Audio Federation - Dealership, HiFiING Magazine and the Audiophiles Guide to the Galaxy

WELCOME

	Welcome. This report describes our experiences while we were at the Stereophile Home Entertainment Show at the New York Hilton in midtown Manhattan, New York City. It contains opinions (ours) and hopefully communicates some of the flavor of this year's show. The raw, unadulterated, unexpurgated detailed descriptions of each room's sound will be found in with each room's photos. To see the list of rooms, go back to the main HE2005 Show page and click on any one of the 4 Sides you want to look at. You can also click on their Room links below which will appear for each room as their detailed description is completed. Note that we are tougher on the better and the more expensive systems. Some systems are so bad it would be truly boring to list everything wrong with them. It is the ones that we think have something to offer, or that are so undeservingly over-hyped that we just have to say something, that we examine with a more powerful microscope. The 'Show Sound' this year was somewhat a disappointment. There were very few rooms with setups 'known' to sound 'good', and these were plagued by room issues. The other room's systems were a mix of equipment seemingly determined by expediency and economic concerns more than sonic concerns. We took pictures with a Canon Digital Rebel XT. 8+ megapixels is nice. The difficulty it has with dark rooms is a nightmare.

We stayed in the same hotel the show was held in. Our room, on the 18th floor, actually overlooked central park. Cool huh? Us and Trump ...neighbors. Who woulda thunk it. (Central Park is that green stuff over between those tall buildings there. See it?)

OVERVIEW

There were at most about 80 rooms, less than in previous years of the show. There also seemed to be less show goers than in previous years, either that or they all came at the same time. Saturday afternoon was by far the busiest day of the show and it was a terrible madhouse up on the 9th and 10th floors as people shoved their way into rooms only to be able to be crushed in a crowd of people standing on their toes trying to see something.

Saturday got so bad we just had to get out of there. So we went down to the vender booths and spent too much money on software. Mostly, if not exclusively, SACDs for the Meitner (who wants to carry vinyl home on the plane?)

The other times were more reasonable, especially if you used the methodology of squeezing yourself into a room, waiting for one or, more often, a batch of people to leave, and then squeezing yourself closer to the front. Repeat. Eventually you will get to sit in the sweet spot. Take patience, yes. But while you are making your way there, you can listen and hear the system in a number of different locations, getting a feel for whether it is going to be worth it to stay long enough to get to the promised land - that front and center seat.

The rooms on the two higher floors are small, on the order of 12 feet by 15 feet, with hard yet flexible walls. People would enter through the standard size door into a rather small hallway about 6 feet loon into the room proper. There was a window centered in the wall opposite the door except in the rooms at the end of the floors.

The floors were very solid. As might be expected, all the smaller rooms had bass issues - so the better sounding rooms were often those with smaller speakers (which do not have enough bass to excite the room nodes) and the well controlled larger speakers (the Von Schweikert VR9SE with adjustable bass responses and the Kharma 3.2E and Midi-Exquisite rooms and the Marten Design Duke/Ellington room with their adjustable subwoofers).

Getting from one floor to another was, as usual, a challenge during busy times. There are only 3 elevators that go from the lower floors to the higher floors - and these were often busy doing who knows what for periods of time exceeding most people's patience levels (10 - 15 minutes) and then would only arrive too filled with people to accept even one more.

Alternate techniques we found to work were to use the stairs. Going between the 9th and the 10th is a no brainer, and the 2nd and 3rd as well (the 4th is a special case which for all intents and purposes was only accessible by elevator). Another way to use the stairs is to ride up one of the 3 much less used elevators to the 15th floor, and then walk down the stairs to the 10th and 9th. (The twist here is that not all elevators go to all floors, and some go to floors that they do not admit to be able to go to).

There were a number of larger rooms on the 2nd, 3rd and 4th floors and the rest were smaller rooms on the 9th and 10th.

The rooms on the lower floors were on the order of 25 feet by 25 feet or larger, with temporary walls in most cases.

Nobody had any trouble filling their larger room with sound (except the Piega / Innersound / Meridian room. It was a very large room, but they also had their 5 speaker setup clustered in a small section of the room). Both of the Sound by Singer rooms had two systems in them, but everyone else had just one. Oh, and there were a number of the larger rooms targeted at video - a couple of them just trying to sell flat panels, along with the Kaliedescape room demonstrating their media server.

