I picked up a pair of these in January for not much money (under $200). I've found precious little information on them, which tells me they were a sales flop. It does seem like the people who did buy Signet speakers loved them, though, and Stereophile had
a positive review of the 2-way SL-280's. Then again, 99% of Stereophile reviews are positive, so here's your salt.
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I have a few pictures on my phone of the inside, but until I can post those, here's
a pair for sale on Reverb to show for reference.
I like the build quality of the cabinet, crossover, and drivers. You can tell these weren't thrown together cheaply. Interestingly, they are indeed 4-way speakers, even though they look like may of the contemporary 3-way dual 8's out there. As the pictures I will post show, the lower woofer is isolated in the bottom half of the enclosure with a tuned port, and the upper woofer is in its own sealed space in the upper half. The upper woofer seems to be bandpassed and not low-passed. I wish I knew what the crossover points were.
These actually replaced my Klipsch RP-280F's in the living room. Those got on my nerves with the narrow sweet spot. The size of the room prevented us from sitting 10+ feet away (more like 7 at best), and if I wasn't on the sofa alone and couldn't sit in the middle, there was always too much presence from one speaker and it ruined my immersion. No one else noticed this of course, but I could put in some White Van Specials and they wouldn't know the difference either. Such is my curse. I wonder if it's possible to start measuring "blend distance" in speaker reviews... the distance where you begin to get a fully cohesive image from all drivers?
Sound-wise I like the tonality (the midrange driver really does help), and the dispersion is much better than the Klipsch's... but those had much stronger bass than the Signet's since the woofers were in tandem. Since I only invested a pittance in these, I may fool around and wire the upper woofer parallel with the lower one. But without knowing the crossover points I worry about a big midrange dip. I'll probably rewire one speaker and then run tones on the modded and unmodded and compare spectrums.
As far as looks, well... ugh. I'm not a fan of the "black oak" veneer on any speaker. Might do some press-on veneer to make them look better.