Steve Guttenberg finally reviews the Eminent Technology LFT-8b loudspeaker.

@bdp24: So that we are being clear, the LFT8b/c do not have a wood frame. The frame is entirely welded steel. There are narrow strips of wood that screw onto the steel frame, but they add no structural rigidity - that’s all up to the steel frame. The wood is there for appearance (and I wish they were a bit nicer, to be honest).

I can push against our frames (panels) and they flex a little due to the leverage, but there is no such pressure against them at any other time. An earthquake bad enough to cause the panels to bend would bring down the house, so not really sure there would be an advantage to added rigidity. I can MIG, TIG or gas weld my own stands and modifications, but saw no reason to do so. I considered it when I was replacing the panel with the buzzing midrange ribbon with the entire new panel sent by Bruce, but my real interest in future mods was to install threaded inserts into the wood woofer box for the steel panel frame to screw into more securely.

Damn, you’re right @gktaudio! I have both the LFT-4 and LFT-8b in my room, and use the latter with it’s grill cloth frames in place. The LFT-4 didn’t come with (a) grill frame(s), and it is the LFT-4 which has the LFT driver assembly (containing bass, midrange, and tweeter sections) attached to a solid oak frame. No wonder the LFT-8b is so heavy! Actually, so is the LFT-4. I thought the weight was a result of all those bar magnets ;-) .

@ledoux1238: Yeah, the listeners ears really have to be within the height of the tweeter, that’s how a line-source tweeter behaves. The original version of the LFT-8 had the tweeter strip at the top of the panel rather in the middle, and people were complaining that the high end dropped off when they sat down. In the a or b revision Bruce lowered the tweeter to it’s present location.

But there is a solution to the tweeter being too high with the Townshend Pods in place: put shims under the Pod(s) at the rear of the 8b, which will then point the tweeter down towards your ears. Little blocks of something stiff will do, like birch plywood (painted black). Adjust the height of the rear of the LFT-8 until you get the center of the tweeter to be aimed at the height of your ears. That's how the tweeter pods in the big Wilson speakers are aligned.

You’re most welcome Leo. The Starkrimson amps with GaN FET power supplies are great.

Eric and others-

It seems that one of my LFTs is about 3-D be louder than the other. I’ve tried swapping amps, cables and all the usual stuff. My room tends to lean slightly left (it must know my politics-:) but it tends to sound like everything is coming out of the left channel now when I’m off axis. I wrote Bruce and I’m hoping to figure it out, but any suggestions would be welcome. 
 

Tomorrow or Friday I’ll try my quicksilver amps and precision fidelity C7 which has dual mono volume. It will be interesting to see how they sound compared to the class D amps…

@harryz Hi Harry, just a reminder that the cable compliment is very different between the 8b and 8c. In the 8c, it is a set of line level cables from preamp out to the DSP / woofer  units, then another set of line level cables from the woofers to your amps, and finally speaker cables from amps back to the speakers. The amps only drives the mid range panels and the tweeters. And all signals go through A-D and D-A conversion before it goes to your amp. 

Regarding the 3 db differential in your speaker output, if you are dealing with vinyl playback, then I'd check azimuth. If not analog, I would still check the output of digital source component. My vintage Wadia CDP experienced a L-R imbalance which got fixed.