	THE SHOW


	The show opened at 12 noon on Thursday - and woe be to anyone who tried to get in earlier without a badge... well not woe, you just couldn't get in. However registration was not going to open to noon - then it was, then it wasn't, then... So as we arrived at 11:00 we got to stand in line waiting for our badges for quite awhile. During this time us lowly dealer types got to hobnob with the rich and famous reviewer and manufacturer-types, an amazing number of whom were from our part of the country. But as we temporarily raised our social status, we lost our place in line several times, not only extending the time it was taking us to hear-some-music, but making us the subject of a number of humorous speculations about the (in)ability of us laid-back Boulderites to function in a fast-paced environment like New York City. I guess part of being laid-back is that while we were addressing those 'unwarranted' speculations, we lost our places in line again.

	*The Brinkmann / Marten Design / EMMlabs / HRS / Audience Room*


	Well, yes, we did finally get our badges and made a beeline to the Brinkmann / Marten Design / EMMlabs / HRS / Audience room. We carry the Marten Design speaker line and wanted to see, hear, and touch the new, better looking piano black Duke / Ellington speaker. We also wanted to see and hear the Brinkmann Balance turntable, which we are expecting to arrive here at our shop any day thank you very much. The Duke / Ellington two piece speaker looked very nice, much better than it had in previous incarnations. It has the standard Marten Design vertical grooves in the front and the top and bottom pieces fit together in a very aesthetic (to us) fashion. We are always struggling with the looks nice versus play nice dilemma - always choosing equipment that plays (sounds) nice, but darn don't we wish more things that played nice looked a little bit nicer too. So we were both pleasantly surprised with the quality of the new look. As for the look of the turntable... Well, Neli and everybody else thinks it looks great. Me, I do not think I can judge this, because, you know, I am not sure I have ever seen a turntable I thought did not look great, at least not a commercial one. Maybe I am just easy to please. The fit and finish on the Brinkmann, however, an area where turntables do differ widely, is second to none. There was also a refurbished Thorens turntable in this room. It was a very simple, aesthetic design compared to the refurbished Thorens in the Lamm / Damoka room. We never got to hear this turntable, The sound? Weak, congested, a little bright (it sounded a LOT better in just 24 hours - and was even one of our best of shows). The EMMlabs had not been played before, nothing had a chance to settle in yet, etc. But we did not care. We had a mantra this year: DO NOT LISTEN CAREFULLY TO ANYTHING ON THE FIRST DAY Our plan was to just take lots of pictures and say 'hi' to everybody the first day. On to the next room. This is the most enjoyable part of a show for me - we've only seen a room or two and, looking around, seeing signs for lots and lots of room that we want to hear. Always with that hope. That the next room will sound so excellent that it will blow our previous benchmarks out of the water. And it wouldn't be such a bad thing if it were cheaper than our previous benchmark either. By the end of the first day, we have seen all these 'likely suspects', and is often the case have not been overly impressed. Then the rest of the show consists of the much more difficult task of looking for 'unknowns' (unknown to us anyway) that sound really fantastic, at either an unexpectedly low price point, or unexpectedly small footprint, or maybe just plain fantastic. We also head back to the 'likely suspects' to see if they have improved substantially, and usually because they do sound pretty good and we periodically get tired of hearing systems that are having a bad day and need to rest our ears some.

The Blue Light Audio - Von Schweikert / DarTZeel / *EMMlabs / Jena Labs Room

Looking around for the next room we just 'had to hear next' we saw the Blue Light Audio room.

OK, like most people who visit Audiogon, we have read the posts about the people who liked this system at CES and those who did not. About Mike L. selling his Kharma Exquisites to order these speakers and try this amp with them (for those who do not have time or are otherwise disinclined to haunt the high-end audio bulletin boards, Mike and his Exquisites were one of the most well known 'couples' on the internet - this divorce came as a shock to most of us. Most of us, through extensive therapy, were able to come to grips with this over time).

Let's go hear!
These are big speakers - or to be more accurate, they are deep speakers. And these are such small rooms. One's immediate response is, OK, everybody prepare to be drowned in bass. Didn't happen. The bass was very well trained to treat the room with respect and delicacy.

The darTZeel amps, though, yes, living up to their reputation as looking different than most, were attractive and no worse than the other engineer-cum-graphic-designer designed amps out there, which is most of them.

