Aside from a lack of high-end harshness, strong dynamics and a solid soundstage, what tonal qualities did the speakers have?
I love Feist, particularly "The Reminder", but given its intentionally low-fi sound, it's a strange choice for testing speakers. But I can see how "Limit" would be a good test for soundstage and harshness. Outside of that, how did the midrange sound compared to the rest of the frequencies?
Given the fallibility of acoustic memory, I'd hate to attempt a direct comparison from memory alone, but I'd say that with their unique tweeter implementation, the had a bit more high-frequency emphasis than my JBLs and some other speakers I've tested. Where many speakers I toe in just off the shoulder, these I left almost perpendicular to the front wall, which, with the angled baffle, amount to only slight toe-in. This brought a little more balance between the highs/high-mids and low-mids, but if I'm using common audiophile objectives, I'll call these more forward than warm in the midrange.
Keep in mind, this commentary is based on ear-alone, a notoriously weak instrument, and the listening window measurements I did (with my mid-end mic and gear) matched the manufacturer's frequency graph:
XTZ Cinema Series - Compact hifi cinema experience.
...flat and extended. Still, the ears do have their own opinions, don't they?
As for Feist's
The Reminder, I wouldn't call it a low-fi recording at all. It's certainly not sterile, which I think is what many expect hi-fi to be: clean and precise instruments perfectly placed in the mix and sweetened in all the right ways. Watch "Look at what the light did now" and you'll get a lot of insight into the recording process. The Reminder was recorded with uncommon techniques, outside a studio, but that doesn't make the recording itself lo-fi with a few exceptions (the portable recording at the end of "My Moon My Man" which segues into "The Park"). Instead, what you have are clean dynamic recordings that capture more than a single instrument. It's busy, and it's live, but it's not low-fi.
There's a reason why everyone plays Diana Krall when demoing systems at the audio shows: her recordings sound great on everything, including small cube/midbass systems. With "The Reminder", a system needs to be suitably high-quality to resolve the subtle details capture in the recording: the sense of spaciousness, the natural claps and footfalls, the soft-to-loud dynamics that, for the most part, have avoided limiters and compressors. Nothing against Diana Krall, who I love and listen to regularly, but "The Girl in the Other Room" is just a different beast, with no more or less fidelity.
