 07/07/08 04:35 PM

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.
Posted by: NYGIANT

Re: Speaker Help - 07/07/08 06:42 PM

Gonk, thank you. I appreciate your help and enjoyed the article, it brought back many memories from my time in San diego in the early seventies.I repaired my own but I'm considering sending them out but as stated in the article, they are big. One last question regarding Outlaw. Ithought the LCR would do better as two channel stand alones, yet it sounds like you think the book shelves are the better sounding. Is this assumption correct?
Posted by: gonk

Re: Speaker Help - 07/07/08 07:08 PM

The LCR is a larger speaker physically and has an extra driver, but it is first and foremost a center channel - which is presumably part of the reason it is a sealed design rather than a ported design (centers too often end up in places with limited clearances, which is likely to get along poorly with speaker ports). Because it is sealed, it doesn't go as deep as the ported Bookshelf does (75Hz rather than 54Hz for the -3dB point). If I was looking for a speaker to use in a two-channel music system without a subwoofer, I'd look at the Bookshelf rather than the LCR. Toss a sub in the mix, of course, and things might change (although I still went with a pair of Bookshelves for my mains - the lower cost and smaller size helped justify the Bookshelves in my case).