The sound, did not blow us away, but even at our advanced age, we were able to remember our mantra:

DO NOT LISTEN CAREFULLY TO ANYTHING ON THE FIRST DAY

So off we go in search of our next not-carefully-listening listening session. Yeah right. We must try to maintain discipline!

The AAudio Imports - *Acapella Audio Arts, Einstein, Symposium, Isoclean
Room

We wanted to go see and chat with the Acapella team who came all the way from Germany for the show (anyone who visits our website probably knows by now these are speakers that we like). So off we go in search of the little sign about 2 feet by 2 feet attached to the wall outside each room that lists what they have inside. As it so happens, they show organizers had not yet got the sign up for the room we were looking for, but the Acapella distributor was in the hallway - and not being completely stupid (i.e. it was only the beginning of the show when we still had some wits about us) we figured he was probably standing near the Acapella room.
Well, we did not get to see the Acapella folks this first day, but we did get to see the LaCampanella in a Aubergene-like red color and hear the little Fidelio 2 monitors. Again, like many other rooms, the first day found these sounding thin and scratchy and blotchy. So we took some more pictures and moved on.
Yes, it did sound better later in the show. See the detailed sound report for more soundoidish info.

The Innersound, Esoteric, *Shunyata, *HRS, Red Point, Scully Room

Somehow we ended up at the Innersound room next. The Innersound folks are from Boulder, too, so going in this room was like going home to visit the family (the part of the family that one likes a lot, just to clarify :-). This is a company that is rapidly evolving, covering more and more of the food chain and at a more and more levels of affordability. So visiting the Innersound room is very much a getting the first look at what is new and exciting in InnersoundLand.
In this case, what attracted our attention was something old and different - a large Scully reel-to-reel tape deck with a pair of old preamplifiers for it and a couple of other large cool-looking boxes which I forget what purpose. Never got to hear any tapes here though - as the authorized tape-playing gentlemen were out of the room.
We never did get back to this room - they only accepted a few people into the room at a time (similar to Outlaw, Red Rose, and others), preferring that the visitors to their room avoid the distraction of all the coming and going that normally occurs in a room. The sound the first day was nice and even handed top to bottom of the frequency band - nothing called special attention to itself. All-in-all, it was probably one of the better sounds we heard that first day - which really isn't saying all that much - but then considering that many rooms didn't get a lot better during the successive days, maybe it is.

The Lamm / Damoka - *Lamm, Weiss, CEC, Vitavox, *Acoustic Dreams, Purist Audio Design, Thorens Room

We wanted to go for a change of scenery so down to the larger rooms we went. Ah, spaciousness. Our first stop was the Lamm / Damoka room. Oh, how innocent I made that sound. But truth to be told - not only do we carry Lamm, but they are known for creating at shows little oasis's of good sound in a sea of loud cacophony. So we knew to expect, sound wise, but never what equipment to expect with Damoka traditionally bringing in all sorts of refurbished speakers and turntables from yesteryear.
Both the Lamm / Damoka room and the Vandersteen room brought in very large bouquets of flowers to display between their speakers. There is something about not having to ALWAYS look at an amp or speaker when listening to music which is refreshing.

This year is was a pair of Vitavox corner horns. And an over-the-top Thorens turntable, which is something to behold. Sounded pretty good too, though truth to tell, the digital these days is getting pretty darn good. The better recorded CDs coming out these days, on the best digital like the EMMlabs / Meitner, and in this case the Weiss, can actually sound as good, if different, as your average LP. In this listener's opinion, anyway.
The music in the Lamm rooms always tends towards classical and traditional jazz. The sound had nice soundstaging and imaging - amazing few rooms had these - and almost no compression except in a small range in the bass. Even fewer rooms had uncompressed sound.

Unfortunately, on one side of the Lamm room was the Outlaw room where they were introducing a subwoofer. Yep, you guessed it. Thump-d-thump-thump-thumpity-thump. And cattycorner to the Lamm room was the Kaleidescape room, where gratuitous and horribly overemphasized and out of context subwoofer noises were used to punctuate their software demonstrations. Not nice neighbors to have at a show in the opinion of this Lamm room attendee.

From here we just went door to door, room to room, checking out the sounds.

