Infinity Classia C336 Floorstanding Speaker Review

[admin]

For those of you that have read the $1500 - $2000 Floorstanding Speaker Shootout article, you've already heard of the Infinity Classia C336s. They do look great and they have very good bass extension. The bass punch was a bit weak and the high end a tad fatiguing. However, out of all the speakers I've reviewed at this price point, the C336s are the most likely to go on sale. When they do, you're going to want to take a second look at them. In a second setup or a movie/family room, the Classias are going to both look and sound great.
http://www.audioholics.com/reviews/speakers/floorstanding/infinity-classia-c336/image_thumb

Discuss "Infinity Classia C336 Floorstanding Speaker Review" here. Read the article (http://www.audioholics.com/reviews/speakers/floorstanding/infinity-classia-c336).

[chest_burster]

I don't know how useful it is to call these $1,800 speakers. They're already widely available at under $1,000 and once the refurbs start flowing from the Harman mothership - it's on.

I heard these the other day and they sound a lot like my Betas which IMHO do more things right than they have any right to for their price. Infinity's engineers are among the best in the world, and that's sort of my problem with this (and other) reviews here: listening preferences aside, if given a choice between a small, internet-direct company with limited R&D or the deep pockets of Harman - I'm going with the design money.

In the case of these speakers, the drivers are remarkable. I've seen other reviews that comment on their smoothness, transparency, and value at their list price (which, again, unlike ID, is totally meaningless). I really do have to wonder if this isn't a simple case of rooting for the underdogs in the industry. A 2 for value, despite near flat frequency response, great bass extension (without the artificial impact some seem to favor), excellent imaging, and nice cabinetry? What exactly is wrong with this calculus? It sounds, as is the case with the Betas in my room, that they do almost everything right.

If you had entered this review thinking of these as sub-$500/pr floorstanding speakers (which is how much I'll pay for mine next year or the year after), what would you say? My only ID experience was with Aperion and I was not overwhelmed. The "cut out the middleman" lie is really only a means of price control. The build quality and parts/pieces are no better than Infinity, and the R&D is nowhere near as extensive.

Not trying to be mean, but this is a cheesy, half-assed review.

[Harrison476]

I don't know how useful it is to call these $1,800 speakers.

Not trying to be mean, but this is a cheesy, half-assed review.


I’m going to have to disagree with you on that statement. In my opinion it was a great article and even better way of learning more about how the speakers sound. This is very important to me since now days in my location it impossible to listen to all the different speakers lines.
More along the lines of reviews several links were given:
• DALI LEKTOR 8
• Infinity Classia C336
• Krix Phoenix –
• Salk Sound SongTower QWT –
I believe, not all have received full reviews at this time.

I read this article several times. This shootout is just one more way to gain more information about equipment and I think it’s especially good when its speakers.

[kaiser_soze]

If I understand correctly, this thread is specific to the review that Tom Landry wrote for the Infinity Classia C336. I read that review, and there were several things that bugged me. He gave it a performance rating of 3/5 and a value rating of 2/5. At the time he wrote the review, the C336 was selling for $900 each, and you can't buy much of a loudspeaker these days for much less than that. Moreover, if you study the pictures that he took of the drivers and if you know much at all about drivers and about Infinity's technology, its difficult not to conclude that the drivers alone justify nearly that price. And now that they have come down in price to about $600 each, I would have to say that the drivers almost certainly justify that price by themselves. This cabinet is not half bad either. All considered, the fact that Tom gave these speakers a value rating less than 50% is pretty strong evidence that his review was not impartial.

He seems to have been put off by the fact that the frames of the drivers were stamped instead of cast, and by the use of electrolytic capacitors. The only noteworthy drawback of electrolytic capacitors is that they tend to have greater internal resistance than most other types, but it is wrong to automatically assume that there will be sonic degradation as a consequence, just as it is wrong to assume that a stamped basket is inherently inferior to a cast basket. This is typical of the sort of opinions that many audiophiles develop, and they do this because they are not trained as engineers and do not know any better. So they just parrot whatever they have heard elsewhere, adding a little personal spin whenever they are in the mood to do that. Tom also made some peculiar inferences with regards to the internal bracing he found inside the cabinet. That bracing is certainly their for structural reasons, and it would be ludicrous to think otherwise. Yet, he concluded, for reasons not the least bit apparent, that Infinity had stuck extra wood inside the cabinet to reduce the volume. This is so ludicrous that it just boggles my mind that he would conclude this. I repeat: it boggles my mind. No one who has any useful comprehension of how things in general are made could look in there and see the bracing and reinforcement and come away with the notion that it was put there for something other than bracing and reinforcement. It boggles my mind, and tends to make me skeptical of everything else he said.

I listened to the Classia C336 when it first came out and it was apparent to me within the first couple of seconds that it is excessively bright, i.e., that that the highest frequencies are exaggerated. In fact, I mentioned this somewhere on the web, possibly on this site. This is the only notable drawback to these speakers, at least as long as you aren't comparing them to speakers that cost several times as much, and as long as you don't have issues with the aesthetics, which seem rather nice to me for speakers in this price range. But anyone with a basic understanding of filters and crossover design can easily compensate for that. All that is likely needed is a couple of simple resistors, one placed in series with the tweeter to drop the voltage across the tweeter and another placed in parallel with that combination of tweeter and resister to prevent the crossover point from shifting to higher frequency. The effort required to do this will be trivial for anyone who understands this much. The end result should be an excellent speaker comparable to other speakers selling for several times as much money, and easily worth the going rate of $1200 for the pair.