olderroust
AK Member
so, I'm in the process of setting up my home office.
Currently, the Q100s are being sold at 299 a pair delivered by a lot of vendors - I think clearing inventory ahead of the Q150.
I went ahead and decided to give them a whirl, and my verdict is "meh." Granted, that verdict is coming from having listened to some very good stuff over the years.
My mains in the living room are Thiel 2.2s (estate sale score) and I'd hoped to use a pair of seriously beat but still very nice sounding Celestions in the office (ebay find - the seller listed 700s as Foos...) Those are waaaaay too much speaker for the space I have. On a few recordings, they sound truly outstanding even in that room. Delicious imaging and articulation, all the good things - I have a performance of the Emperor Concerto that I listened to a few nights ago, and using these as nearfield monitors for that was amazingly immersive.
However, add much in the way of bass and the room, the placement, the lack of a surface for a good, hard mounting point get together to say "these speaks are wasted here."
Looking around, it looked to me like what I wanted were decent sounding speakers with coaxial drivers to give me flexible placement options. Since I don't have four figures to spend on the setup, and I'm space constrained, the Kef 100/300 monitors looked like a good fit. The R100 is over budget, and a number of knowledgeable sounding folks favor the Q100 over the Q300 as they prefer the smaller size driver. It delivers less bass, but better controlled bass and is the driver geometry used in the very excellent LS50 series.
The Q100s have five way binding posts and are set up to permit bi amping or wiring, though I can't see a need to do either of those things in a speaker of this grade. But hey, at least the integrally jumpered cables I was using with the Cels came in handy right away.
I got a good look at the 100s - the thing to keep in mind is that they are pretty deep, about a foot deep - and knew I'd need a pair of shoes for them that let me angle the driver arrays at my head. They have a mounting bracket on the rear of the speaker, but I don't see exactly how I'd make use of it. I'm sure something will come to me.
Next, I connected them up and verified that I've got left and right channels in their proper places. I thought at that point I might start listening, but I was wrong - dash back to the packaging to find the port bungs. (If I keep these, I swear I'm going to fill the port tubes with Locktite expanding foam.)
A very common complaint about these speakers is that they have no bass. This is one of the complaints that made me want to listen to them, as I find that in low-end products, if users at Amazon are saying "kickin' bass, dudes" I am not going to like the sound. With the ports open and set up in nearfield, they have bass. Rather too much bass, in fact, and not terribly awesome bass. But it's there to satisfy folks who want it. The bungs did help.
I then moved on to one of my recordings of the Emperor. Lasted about 5 minutes, then began making measurements to see how I would get these positioned so the driver array was in line with my ears. Permanent mounting, is not currently a consideration - these are speakers which play music, rather than a way to get music into my office, at least so far.
By that I mean that listening to them, you are not likely to forget that you are listening to a mechanical system for long.
I made a very simple pair of brackets out of two pieces of wood and a thin aluminum lip - just enough to angle them as I wanted and keep the speaker from sliding off the angle on its own.
Getting the positioning dialed in helps a great deal. I was able to finish listening to the concerto, then moved on to the Allison Krauss and Union Station performance from Sound Stage and then to the Emmylou Harris / Mark Knopfler "Roadrunning" collaboration. There will be more of a stop at Talking Timbuktu and more classical music as well in the next few days.
I was pretty impressed with the speakers' articulation of the Krauss material, especially the mandolins and banjos. I was rather less impressed with how the Roadrunning performance did - in that, some of Knopfler's vocals are submerged, where on the main system or in this system via headphones they are very well resolved.
And then there was the classical. Once I got everything dialed in and went back to the Emperor, a piece I know well although the performance, less well - I'm most familiar with Szell/Gilels CSO performance - at one point I was startled. I was hearing something in the piece I'd never heard before, but not in a good way - it a!most sounded like an electronic fault. I listened on the headphones and yes, there is a dissonant passage in the 2nd movement but the Kefs handled it very poorly. If I'd let the recording keep going, I'd have realized where I was in a few more seconds - but I wanted to hear that bit right then over the headphones, then a third time over the Kefs so I was sure of what I'd heard.
Nowhere in the recording, unsurprisingly, did they achieve the striking dimensionality that the Celestions had done. The coarse errors in delivery they occasionally throw out are more surprising. (Anyone else wonder how much of the "break in period" for speakers is in fact a window in which you're expected to grow accustomed to the flaws in the equipment?)
Next on my list to audition are the Gallo CL-1 being closed out on ebay and a-gon at 200 or so dollars a pair. The CL1 does not have the famous tweeter but does have a very simple crossover design. The ebay sets are demo units listed as refurbs, the ones on Agon are new in box. Price at ebay winds up being about 80 bucks less (including shipping) so that's the way I went.
The system as a whole is this:
Synology NAS -> Sony UHPH1 media player -> Monoprice Desktop Headphone Amp -> MDA preout -> Velodyne sub crossed at 120 -> NAD 2400 PE amplifier -> speaker du jour.
