About 3 years ago I was happily enjoying my Large walnut Advents in my main family room system when I happened upon a pristine pair of NHT 2.5's in a beautiful mahogany finish. When I showed my wife a photo of them she loved the narrow profile and more modern look of these well received towers and since she's never been a fan of the looks of the NLA's I decided grab them.
I hooked them up to my 125 watt Onix integrated amp and...Ugh, where'd the music go? While they sounded fairly clean and polite I couldn't get over how detached the bass was from the rest of the music. It was rubbery, detached and frankly just artificial sounding. Now I tried every position and adjustment imaginable with these cuz I REALLY wanted to like them but I could not get them to sound coherent no matter what I tried.
I decided one evening to reinsert the Advents just to see if it was in my head and bang! There it was, music, with a top to bottom coherence that just sounded more RIGHT to me. I was really disappointed as the NHT's were just beautiful but I gotta go with what I hear so back in go the Advents and I sold the NHT's off the following week. I understand the NHT's are not currently a modern speaker but their design is mimicked by a lot of current speaker manufacturers using a narrow baffle and side firing woofers. I've also heard from several satisfied owners of the 2.5's so this isn't meant to be critical of what was considered a very fine and well received speaker line. I guess it just means what's good for one may not work for another and that's O.K., I'll never try to convince someone that what they like or prefer is wrong, frankly it's insulting and unnecessary.
