Well here we go. I'm going to do my best here to give everyone my opinions about these speakers, hopefully without saying all the same stuff as boboi.
First I'll give you the situation that i'm doing my listening. A month or so ago I decided to sell my logitech Z-5500 speakers i'd had in the office for about a year. They were good for gaming but I was working from home half the week, and they weren't cutting it for music at all. So I got rid of them and scored an older onkyo stereo receiver on ebay for like 40 bucks. It's a TX-800, I've got no manual and have no idea what the specs are other than it can push the RC-10's cleanly to a very good volume, esp sitting 4ish feet from them in the ~12x12 office.
They're sitting on the omnimount stands that vann's sent with the speakers for free. They're decent stands, but I couldn't for the life of me get the wire through the pedestal, my monoprice 14ga wire is pretty limp and after a while I said screw it.
So the audio is WMA lossless coming out of my desktop which holds an Abit IP35 pro motherboard. The intregrated sound is a realtek 886 I think, can't remember. All I know is that its a better quality solution than my toshiba laptop's sound. It's also running win7 64bit home premium.
Now with that out of the way I'll look at build quality and whatnot. Pulling them out of the pristine energy box that was inside a huge vann's box, I saw the solid vann's packing job kept external damage from occurring during shipping. Getting speakers out and unwrapped I immediately saw the color of the cherry is somewhat darker than I expected. If they were a couple shade darker they could have probably called them rosenut, assuming they didn't already have rosenut
They are finished semigloss IMO, not high gloss like my EMP ti's in the living room which are def rosenut. The veneer is very nice, a subtle grain, nothing too crazy. It provides a great contrast to the face of the speaker, the brushed aluminum surrounding the tweeter and mid really adds to the look. I really like the looks with the grills off, I'm probably going to put the grills away permanently. Only downside I would have changed is the nubs the grills attach to aren't flush mounted, they stick out 1/4 inch or so. Overall great looking speaker, probably about on par with my EMP's in the living room in terms of looks.
On to the music listening!
I'm not a classical guy as much as boboi, but I am a pretty big dave matthews band fan. I think their music is a good test for speakers because of the variety of instruments and quality of some of their recordings.
I decided to change it up some and started with Warehouse 8: vol 5, track 1 is Rupunzel. Being a live track I was really listening for solid imaging and, being live, the decay of notes. Immediately wow, I've got them WAY too close to the wall, they're about 4inches off the wall. The low end was pretty boomy and inaccurate, but I have to deal with it, the wife won't let me move the desk any further out. So I dropped the 31hz 2 notches and 62hz 1 notch in WMP and that really cleaned them up. You might think that's cheating, but I'm doing what I can to compensate for my lack of ideal situation.
For those of you that don't know the song or the band very well, DMB, from my experience, almost always has the same setup. from left to right, violin, Dave in the center in front of the drums, then bass, then trumpet, then on the far right, the sax. Closing my eyes let me experience the imaging, dave right in the center where he belongs, violin just to the left, trumpet and sax distinctly to the right. I will say they needed just a touch of toe in sitting this close to them to get the imaging to line up well.
This song has some abrupt stop/starts esp at the beginning that allowed me to hear the decay very well and the RC-10's did very well. They were very accurate and remembering listening to some cambridge bookshelves recently that didn't handle it as well, I was happy.
I then moved to their latest studio album, Big whiskey. I sampled alligator pie and then seven right after that. Big change, the live album's aren't nearly as well recorded and mastered, which I expected and these speakers definitely brought to light. alligator pie is fairly crazy at the beginning and I was look for clarity, and it was there. I could still pick out the instruments with none of them or frequency being particularly overpowering.
Seven is very much different with more trumpet and a much slower pace. I noticed the high's are pretty smooth and detailed, but on this song, the cymbal was just a touch harsh IMO. I don't know, maybe I'm just not used to hearing them, I don't get to sit down for music listening in the living room as much as I'd like.
I moved to coldplay's viva la vida, track 6 which is Yes for my final song today. The wife had come in at this point and she wanted to continue listening to this cd after I had finished. This song was has some good mixes of electric, acoustic, and strings, along with some other stuff I didn't recognize
Everything was precise and detailed and sounded great. Maybe not the best song in terms of dynamics and whatnot, but one I've listened to alot. I'm in love with the accuracy, they're such a HUGE step up over the logitech's, as they should be.
In conclusion, these things look as good as they sound, and at 300 bucks for not HUGE bookshelves that don't need run with a sub for music. I'm very happy with the purchase so far!