Currently, the Q100s are being sold at 299 a pair delivered by a lot of vendors - I think clearing inventory ahead of the Q150.
I went ahead and decided to give them a whirl, and my verdict is "meh." Granted, that verdict is coming from having listened to some very good stuff over the years.
My mains in the living room are Thiel 2.2s (estate sale score) and I'd hoped to use a pair of seriously beat but still very nice sounding Celestions in the office (ebay find - the seller listed 700s as Foos...) Those are waaaaay too much speaker for the space I have. On a few recordings, they sound truly outstanding even in that room. Delicious imaging and articulation, all the good things - I have a performance of the Emperor Concerto that I listened to a few nights ago, and using these as nearfield monitors for that was amazingly immersive.
However, add much in the way of bass and the room, the placement, the lack of a surface for a good, hard mounting point get together to say "these speaks are wasted here."
Looking around, it looked to me like what I wanted were decent sounding speakers with coaxial drivers to give me flexible placement options. Since I don't have four figures to spend on the setup, and I'm space constrained, the Kef 100/300 monitors looked like a good fit. The R100 is over budget, and a number of knowledgeable sounding folks favor the Q100 over the Q300 as they prefer the smaller size driver. It delivers less bass, but better controlled bass and is the driver geometry used in the very excellent LS50 series.
The Q100s have five way binding posts and are set up to permit bi amping or wiring, though I can't see a need to do either of those things in a speaker of this grade. But hey, at least the integrally jumpered cables I was using with the Cels came in handy right away.
I got a good look at the 100s - the thing to keep in mind is that they are pretty deep, about a foot deep - and knew I'd need a pair of shoes for them that let me angle the driver arrays at my head. They have a mounting bracket on the rear of the speaker, but I don't see exactly how I'd make use of it. I'm sure something will come to me.
Next, I connected them up and verified that I've got left and right channels in their proper places. I thought at that point I might start listening, but I was wrong - dash back to the packaging to find the port bungs. (If I keep these, I swear I'm going to fill the port tubes with Locktite expanding foam.)
A very common complaint about these speakers is that they have no bass. This is one of the complaints that made me want to listen to them, as I find that in low-end products, if users at Amazon are saying "kickin' bass, dudes" I am not going to like the sound. With the ports open and set up in nearfield, they have bass. Rather too much bass, in fact, and not terribly awesome bass. But it's there to satisfy folks who want it. The bungs did help.
I then moved on to one of my recordings of the Emperor. Lasted about 5 minutes, then began making measurements to see how I would get these positioned so the driver array was in line with my ears. Permanent mounting, is not currently a consideration - these are speakers which play music, rather than a way to get music into my office, at least so far.
By that I mean that listening to them, you are not likely to forget that you are listening to a mechanical system for long.
I made a very simple pair of brackets out of two pieces of wood and a thin aluminum lip - just enough to angle them as I wanted and keep the speaker from sliding off the angle on its own.
Getting the positioning dialed in helps a great deal. I was able to finish listening to the concerto, then moved on to the Allison Krauss and Union Station performance from Sound Stage and then to the Emmylou Harris / Mark Knopfler "Roadrunning" collaboration. There will be more of a stop at Talking Timbuktu and more classical music as well in the next few days.
I was pretty impressed with the speakers' articulation of the Krauss material, especially the mandolins and banjos. I was rather less impressed with how the Roadrunning performance did - in that, some of Knopfler's vocals are submerged, where on the main system or in this system via headphones they are very well resolved.
And then there was the classical. Once I got everything dialed in and went back to the Emperor, a piece I know well although the performance, less well - I'm most familiar with Szell/Gilels CSO performance - at one point I was startled. I was hearing something in the piece I'd never heard before, but not in a good way - it a!most sounded like an electronic fault. I listened on the headphones and yes, there is a dissonant passage in the 2nd movement but the Kefs handled it very poorly. If I'd let the recording keep going, I'd have realized where I was in a few more seconds - but I wanted to hear that bit right then over the headphones, then a third time over the Kefs so I was sure of what I'd heard.
Nowhere in the recording, unsurprisingly, did they achieve the striking dimensionality that the Celestions had done. The coarse errors in delivery they occasionally throw out are more surprising. (Anyone else wonder how much of the "break in period" for speakers is in fact a window in which you're expected to grow accustomed to the flaws in the equipment?)
Next on my list to audition are the Gallo CL-1 being closed out on ebay and a-gon at 200 or so dollars a pair. The CL1 does not have the famous tweeter but does have a very simple crossover design. The ebay sets are demo units listed as refurbs, the ones on Agon are new in box. Price at ebay winds up being about 80 bucks less (including shipping) so that's the way I went.
The system as a whole is this:
Synology NAS -> Sony UHPH1 media player -> Monoprice Desktop Headphone Amp -> MDA preout -> Velodyne sub crossed at 120 -> NAD 2400 PE amplifier -> speaker du jour.
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