Stand Loudspeaker Reviews

I was stuck: Move the Impacts back and they boomed, move them forward and they blurred. Seeking an enjoyable compromise, I kept moving them—forward and back, closer and farther apart. With each pair of speaker positions, the quantity and quality of bass were dramatically different from what they were in all other positions. A score of radical, floor-gouging adjustments and much lamenting later, I remembered the ol' sock mod. I stuffed the Tektons' ports with Wigwam Outlast Weather Shield socks. Voilà! It reduced the overloading of the room, which I'd determined was happening in the 50–70Hz area. Socks in, there was less apparent low bass, but also less muddy energy clouding the midrange. More important, the socks let me move the speakers back to only 21" from the front wall, where their frequency response seemed relatively smooth and their image focus sharpest. Throughout my listening for this review, I stuffed in Wigwams and yanked them out as the spirit and the recording moved me. Most of the listening observations below were made sans socks.

Toe-in was another big deal. Getting the Impact Monitors to focus their best required placing them closer together than I ever could have imagined would work—the centers of their central tweeters were only 5.6' apart—and toed in about 16°. And from there, at last, they sounded light, fast, and strong, with clean, detailed bass and substantial, detailed soundstages.

Listening
The Impact Monitors played reggae extremely well. The first recording I played after finally getting the Tektons dialed in was This Is Reggae Music Vol.2 (LP, Island ILPS-9327-A). As usual when I play this 1975 anthology, what most grabbed my attention was Scotty and Lorna Bennett singing their provocative reggae classic "Skank in Bed": "Breakfast in bed, kisses for me / You don't have to say you love me."

The Impact Monitors displayed every sex-drenched aspect of this song made famous by Dusty Springfield on Dusty in Memphis, with vivid, colorful sensuality. The Hammond organ did its rich tone thing, with DJ Scotty and the best bass lines all stage front, Lorna and the horn section far upstage. Percussive bass seemed attractively fat but tight, and moved like thick hips dancing. Every offbeat rhythm was a delight. Scotty and Lorna's reggae was Jah-loves-I-and-I real.

Breakfast in bed, love can make you sing
What's your hurry, please don't hit and run
We can let her wait, my darling, it has been so long . . .

After breakfast . . .

Every track on Lou Reed and John Cale's quasi-biographical Songs for Drella (CD, Sire 26140-2) humanizes and demythologizes America's most influential artist post-WWII: painter, sculptor, filmmaker, and social avatar Andy Warhol. Cale plays various keyboards and speaks in the voice of Andy, while Reed explains, recollects, and eulogizes. Every track is saturated with reverb; in, say, "Trouble with Classicists," this provides a resilient cushion of studio-generated "air" that captivatingly surrounds and frames the voices. Reed's solitary guitar notes appear sharply, float in space, and finally fade into a reverberating abyss. The Impact Monitors revealed textures and energy in ways that made the songs feel like paintings, reproducing these reverb-filled songs with grace, taut energy, and saturated tone. However, the music was slightly blurred and indistinct in comparison to how it sounded through the more expensive DeVore Fidelity Orangutan O/93s ($8400/pair) or Harbeth Monitor 30.2s ($6495/pair).

Imaging and saturation of tone are the first things I notice when I put a record on, and the Impact Monitors delivered both in good measure. They even overcame my dread of the comb filtering and phase-related mishegas that I feared 14 tweeters would produce by delivering surprising amounts of well-focused detail.

The Tekton's best and most important trait was its ability to grab and hold my attention, make me think, Oh, how nice this music sounds, then draw me further in, and end up having held my attention for a long time indeed. They specialized in making all types of music easy and fun to listen to.

Because they're tiny sealed boxes, my Falcon Acoustics LS3/5as can't reproduce the scale and force of the manic synth expressions recorded by Aaron Funk, aka Venetian Snares, on his Pink + Green (CD, Sublight SLR204). The big-box Impact monitors handled this disc even better than did the Harbeth 30.2s, which make Funk sound a little too precise. I believe Funk wants his audiences to experience something looser and more expansive—as his music sounded through the Impact Monitors. The Tektons were made for this kind of music.

