search

"Well I say that if rock sounds weird over panel speakers, then something's wrong with the music, not the speakers—"

Dara and I had been out on a Sunday drive when we picked up these two crazy hitchhikers, audiophiles who were bickering about panel speakers in the back seat and driving us both nuts.

"Willya shut up back there?" I yelled. The first 'phile kicked the back of my seat.

"What's wrong with YOU, mac?! It's a free country! Or used to be, anyway—"

I'd had enough of the two of them; I pulled into a…

The bass help comes from an ET-designed 8" woofer, operating in a 0.8-ft3 sealed enclosure. The woofer's 56gm cone is purposefully massive…

At the frequency extremes, the LFT-VIII has a bit of trouble matching its terrific midband performance. The bass, while it goes down surprisingly low and strong for such a narrow-profiled speaker, is not as tight or as tuneful as that of the Spica Angelus or the ProAc Response 2, or especially that of the Muse Model 18 subwoofer I normally use in conjunction with these two speakers. The…

Description: Three-way planar/dynamic hybrid speaker. Drivers: 8" acoustic-suspension, paper-cone woofer, 42" L by 3" W midrange panel, 18" L by 1/4" W tweeter panel. Crossover frequencies: 180Hz, 10kHz, 6dB/octave slopes. Sensitivity: 83dB/W/m. Impedance: 8 ohms. Phase accuracy: 100Hz–31kHz, ±20°.
Dimensions: 13" W by 60" H by 1.75" D (panel), 24" D (bass bin, including feet). Weight: 65 lbs each.
Serial numbers of units tested: 892015446L/R.
Finish: oak standard.
Price: $1500/pair (1993); $1899/pair (2008). A tweeter update is available to convert…

The ETs were hooked up to my reference system: LP playback was courtesy of the Well-Tempered Record Player, Audio Research SP-14 phono stage, and a Sumiko Blue Point Special cartridge; CDs were fed to the Theta Data II/Basic II combo, along with a PS Audio Ultralink; DAT playback came from a JVC DAT deck feeding the processors; preamp was the cool-man Melos SHA-1 headphone amplifier; amps were VTL Deluxe 225s, Muse Model One Hundred, Forté Models 4 and 6, and Aragon 4004 Mk.II; Aside from the AudioQuest Lapis between the 'table and phono stage, Kables were Kimber KCAG…

Though Eminent Technology specifies the LFT-VIII's sensitivity as 83dB/W/m, I couldn't get anywhere near that figure, my B-weighted sensitivity on the midrange axis being some 4.7dB lower than that of the BBC LS3/5A, which weighs in at around 82.5dB/Wm. Partly this is because the British speaker has a rising treble compared with the Eminent's sloped-down high end (see later). Even so, looking at just the octave band centered on 1kHz, the LFT-VIII still played 2dB quieter than the LS3/5A for the same 2.83V input. This is a speaker that needs to be fed plenty of…

Das Rheingold is not even properly part of Der Ring des Nibelungen, which Wagner called a trilogy; it's a brief, concise prologue from which no one expects a great deal of passion or emotional catharsis. After all, there's not a single…

Description: two-way, reflex-loaded, stand-mounted loudspeaker. Drive-units: 1" (25mm) aluminum-alloy dome tweeter, 6.5" (170mm) aluminum-alloy cone woofer. Crossover frequency: approximately 3kHz. Crossover slopes: 2nd-order, 12dB/octave high-pass. Frequency response: 35Hz–24kHz ±3dB. Sensitivity: 88.5dB/W/m (2.83V). Maximum spl: 120dB. Nominal impedance: 8 ohms. Amplifier requirements: 30–200W.
Dimensions: 20.1" (510mm) H by 7.9" (200mm) W by 8.9" (255mm) D. Shipping weight: 48.5 lbs/pair (22kg) (matching stands weigh 62 lbs, 28kg each!).
Finish…