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The drive home from Montreal and the Salon Son & Image show is smooth and uneventful. The snow kindly stops just as John Atkinson and I climb into his Land Cruiser, the woman at Customs lets us into the US with little fanfare, and, there isn't much to set the heart racing. Every fifty or so miles, the highway's long dividing guardrail is punctuated by some enormous brown bird—a once majestic body that owned the sky is now slung awkwardly and pitifully over cold steel. It's sad that something so beautiful and strong can die so quietly. But quiet abounds out here. The sky seems to move…
It ain't the stuff you don't know that trips you up, it's the stuff you know that ain't so. When, at the 2007 CEDIA Expo, I encountered Klipsch's startlingly new Palladium P-39F loudspeaker ($20,000/pair), I was impressed by its looks. Tall (56"), as beautifully contoured as the prow of a canoe, and clad in striking zebra-stripe plywood, the P-39F is possibly the best-looking speaker Klipsch has ever made.
The Klipsch rep, too, was enthusiastic: "This is a loudspeaker that PWK would have approved of!" (Yes, seven years after the death of Paul W. Klipsch, employees still refer to…
Then there's that scrumptious cabinet. It has no parallel surfaces, and curves continuously from its tapered baffle to pointed rear spine. The cabinet—made of compressed laminated plywood, MDF, and particleboard—has an average thickness of 1", although the baffle is thicker and, where the woofers are mounted, is reinforced with steel. The cabinet's interior is extensively braced. Each speaker sits atop a high-mass machined metal baseplate tapped for spiked feet. Mounted low on one side of the P-39F are three flared port tubes—the look is old-school Pontiac. Access to the triwired speaker…
Sidebar 1: Specifications
Description: Three-way, reflex-loaded, floorstanding, loudspeaker with horn-loaded midrange and tweeter. Drive-units: horn-loaded, 0.75" titanium-dome compression tweeter; horn-loaded, 4.5" inverted aluminum-dome compression midrange; three 9" aluminum-Rohacell-Kevlar woofers. Crossover: 500Hz, 3.2kHz, fourth-order electroacoustic. Frequency response: 39Hz–24kHz, ±3dB. Sensitivity: 95dB/2.83V/m, anechoic. Harmonic distortion (measured at 95dB/m): second harmonic, 0.5%, 50Hz–10kHz; third harmonic, 0.1%, 50Hz–6.6kHz. Impedance: 4 ohms (2.7 ohms at 130Hz). Power…
Sidebar 2: Associated Equipment
Digital Source: Ayre C-5xe universal player.
Preamplifiers: Ayre K-1xe, VTL TL-6.5 Signature.
Integrated Amplifier: Ayre AX-7e.
Power Amplifiers: Moscode 402au, Musical Fidelity Nu-Vista 300, Parasound Halo JC 2, VTL MB-450 II.
Loudspeakers: YG Acoustics Anat Reference II Professional.
Cables: Interconnect: AudioQuest William E. Low Signature, Shunyata Research Aeros (single-ended, RCA); Stealth Audio Metacarbon (balanced). Speaker: AudioQuest William E. Low Signature, Shunyata Research Aeros, Stealth Audio Dream. AC: Shunyata Research…
Sidebar 3: Measurements
Measuring a speaker as bulky and heavy as the Klipsch Palladium P-39F is always problematic: the speaker can't be raised high enough off the ground to eliminate the bounce of its sound off the floor between the speaker and the measuring microphone. I therefore had to use more aggressive time-windowing than usual to generate the frequency-response graphs, which in turn means that these graphs' resolution in the midrange is more limited than usual.
Looking first at the Palladium's voltage sensitivity, my estimate was 94.8dB(B)/2.83V/m, which is within…
If you have more than six or seven bucks to spend, you might consider the Imagine T floorstanding speaker from PSB Loudspeakers ($2000/pair). A year ago, John Atkinson reviewed PSB's Synchrony One speaker ($4500/pair; Stereophile, April 2008, Vol.31 No.4). The Imagine series is the next line down, and also includes center, surround, and bookshelf models. John Marks flipped over the Imagine B minimonitor in his column in the February 2009 issue.
PSB stands for Paul and Sue Barton, the founders of PSB Loudspeakers, now owned by Lenbrook Industries Limited, based in Pickering, Ontario. (…
Kalman Rubinson reviewed the PSB Imagine T in June 2009 (Vol.32 No.6):
My first intimate experience with PSB loudspeakers was back in the mid-1990s, when I'd just began writing for Stereophile and found myself "between speakers." I'd sold off my Apogee Duettas and was not yet fully committed to something new. PSB designer Paul Barton graciously let me hang on to a pair of PSB Stratus Gold i speakers, which John Atkinson and Thomas J. Norton had reviewed in April 1997. With a smooth but somewhat recessed midrange, powerful and extended bass, but trebles that lacked sparkle, they sounded…
Sidebar 1: Playing With Ports
In the images of the rear of the Imagine T in PSB's literature and on their website, the upper port is shown stopped with a removable plug. Sure enough, the review samples arrived so plugged, along with a brief note explaining the situation: "the port cover can be used to adjust the bass tuning of the Imagine models where room problems at low frequencies (in the 100Hz region) occur....We invite the listener to try plugging any one or multiple ports to better integrate the system in their room.... Please experiment....Additional Port Covers can be acquired…
Sidebar 2: Specifications
Description: 2.5-way reflex-loaded, floor-standing loudspeaker. Drive-units: 1" titanium-dome, ferrofluid-cooled tweeter; two 5.25" polypropylene-cone woofers (lower woofer rolls off above 800Hz). Crossover frequency: 1.8kHz. Frequency responses: 38Hz–23kHz, ±3dB (on axis); 42Hz–20kHz, ±1.5dB (on axis); 42Hz–10kHz, ±1.5dB (30° off axis). Low-frequency extension: –10dB at 35Hz. Nominal impedance: 4 ohms. Sensitivity: 88dB/2.8V/m anechoic, 90dB/2.8V/m in room.
Dimensions: 36.9" (945mm) H by 8.2" (210mm) W by 13.5" (346mm) D. Weight: 40.7 lbs (18.5kg) net, 52…