Floor Loudspeaker Reviews

I listen in an unusual room, 20' by 35' with an 11' ceiling—almost 8000 cubic feet. Although heavily carpeted and furnitured, the room is not at all dead—not nearly dead enough for J. Gordon Holt, who is, for my tastes, too accustomed to his Tube Traps. Amplification for this review was provided by Mark Levinson, in the form of the Nos.26 and 20. Source material was analog LP (no digital-to-analogs, thank you) played on a Well-Tempered Turntable (the best value ever in a $1000–$2000 'table-plus-tonearm, in my opinion) with a variety of cartridges, none of them spectacular. Interconnects varied, but tended toward the "lean and clean" school, as exemplified by Straight Wire, Discrete Technology, and Audioquest. Speaker cabling was the super-exotic Kimber 4AG recommended by Dick Olsher in Vol.11 No.7. (That's about right, wouldn't you say? $3000 worth of cable to drive a $1090 pair of speakers? Such are the luxuries of review samples.) Also included was CD listening, on both the Denon DCD-3300/DAP-5500 combo and the CAL Tempest II.—Larry Archibald