That is very good to know.

I have been waiting patiently for you to upgrade your speakers

Gonk, if you have the opportunity to get a hold of a pair of Ascend Acoustics Sierra-1's I would be very interested in your opinions comparing them to the Outlaw bookshelf speaker as those are what I am currently using for front L/R duty.

I've heard good things about the Sierra-1's, but haven't had a chance to hear them myself.

Hey gonk,

What led you to try the Outlaws with so many other choices of speakers in that price range? You must have put a lot of thought and effort into choosing those speakers, I'd be interested in hearing how you narrowed down the field.

I'm curious as I'm currently doing the same sort of search to replace my aging Kenwood LCRs.

Eventually I'll need to start listening to some speakers, and at the top of my list are the Triad Inroom Silver LCR, Klipsch KL-650-THX, Monitor Audio GSLCR for stuff I can buy locally and Ascend CMT-340SE and Outlaw LCR (although I've also looked at the AV123 x-cs, possibly with the Ninja mods) for stuff I can get through ID.

One thing that helped me keep the list short is lack of local shops that carry a lot of the brands. Plus I'm primarily interested in MTM type designs or other designs that have the same/similar effect.

Other than the Triads I'm not interested in buying speakers that I can't try for 30 days. I would have crossed the Triads off the list for this reason as well, but they are locally made and have demo rooms. For this reason RBH and Atlantic Technologies were crossed off as was Snell.

I'm not the type of guy who can spend $3000 on 3 speakers without hearing them and with no return guarantee.

Anyhow...to make a long post short. I just wanted to hear your thoughts on the process you went through to purchase the Outlaws and if you are going to try any other speakers as an in home comparison.

Hi Gonk. I think you'll be pleased. What's great about the BLS is that it makes music but can also give you some nice output for home theater (I can hit reference in my 3000 CF room, provided they're crossed over at 80). The switches really do work and help tailor the sound both with regards to placement as well as environment.

What really strikes me about the sound is the huge soundstaging and excellent imaging of the speakers. Joe D (or whoever designed them) really hit the sweet spot in this regard. The actual sound is on the very slightest side of warm (at least in my room), so classical winds, for instance, have a wonderful roundness that is addictive. Let us know what you think!

Tony

A brief update is in order - I've had the Outlaws hooked up since late Tuesday night, but have done very little critical listening yet. I haven't even re-calibrated the 990, which I have tried to do the last two mornings before things got in the way. They have been getting broken in a fair bit (leaving the radio playing while at work each day), but that's about the only thing I've acheived with them that I'd wanted to this week. Between this being my wife's last week at her current job, my car breaking down (the working theory is a tank of bad gas, although I won't know that for certain for another hour or so), and a couple late nights of work, my impressions so far are brief, preliminary, and based on too little setup to give the speakers a chance to be their best.

Having said all that, I'll also repeat what I told a co-worker yesterday afternoon. He's listened to my old Paradigms several times and is very fond of my system, and after asking how the Outlaws sounded he asked, "They don't sound better than the Paradigms, do they?" Despite not having set things up at all yet, I found myself saying, "Yes, I think they do - at least a little." My wife is also pleased with both the sound (as the daughter of a hard-core audiophile, she has a tendency to notice changes to the system even when she isn't paying attention) and the appearance. The finish is beautiful - pictures on the site and the ones I've taken don't really do them justice - and I really like the metal grilles. I'll post a picture or two shortly as a little something to tide the thread over until I can spend a weekend really putting them through their paces (calibrated, placement tweaked, switches experimented with, and some good listening fun).
It was an odd process, to be honest. For several years now (probably around four years, actually), my wife has been interested in the possibility of replacing our tower speakers with bookshelf speakers, but I never pursued it too far. The arrival of Outlaw's speakers (and particularly some of Tonygeno's early comments about them) piqued my curiousity enough to get me thinking about actually doing a speaker upgrade of some sort. I might have gone back to Paradigm and demo'ed some Studio/20's and a new matching center, but the local representation dried up and I'm not sure if anybody has picked the line back up. Because the Bookshelves were what triggered the discussions of an upgrade, I talked a bit with Outlaw about the speakers and their design. I liked the approach that they were taking with the speaker products, and after some discussion with Scott I decided to give them a try...
Will do, Tony. I'm looking forward to it...

OK, here are two pics. Note that I've got some plans for building stands eventually and need to try to borrow a set from my father-in-law as a starting point, but for the moment the mains are at a non-optimal mounting height on top of the side cabinets. First is a shot of the left channel, followed by an overall shot.





The flash makes the grilles more transparent than they are in real life, by the way.

Thanks for the update Gonk! They look great.

Same thing happens when i take pics of my B&W center. It has a metal center-section to the grill that vanishes from the flash.

Looking forward to your in-depth review.

Gonk,

Looks great!!!!!!

Is it possible to move the Outlaw logo badge?
The center channel looks odd with the logo on the end.

You know that someday you are going to have to upgrade your display.

The badge on the LCR has to be on that end of the grille, but it can be rotated so that it is upright in any orientation (top or bottom for a vertical LCR placement, left or right for a horizontal LCR placement). I've contemplated flipping the grille 180 degrees to see if I like it better on the right or the left.

Ah, yes, my TV... Believe me, you're not to first person to comment on my use of a CRT, but part of the negotiations associated with putting a 7.1 system in the den was putting it in a nice piece of furniture. I should be able to a 37" flat panel in that cabinet without problems (so long as there are no side-mounted speakers), which is a decent sized image at our viewing distance, but right now I don't think I could find any flat screen display that could match the picture quality of my trusty Zenith CRT. It may weigh a ton and be 4:3 aspect ratio, but I figure it'll be a few more years before something that can provide better picture quality in that footprint will be affordable. Once something like that does come along (OLED, perhaps?), trust that I'll be doing a bit of upgrading. Of course, there's also the occasional thoughts of a retractable projection screen and an LCoS front projector, but that's much more of a "wouldn't it be cool if" than a "let me get the credit card out" sort of thought...