I attended the Legacy "demo" yesterday. I am calling it a demo, rather than a show. Mostly based on the scaled down presentation. No separate rooms(just a curtain), no food, no drink. Most of all, no Bill Duddleston. It seemed as if most of their products were in attendance. On one side of the curtain was the two channel setup, on the other was the Home Theater. They used a Pioneer DVD player as the source, into their own Legacy pre and power amps. I'll start with a quick statement of the HT side. It was good. I am not an HT person, so I am not someone you should listen to. However, in playing two channel through the speakers on the HT side, it was very disappointing. I will use a song by Bela Fleck and The Flecktones as the focus, as it was a main demo track for this setup. Their flagship, Whisper, was impressive to most, but terrible to me. The track was simply an electric bass, and the sound noticeably jumped back and forth from the 15" woofers to the 7" midrange drivers. This was so obvious that it almost sounded as if two different instruments were playing. I don't blame the drivers, passing music between 15" and 7" drivers is a task more daunting than I would ever tackle. Seemless it was anything but. This poor driver integration resulted in me having a hard time discerning the overall midrange quality(it distracted me that much), but I will give it the benefit of the doubt. Other than the satellite/studio monitors, Legacy is using soft dome tweeters. A wise move, they were fairly detailed and smooth. But, below average in their class. The HT oriented Empire was completely disappointing. In short of the reverse way that a great minimonitor is impressive. If I see some humongous drivers, I expect humongous sound. It was nothing of the sort. On to the stereo side of the room. I want to say that the Focus is their best speaker, as has been stated above. Bass was too heavy(unlike all my previous experiences with Legacy), but the rest of the sound seemed fine. In fact, quite good. I would have to give them a more thorough audition before committing, but if satisfied, would recommend them. They had the speakers really close to the corners of the room, and that may be part of the bass problem. I would have to try them with tubes, to see how current hungry they are. I have a feeling they might be, despite their touting the high efficiency of their line. The Studio Monitors deserve praise in the area of power handling. They did not turn to dreck as the volume went higher and higher. I can think of some high end speakers that might want to take a lesson from that. That speaker was the only one to use a metal dome tweeter, and it showed. Harsh and sizzly. The rep even agreed with me. They were actually super nice people, and customer service/satisfaction seems exemplary. One nice thing I would like to say about them is that they will store the speaker's boxes for you, for free, for the lifetime of the speaker(which could possibly be longer than the company). The rest of the line seems unimpressive to me, as it always has. Certainly not good value for the money, as a lot of great speakers have come out in the past decade. They would have been a better purchase in the late 80's. I think the glaring weakness is in parts quality of the tweeters. Here in 2001, we see speakers feauturing tweeters from Dynaudio, Morel, ScanSpeak, Accuton, Focal(not my bag), Vifa, etc. It's time to move out of the 80's, and use a tweeter that costs more than $10 in an expensive speaker. Funniest person there: A guy who kept A/Bing the Studio Monitor vs. the Focus. It's why I have such deep opinions on each speaker. He got testy when one of the reps mentioned that people don't usually A/B those two. I jumped in for the rep, telling him that two speakers were diametrically opposed to each other, but the guy insisted. I have met people who "understand the hobby" more than him along the way, I can assure you.
