The speaker quest begins...
Well, I went to my local audio shop today and listened to some B&W's. It was such an awesome experience and there are so many things going through my head right now that it's hard to put them all to words, but here are the highlights.
1) I wasn't really very impressed with bookshelf speakers, or at least the ones that I heard. I listened to some of the B&W 600 series and 700 series bookshelves and some models from klipsh, and they didn't seem to strike me nearly as well as the floorstanding models did. The bookshelves were on stands too.
2) The B&W 600 series floorstander that I heard was truely a work of art and pretty much surpassed anything else I had ever heard before, including headphones. They say that it takes upwards of 3k to beat the sound of a 300 dollar headphone, but man are they wrong. the B&W at 1k demolished my expectations for sound quality in this price range. The speaker itself impressed me so much that I feel that anyone who spends more than 1k on a headphone setup really needs to rethink their purchase IMO.
3) Sure, there was a listening sweet spot, but I feel like audiophiles exaggerate the necessity of being at the sweet spot at all times. All of the systems sounded darn good no matter where I was in the room; obviously they sounded their best at the sweet spot, but it definitely wouldn't kill me if I had to go close the blinds or change while the music was still playing.
4)The 700 series was even more impressive, but at 3k, they definitely didn't sound 3x better than the 600 floorstanders. If money was no object, obviously I would pick the 700 series, but I feel like I would be happy with the 600's as a reference for quite some time.
5) Speakers are a LOT less dependent on source, and I feel like this session confirmed my thoughts on the imod as a headphone/speaker source. I compared the redwineaudio imod to a 5k mcintosh cd player on the 700 series floor standers and it was almost scary how similar the two were tonally. I feel like the redwineaudio Imod really does accomplish what it's set out to do; to remove some of the handicaps that the ipod has. There was absolutely no roll off on the ipod that I could hear. However, the cd player absolutely killed the imod in inner detail and richness, traits that I feel headphone listeners need the most. For speaker listening, I totally recommend the I-mod as a great entry into audio, but for headphones, I feel like something more around the 500-600 dollar range would be a worthwhile investment.
Overall the first leap on my journey has been a success. This summer I plan to travel around and check out a whole bunch of audio shops in hopes to find my perfect speaker, but I have a feeling that the B&W 600 series floorstanders will be hard to beat at this price point.
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