FIRST IMPRESSIONS
Before eating dinner tonight I got to spend another hour with the speakers and am pleased to report the following:
A) They seem to get exactly as loud as the Big Betsy F15 combo.
B) They sound full and rich, with enough bass to be enjoyed without augmentation.
C) They have the same energy that you feel when you listen to the Big Betsy, similar slam and scale. I would say less slam but same scale.
D) They give enough of the Big Betsy / Capitan Crunch sensation that you know you still had a Big Betsy experience... I wasn't expecting that.
E) The sound is refined beyond description. The top end and midrange, well, let's just say that it's in a league all its own. I would say that the sound of this driver is so good that it would be sacrilegious to speak of the music it makes in segregated terms like 'bass' or 'midrange' etc.
F) It was designed by a true genius with a deep understanding. It possesses a cone that you can not hear.
Sound always takes on the signature of the last surface it touches, so the sound of a speaker cone is always superimposed over the top of the music. Not here. I've listened to so many drivers and cones when I had a speaker re-cone business pre-dating DECWARE, and then all the stuff that came along after DECWARE, like the Fostex, Lowther, and similar drivers that use thin smooth paper cones. You can hear those cones, and now that my reference has been calibrated by less than a couple hours with this driver, well lets just say I'm wrecked about as bad as I was when I came out with the 25th Anniversary Zen Triode amplifier. Anyway, to finish the thought, this is the
first and only driver that I can not hear the cone. It's simply brilliant.
As a result the sound comes out of an empty space full of all possibilities. For example in the first 3 minutes of the Daniel Voth track I spoke of earlier this afternoon, I was thinking OK, this cone material is refusing to break up, and it's so soft and smooth sounding, if not a little dull. This was because I could not hear the cone which would have otherwise added an artificial edge that would actually be interpreted as an increase in focus. Then all of a sudden some dynamic attacking high notes exploded into space right in front of me that I had a hard time registering as having just come from the same speakers!! The absence of cone sound makes the music smooth until something dynamic happens and then you wonder how such attack and high frequency is possible without compression or distortion.
Sorry I had to explain F).
They do not have the giant bass hit of the Big Betsy, but what they do have probably is Truer to the actual sound with less hype in the mid-bass region. We will see what happens over time as these season and my brain continues to wrap itself around what I'm hearing... right now I would say that if you listen to both the Big Betsy and this smaller model with the Crystal 10 you will literally HAVE to have both. Consider yourself sufficiently warned, because if you think you don't have room the Big Betsys... imagine how upset you'll be when you find yourself with both. This years fest is going to be a disaster for everyone who attends ; )
-Steve