The Piega, Innersound, Runco, Meridian Room

A surround sound system with a small looking flat screen monitor playing music DVD videos. I thought, cool, I get to hear what surround sound sounds like in a perfectly symmetrical, full-range system. The only surround sound music system we have liked was set up by Globe Audio Marketing at CES 2004 using the Audio Aero Prestige prototype and 5 small Wilson Bensch speakers. The Halcro / Wilson Audio surround sound rooms that we heard at past shows were always so full we never got to hear them anywhere near the sweet spot (at that time we had not yet learned the "wait, people leave, creep forward, repeat" technique).

We have heard surround sound music videos here in our dealership - and often - but the systems were never symmetrical (not to mention the rooms :-). The thing with music videos, and movie sound too, is they can be bright and forward and lack harmonic texture. Thanks THX. So one has to compensate for this in the system somewhere if one is going to listen to this stuff. We usually use a tube preamplifier somewhere in the chain. It also helps to use speakers that have absolutely no tendency towards presenting a forward midrange.

The Piega C40's (and, in this case, the C10's) are such cool looking speakers; design looks great, size looks great, technology looks great. But they sure do get put in a lot of lousy sounding systems at shows. The Innersound amps are great - we have heard them under controlled conditions. The sources seemed fine, usually a small folk or jazz ensemble.

The Sound by Singer Rooms (1, 2, 3)
Peak Consult, VTL, dCS, Finite Elemente, *Shunyata
Peak Consult, VTL, dCS, *Harmonic Resolution Systems (HRS), *Shunyata
JM Lab, BAT, *Shunyata, *Harmonic Resolution Systems (HRS)

We heard these three systems next, in rapid succession. The second, bigger and more expensive than the first, sounded better. The 3rd, most expensive, sounded better than the second. The problem with these rooms (including the other smallest Singer system and the other JMLab / Pathos system down the hall) is that the systems are attempting to produce nice sound, and not music. Frequencies? All frequencies present. Slam? Slam here sir. Dynamics? Compression here sir. No transparency. No suspension of disbelief. No tonal purity or consistency. No nuance of artistic intent. Sonic fireworks sells, but does it provide long lasting satisfaction and enjoyment? Maybe it does for those who do not know that it is possible to get more.
The biggest JMLab system was the best we have heard big JMLabs sound - perhaps because the room was large enough and was not hopelessly compressed (the old Grand Utopias driven by Lamm 3 years ago at HE2002 was also less compressed, but the room size then added a bass bloatedness that seemed to negatively affect the coherency and focus).
Soon after we originally entered the first of these rooms, there was an organized press release, at which 15 or 20 people in suits listened to a couple of other people in suits talk about a new product or two of some sort. Is it just me or does anyone else think that this is a little overkill for a high-end audio product? One likely to sell at most 1000 units, and probably nearer 100? And such formality and pomp. Don't they know this is high-end audio? We are all eccentrics, misfits and nerds here. We find it hard to get dressed - much less look impeccable in a suit. "Speak for yourself", you say? Well, yes, I am :-)

	The Almarro Room


	What can we say? The first day they sounded pretty good, but we did not listen closely. The 3rd day they did not sound good and had moved the speakers from the long wall to the short wall. We noticed that they are now using after-market power cords and speaker cable (when we first saw them at HE2003 in San Francisco, they were using stock power cords and I think lamp cord for speaker cable. Sounded good at that show). Ah, now we hear that the first day they did not use spikes, and in an attempt to improve the sound, no doubt to help with the bass response that everyone else on the 9th and 10th floors were struggling with, they added them, as we see above. There were back off, later in the show, as they did bad things to the midrange. Just always goes to show, doesn't it? Wish they would play their 6C33C-based amp more often. But maybe that is just because we are used to and like the 6C33C sound the Lamm amplifiers have.

	The tmh Audio Room, Linar, Butler, Remiyo and many others Room
	These rooms were OK. Like many rooms, it did a number of things OK and a number of things not OK and did not stand out as being especially good or bad. Given the price of some of these systems though, one could hope for something more. There were many rooms, as we mentioned before, that were unremarkable. The Merlin room seems to get more and more disappointing each show. The Lowther-based Horn speakers always sound really good in a really small frequency range. The Bosendorfer room had two Bosendorfer-built pianos on display which were gorgeous. The Ars Aures, Adagio room sounded pretty good if the speakers were in the $10K range or below (I have no idea what they go for). Oh well, maybe they just had some bad luck. Everyone can have a bad sound day. Not all of us have to have one in front of 1000s of other audiophiles, thank goodness.

