I've had the original SuperZeros (before they went from MFD to molded housings) for years, and have always considered them my reference speakers for neutral presentation and magical imaging, albeit without huevos if you don't add a subwoofer.
Anyway, my wife and I have spent the past few weekends trolling high end audio stores listening to other brands of bookshelf speakers that would be suitable for our second system.
Preamble - Skip to the review if you're faint of heart
It's been rather like the story of Goldielocks: This one's too warm... This one has muddy midrange... This one's too sibilant. Nope, muddy mids again... Muddy mids... How many muddy mid speakers are there anyway??
And what's with all the bookshelf speakers trying to sound bigger by farting out sloppy bass through distended ports????
Oops, I got off track. Hold on, let's wait for my meds to kick in.. OK, I'm better now. Really I am.
Anyway, today we drove to the nearest authorized NHT dealer to see exactly what the company had replaced our favorite budget speaker with. Was it an improvement, or just another example of corporate cheapening?
The Review
The SB-1's presented themselves very well indeed. Piano, trumpet, and symbals never sounded better, but of course male vocals and drums needed the assistance of a subwoofer to sound proper. These tiny speakers only go down to 65Hz, but they do it honestly without coloration or boominess that seems to dominate the market.
The real shocker was when we brought them home and connected them next to our SuperZeros in an A/B arrangement we could switch back and forth between.
They absolutely blew away our SuperZeros in the high frequency range. The predjudice is usually that metal dome tweeters can be more crisp or tinny compared to soft dome tweeters, but in this case the opposite was true. While the SB-1's metal tweeters were very well controlled, the SuperZero's soft dome tweeters sounded slightly raspy, giving away imaging on symbols with a point source overtone that was slightly above what it should have been.
We now have a new reference mini-monitor speaker, and look forward to designing a straightforward subwoofer to fill in the non-directional low frequency bottom octaves that it gracefully declines to strain to produce.
SB-2, SB-3
While we were at the store, we had listened to the SB-2's and the SB-3's, and surprisingly we preferred the SB-1s for their transparency. While the SB-2's are supposed to be an upgrade with lower bass extension, we found the midrange to be just a little muted and dirty. The SB-3's (which had just squeaked into the Stereophile recommended component list) not only didn't deliver in sounding like full speakers, but they sounded disappointingly like the hundreds of other bookshelf speakers trying to hard to sound big. The penalty, in case you haven't guessed it, was in lack of midrange clarity and for some reason the trebble sounded slightly "hyped."
