Progressive Rock

In most of the CES rooms you're allowed to test equipment with your own CDs wether it's prog or jazz or whatever.
Don't forget your couple of CDs next time or vinyls where applicable...

Speaking of horns, someone once told me they auditioned a heap of speakers using The Black Album by Metallica. The best speakers were the Klipsch RF-7 and apparently they were better than a lot more expensive audiophile speakers. But of course these speakers would be lacking a whole lot of refinement for other genres of music.

Agithos, I had heard about the Klipsch RF-7s and auditioned them LOUD. The horn tweeters sounded more live than my Energys, but not enough to warrant the additional expense. Which again, brings me back to my point of "diminishing returns". However, they did sound more refined than I had expected. In fact I read where alot of Klipsch fans where disappointed and complaining that this speaker was a "sell out", sounded to high end, etc..

In the 70's i listented to a lot of prog (still do to a lesser extent now) and the best system i assembled for that was vinyl based with a pair of old Klipsch Cornwalls. The dynamic responce of the horns was great for rock music. I have to admit i had them set up terribly for overall accuracy (stuffed perfectly into the corners to get all the bass i could) but i can still remember a couple of tunes on the Genesis live album (afterglow being one of them) where i could feel bass more than hear it. When you consider that colisium pa's provided the sonic reference point accuracy wasn't really all that big of an issue anyway.

My Dunlavys rock (my vandersteens didn;t) but they don't have quite the dynamics of the horns nor the bass thump of a 15. There is a distinct difference between a speaker hitting a low note with accuracy and moving a lot of air with that note. It's moving the air that provides the impact, thus the multi folded 18 in subs in live rock shows. My Dunlavys have a 10 in driver that will get into the 30 hz range pretty solidly but they don't hit you in the chest doing it. I think that is where some of the accurate speakers work well for more controlled music like jazz where they may seem to fall apart for rock (or big orchestral works). Trying to get the viseral impact from a speaker not designed to provide it usually results in everything being played too loud and the overall result suffering.

Yes9 says "The reason I asks is that I attended the Home Entertainment show last month in NYC. And not one of the rooms I visited were playing rock of any kind - and they did not seem receptive to taking request - especially at the volume I would need to hear before plunking down oh say $12,000 for a pair of speakers. "

You should have visited my room (Sonic Spirits - rm 1018)! We were more than happy playing CDs brought by visitors or playing requests if we had something someone wanted to hear. Off the top of my head, we played the following pretty frequently during the show:

Prodigy - "Firestarter"
Billy Idol - "Rebel Yell"
Steppenwolf - "Magic Carpet Ride"
The Clash - "London Calling"
Van Halen - "You Really Got Me"
The Who - "Pinball Wizard"
Jeff Beck - "Goodbye Porkpie Hat"
Stevie Ray Vaughn - "Tin Pan Alley" and "Pride and Joy"
Eric Johnson - "Cliffs of Dover"

Rock CDs brought by visitors included stuff by U2, Traffic, the Doors, Rush, Yes, CCR, Hendrix...

And we didn't have any issues with turning up the volume at a vistor's request... :-)