What other systems did you consider/hear before going with the EMP line. Now that you have them, what do you think they compare with? I haven't heard them and probably won't get a chance to before I buy them. Just trying to get an idea of the warmth or brightness of the sound.
The other thing that has me thinking is how the range on these speakers are with all 4" speakers. I am sure they are all great quality 4" speakers but in the end the 4" will not produce the lows of a 5.25" or 6.5" speaker. Would you mind giving a more thorough review of the performance of the speakers high, mids and lows (which I assume the sub has to go come up a bit for).
thanks
Before I purchased mine, I had been looking for awhile. I listened to every speaker I could find in the big box stores around my area. Polk (Monitors, TSI, RTI), Infinity (forget which line), Klipsch (quintets along with another line). I went to a couple of higher end shops in my area but almost all of their equipment was set up at Homearama so it was hard to find equipment to listen to. I tried to listen to 5.1 set-ups in 1500-2000 price range that I could find near me. My budget was originally $3000 but buying an engagement ring and then saving for a wedding has a tendency to cut into ones budget…..which is another reason why EMP was a welcome option.
I have no idea what other brand I would really compare the 551’s to. In my opinion the EMP’s are a neutral speaker and slightly unforgiving to flaws in the source material. I don’t consider myself an absolute audioholic by any means. I used to play clarinet and was also percussionist back in the day so I’ve done, and still do, more than my fair share of drum tuning so I like to think that I’m not completely deaf. There was no other line of speaker in my budget that I listened to that made me feel that the extra money was going to get me much more, if anything at all. From what I listened and comparing the notes that I took, I would have had to pay at least $1000 more to notice a difference. With that said, if I were to pay full price for the EMP’s I would be very discriminating because in that price range there is a lot of competition.
If there is one knock on these it’s that I have the crossover set fairly high (100Hz) but since I’m using them with a sub it’s a non-issue for me. Localization hasn’t been an issue. When using the audio test that is included on my THX DVD’s, there is a little that was lost while crossing over. I’m not sure if that’s my fault or a fault of the systems but it wasn’t enough to make me feel that a larger driver would have done the trick. The mid-mids to the upper ends are great. It’s just that one little area but it’s something that I would have never noticed and still haven’t noticed in movies or in music. Since I bought them I have been going through different parts of my CD collection. I just got through my classical cd’s and the speakers performed great. Shostakovich's String Quartets and Rachmaninov’s Vocalise (on violin, not the vocal) were the standouts. The only thing that I felt could have been better were some French horn ruffs to the upper register in Shostakovich’s 8th but that seems like it would be a hard instrument to reproduce anyway. I just recently started in on my fusion collection and so far so good. For rock I listened to Incubus’s S.C.I.E.N.C.E. album. It handled Summer Romance (Anti-Gravity Love Song) just fine. Since that is one of my more bass hungry CD’s I thought that would be a good indicator. For movies, they do what they are supposed to do. Admittedly, I’m not as picky for movies. Dialogue comes across a lot better than I originally though giving the size of the center channel.
I’ve tried to keep this as short while giving a broad spectrum of what I've noticed without being too subjective which was harder than I though. Kudos to those of you who can write good reviews. I’m completely satisfied with the EMP’s. As previously stated, I haven’t listened to the other speakers mentioned in this thread but it would be hard to imagine one of them being heads and tails above what the EMP’s are. For me it was a delicate balance of cost, performance, and time. The EMP’s fit my equation beautifully. As Seth=L said, patience is rewarding. There will always be a better deal in the future; it’s just a question of if you want to wait for it. Hope this helped at least a little bit. If you have any other questions let me know.