The GTT Audio - Kharma, *Lamm, Kuzma, *EMMlabs, dCS, Taoc, Kubala-Sosna Rooms (1, 2)

GTT Audio had two rooms, one with the Kharma Midi Exquisite speakers driven by Lamm amplification and a Kuzma turntable and another room with the Kharma 3.2E speakers driven by a pair of little Kharma amplifiers and dCS digital as source. Both rooms had the Kharma subwoofer, which is a cool-looking beast.

These rooms were probably the rooms to beat at the show - systems that are known to sound good (though driving the little 3.2E speakers with the new, really small-sized, really quite inexpensive Kharma amps is an unknown quantity - and quite a statement of confidence in the amps that GTT and Kharma would risk putting them on the system at a show like this).

We came and listened to these rooms several times. Overall the sound in these rooms were some of the better sounds at the show - though nothing to shout about. We think the Kharma 3.2 speakers are one of the better speakers out there at their price point, and in a small room like this they should excel, but we felt there was a little leanness and tentativeness to the sound in the mids and upper mids, not a lot but some, which one is sorely tempted to attribute to the little amps.

	*The TAD, Pass Labs, EMMlabs, IsoMike Room**


	More will be said about this room in the detailed report, but there is a pattern to these kinds of rooms which is interesting. TaCT often takes a similar approach. There are many others and salespeople often try this as well. The approach is to convince the mind that what the ears are hearing has to be great. They convince the mind by describing the technology they use - how it fits together, how it does amazing things, sometimes but not always how it is better than some chosen members of the competition, and how the designer must have been a genius to do all this and who better than a genius to determine for us what sounds good and what doesn't? It is not as if they are lying - in as much as I understand what they are saying technologically, and I have been a technology geek all my life and so I understand a goodly amount, what they are saying makes perfect sense. It should sound great. But so often it does not. Like we say in the 'Guide, "Use the Ears, Luke!".

	The Epos, Creek, Music Hall, Shanling Room


	This room was at the end of the hall. They had their window open (woo hoo!). It was really hot and really stuffy in the other rooms, and so this was a welcome adventurous move on their part. Yeah, so you hear a little traffic once in a while and, yeah, even a cop or two playing a waltz with their car's siren - but so what? That's life in the big city. They didn't play their very small system very loud. Actually it was kind of quiet when we were there. But music was being made and there was almost a non-conformist type feeling - cheap turntable, cheap speakers, but such nice music... isn't that what we are here for? No, nothing was done 'right' by this system - but a the same time nothing that was done wrong was thrown at the defenseless listener with impunity. So many rooms played their systems so loud, and had so many problems, that the ears can get deeply offended and one wonders if one will need to come back to ask for child-support in 9 months. OK, let's see if that one makes it to the final edition... :-)

	The Red Rose room
	Sorry, no pictures. It was a little intimating in this room for me personally. This was a canned demo by Mark Levinson showing off his company's, Red Rose Music, new product which is a $1500.00 outboard DAC for the personal computer. It takes USB in and outputs single-ended RCA. There wasn't seating room so I stood a couple of feet in from the rear wall. First, Mr. Levinson seems like a really nice guy. But, like many product-oriented and idea-oriented people, perhaps there might be somebody better to give a demo. I personally have this same problem, being too deep into the ideas to see how a presentation might go over with those that are not as familiar with it as I am. The product is presented as if it had the capability to turn MP3 into SACD quality sound. Why say this without clarification? What they really mean to say, if I put on the marketing hat for a second, is that it will make MP3s more enjoyable than SACD. Then a few MP3s are played through the Red Rose system hooked up to the laptop PC in the room This sound is then described as being way better than any MP3s we have ever heard . Problem is, it wasn't. Better I mean. At least not significantly. Lot's of people have hooked up nice systems to their PCs these days. I recently had a pair of old Sonus Faber Extremas driven by an Edge NL10 through a Lexicon MC-1 by the output of the DAC in my stock DELL PC. The sound I got was certainly on par with the Red Rose demo, better in some ways, worse in others. Yes, I lust after a real DAC for my PC like everybody else in this boat, but this demo wasn't helping me get there. OK, I was too shy to ask the obvious questions, but luckily others were not! The questions were polite but very succinct and to the point: Question: "Sounds nice but can we hear a before and after, the sound with the new Red Rose DAC and also the sound without the DAC so we can hear what it is doing?" No, is the answer, it will be best for you to do this comparison at home, shows being a difficult place for demoing such differences, and so on. Question: "How can 128K MP3 be as good or better than SACD, there is information that is just not present in the MP3?". "The important thing is... do you like the sound, is it enjoyable?" is the answer. Well, I enjoy my Bose car sound system too, but it is not what I would call high-fidelity. I know it is not polite to leave in the middle of one of these canned demos, and I felt bad about leaving then, but since I was standing by the door and this demo was not doing them any good at all, I decided to continue on my last-day quick tour. There were many rooms still to visit and sometimes one's responsibilities come first. Hope this was not too harsh and helps the Red Rose folks position their DAC a little better vis-à-vis those of us who have PCs who really do need a DAC like this.