When I first set up the Tektons, I kept thinking I could hear not the vibrations of their cabinet walls, or the puffing of their ports, but the actual empty volume of the inside of their cabinets. I called this coloration the "overtone of emptiness"—it made everything sound as if it was coming from inside a small whisky barrel. This real or imagined coloration appeared and disappeared for no apparent musical or technological reason. Whether or not it was real I don't know, but if it was real, I think it was enhancing the spatiality and relentless force of Aaron Funk's manic, drum-rolling synth inventions. The Tekton Impacts delivered 100% of Pink + Green's smart-artist attitude.

Speaking of smart artists, the Tektons reproduced Alexandre Desplat's score for the film Isle of Dogs (16-bit/44.1kHz, Abaco/Tidal HiFi) at smaller scale than you'd hear it in a movie theater, but still very big and deep-space thrilling for a pair of stand-mounted speakers in a small room.

As I frequently remind you, the best test of any loudspeaker is how tangibly lifelike it can make a recorded piano sound. I hadn't played it in years, but I thought Minoru Nojima's performance of Liszt's Transcendental Études after Paganini No.3, "La Campanella," from Nojima Plays Liszt (CD, Reference RR-25CD), might be a good test. I've heard this classic audiophile recording from 1986 many times, and am never unimpressed when speakers can sail through it as well as the Impact Monitors did. The HoloAudio Spring DAC was in the system, and every quick note was a pleasure to hear. Nojima's Hamburg Steinway sounded a touch soft and slightly smeared—not as precise as through the DeVore O/93s or the Harbeth M30.2s—but the instrument's weight and body were well represented, and the lower half of the keyboard was especially satisfying.

Experimenting with Amplifiers
Over the next several weeks I kept playing Nojima Plays Liszt, Isle of Dogs, and Songs for Drella, while alternating among the Bel Canto Design e.One REF600M, First Watt J2, Pass Laboratories XA25, and PrimaLuna ProLogue Premium power amps and the Line Magnetic LM-518 integrated. It was no contest—the Tektons best reproduced instrumental and male vocal tone when driven by the First Watt J2. The Line Magnetic integrated, with 845 power tubes, best showcased the Impact Monitors' reproduction of midrange textures and the capabilities of women's voices. Not surprisingly, the Impacts were most impactful (sorry) and displayed the most full-range giddy-up when driven by the deep power of the class-D, 300W Bel Canto REF600M monoblocks.

The best amp for pleasure and dreams was the 35Wpc, EL34-tubed PrimaLuna ProLogue Premium. With the PrimaLuna and Isle of Dogs, I kept smiling and chanting, "I like these Tektons, I like these Tektons." Surprisingly, the Bel Canto–Tekton combo didn't sound too soft—it brought flow, body, and texture to the fore of my listening, and promoted Isle of Dogs composer Alexandre Desplat to Boss of All Music Cats. The Tektons loved film soundtracks.

Conclusions
In 2015, my main criticism of Tekton Design's floorstanding Enzo XL was that its overall sound leaned toward the Puritan, the restrained, the businesslike. Tekton's Impact Monitors were not at all like that. To my delight, I found them aptly named: They delivered exceedingly smooth, liquid sound that was weighty, coherent, and impactful. Whatever Eric Alexander is doing with the Impact Monitor's crossover, it seems to be working.

The Impact Monitor is an all-rounder—a loudspeaker capable of satisfying many serious audiophiles, dance-partygoers, and record collectors. Few speakers can play every musical genre with the Impact's level of ease, acuity, and, uh . . . impact. Add to these virtues the fact that few other moderately priced audiophile speakers can play so loud without distortion. And they're unusually easy to drive. At times, the Impact Monitor looked—and sounded—a bit too big for my small room, but I doubt many pairs of stand-mounted speakers could fill a larger room as powerfully or effectively as these did mine. Highly recommended.