ESS and Heil air-motion tranformer - any thoughts?
I just encountered a new speaker company, GoldenEar Technology, that features its own nicely refined take on the Heil throughout its product line. The company's founder and chief designer is Sandy Gross, who was a co-founder of Polk Audio in 1972 and Definitive Technology around 1990. You can especially see some family resemblance between GoldenEar's Triton 2 Tower and the Def Tech Mythos, but the GoldenEar uses the new Heil tweeter and costs 40% less than the Mythos. I heard them at a high end audio open house at my local high end store just a couple weeks ago. Co-founders Sandy Gross and Don Givogue introduced the speakers while Stereophile's John Atkinson played 24/96 digital masters from his laptop. At $2500/pair list these speakers are stupid good and neutral. Bass extension goes down to a claimed 18Hz thanks to each speaker having a 1200 watt built-in amp to drive twin 5x9 bass drivers assisted by even larger passive radiators. It makes amp matching much easier. The front baffle is only 5" wide, so imaging and soundstage are particularly good. They also make a selection of L-C-R and surround speakers featuring their "folded ribbon" tweeter in a D'Appolito array. |
Just listened to Billy Joel At Shea Stadium Blu-Ray on my pair of AMT 1-D's. The cymbals sounded like a real cymbals with nice bite and smooth decay. The drums sounded deep and, amazingly, didn't overhand by mid-bass bloat. I go a long time without listening to these and with a truly good recording they really still can impress me. Recordings with too much bass, especially sludge-like mid-bass bloat, sound bad no matter how good the mids and highs are. |
In response to Bill's post, I have heard the Adam speakers on one occasion, the $10K stand-mounted one with the powered woofers and the Heil type midrange and tweeter (I believe it is the smallest model in the Tensor series), and was extremely impressed. I was prepared for what Larry describes, but at least on first listen to me Adam seems to have done a great job, at least in this model, in minimizing that discontinuity between the midrange and the woofers. I had come in to my dealer's to hear the Wilson Sashas, which did sound very good, but the Adams had a dynamic realism to them, especially with transients, that made them sound like a live musical event vs. the Wilsons which, good as they were, sounded more like speakers reproducing a live event in comparison. I would like to listen to the Adams more to see how good they are in long-term listening, and perhaps also to the larger model in the line with deeper bass response to see if adding the last octave of bass to the speaker might highlight any discontinuity between the woofers and that remarkable performance in the midrange and treble. It could be that my enthusiasm for the dynamic realism of the speaker and the open and clean sound of the Heil drivers caused me to overlook some flaws in the speaker that ultimately might make it something I couldn't live with, but for now they are definitely a speaker that I would consider on my short list for purchasing. |