	The Stern Auditorium, Carnegie Hall Baltimore Symphony Orchestra


	Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Yuri Temirkanov, Music Director and Conductor Gidon Kremer, Violin GIYA KANCHELI Lonesome (NY Premiere) SHOSTAKOVICH Violin Concerto No. 1 in A Minor, Op. 99 DEBUSSY La Mer RAVEL La Valse Talking about rooms that had darn good sound. We went to hear this concert on Friday night during the show. It had been awhile since either of us had got a chance to hear an orchestra live, and never in a hall this acoustically perfect. The hall seats about 2000 people. We are not experts on these pieces of music but it was performed flawlessly as far as I could tell. Certainly was enjoyable and spellbinding. Now, I thought I'd do audiophile-style analysis of the sound of the real thing in a optimal setting (we were in about the 17th row though our seats were off to the side) The dynamic range was very large, from whisper quiet melodies to crescendos that were over 100dB in my estimation. This type of range seems to be mostly limited to classical music and is one of the many challenges presented to hi-fi systems: can your system play as beautifully at one extreme as the other? One could hear the differences between each and every of the 10 stand-up basses. They are all moving slightly differently and applying different pressures during a particular musical phrase. They were too close together for me to assign what I was hearing to a specific bass. I could not hear the differences between each and every of the 30 violins. The richness and texture of the violin played by the soloist was strikingly rich. It was like each string has it own unique texture and so there were sometimes many volumes and textures happening simultaneously. Also each direction of the bow as it moved across the strings changed the sound of the texture (by texture I am referring to the many short-lived tiny little repetitive scrapping / plucking noises that one can hear when a bow is drawn across a string). Apparently violin virtuosos are able to intentionally control and manipulate these more subtle aspects of the sound to communicate a deeper level of emotion and message. There was a soundstage and good imaging. Not sure why some people think imaging is an artifact of the reproduction chain, but even in my naiveté with regards to some of the weird and special instruments that were played during this concert, I could locate where they were playing the instrument not by sight but by where the sound was coming from. An interesting twist to all this is that the bodies of the musicians and their sheet music stands block some large percentage of the music. Listening to the solo violinist, he would move around and sometimes I would hear the violin directly and sometimes his violin would be behind the music stand and then I would hear it reflected off both the front wall and the side wall nearest me. I imagine a part of the design of the hall keeps these two sounds from being too disjoint. The sound was amazingly warm and harmonically rich. I thought at the time that many people, hearing this sound and not knowing the source, would say it is much warmer that the 'real thing'. The only negative anomaly occurred during the loud crescendos, and for a split second it was hard for me to differentiate between the various sounds being made - sounding as if the massed violins were crowding out the rest of the instruments and playing just a few notes whereas immediately preceding and following these moments I could hear many different notes. This effect is similar to congestion but not quite, and more similar to over-loading a room with a resonance frequency. My only explanation of this effect is to blame our seating location. Secondary explanations would be that the hall itself was not able to dampen these frequencies, or that the shape of my ear is defective. Enjoy!

	*The Eggleston Works, Rogue, EMMlabs, Nordost Room*


	This is another room that had darn good sound. Yeah, it has a source to die for. But given that, these small floor-standing $5500.00 speakers did really well, in all parts of the frequency spectrum that they could reasonably be expected to handle.