They are surprisingly good, but extremely sensitive to surrounding equipment. As indicated by others, they really do well with all tube front end, and nowhere near as good with solid state. Do not ask me why. ML demo's with sacd from sony as well.
- ...
- 7 posts total
I have a pair of R3s driven by a Pass Aleph 3, sourced by a Mark Levinson 390s (no preamp), in one of my systems. All the cabling is Cardas Golden Cross. The R3s sound nicely extended on the high end, with the ribbons imparting a light, feathery touch of detail to cymbals and a sense of air around the instruments. On the low end, they go surprisingly deep for minimonitors, well into the mid bass. I supplement them with a Sunfire True Sub Mark II, crossed over at the upper end of the low bass range. The R3s weak point is their midrange, which I feel is a little hollow. No real coloration, but rather somewhat depressed in level and the sound not as full as I had expected. Vocalists seemed to be singing from the back of the stage, rather than up front. I sometimes have the sense that the design asks too much of the drivers, seeking to be full range at the frequency extremes and leaving something of a gap in the midrange, although this may be overstating the case just for illustration. Perhaps what I have described would be complementary to tube amplification, which might have a more prominent midrange. Over all, despite my impressions of the midrange, I regard them as pretty good speakers and am generally happy with their performance. |
They are okay. Heard the rosebuds a second time and sounded much worse than the first time.. The boomy bass was still there. Boomy to me, although most people seem to like this. But they were bright and fatiguing and a weird leading edge compression on the upper freq. Similar to clarinets played on vinyl. It's not a rounding of high freq. More like a leading edge compression. I would definitely try gr-research.com lucidity speaker which is a levinson clone (uses the same tweeter but better bass). Danny does much beter job at x-over than most speaker mfg. He has these on an around-the-country demo trip and you can add your name to the list. You only pay one way shipping to the next person on the list. Lucidity criterion for $1,000 |
I'm sure they are very nice speakefrs for the $300 or so they cost from the factory in China that RR buy them from. You can find most of the Red Rose models here: www.aurumcantus.com It's in Chinese, but if you click the second or third link in the top left you'll find the speakers. Steve Oh, and the integrated amp is a Korsun costing about $250 |
- 7 posts total