Hello All,
I attended the South Florida head-fi meet this past weekend, by the way I highly recommend checking out the pre and post forums, there are some nice pictures:
http://www4.head-fi.org/forums/showt...0&goto=newpost
http://www4.head-fi.org/forums/showt...6&goto=newpost
In Orlando and Tampa-St.Petersburg I managed to go to 3 Audio stores. Heard the Paradigm Studio 20's in Absolute Sound, and a bit of the mini monitors; Focal JMlab Chorus and Mini Utopias in Sounds Terrific; and Sonus Faber Concertino and Concerto in one Sound Advice store.
The Studio 20's (Absolute Sound) were amazingly comfortable to listen to, overall they are always a little warm, but very refined for me, very smooth highs. I heard to the mini monitors again and briefly, but not side by side with the Titans, the Titans were in another room and not connected. However, the minis were in a very large room, and about 2 feet from the rear wall, they filled that large space with very nice bass. They sounded great, and from my own experience with my Titans I think the Titans wouldn't have filled that room with bass that well. But again I couldn't compare them side by side this time, however this other exposure make me preserve my belief that the Minis have stronger bass than the Titans.
Sounds terrific unfortunately didn't have any Quad speakers to audition, which were my main interest (12L's) beside listening to some integrated amps. Anyway, they had Focal JMLab bookshelf speakers. I believe I listened to one of Chorus bookshelves, but don't remember exactly the model #. They sounded great connected to a Cambridge Audio A500 amp and a Classe CD player, even though the room was way less than ideal (a small cube).
They also had some much more expensive JMLab Micro Utopias connected to Musical Fidelity source and amp, and using Nordost speaker cables, quite some gorgeous gear all together, but oddly enough the room was also just a small cube, and on top of everything, there was a Rel subwoofer in the corner connected to that system. I didn't like the bass at all, too much, putting that aside the speakers sounded nice but there was a high freq. echo that I know doesn't exist in the tracks I played through them (heard those same tracks also in the top headphone setups of the Florida Headfi meet, so I can tell). So the room was not at all up to demoing such speakers I think.
The small Concertinos (Sound Advice) sounded nice but collapsed quickly in the bass at high volumes. The store assistant was driving the volume knob, I was listening to them with track 1 of "Thirteenth Step" (A perfect circle). When the bass kicked in there was an ugly loud pop as if the speakers had blown. They hadn't, as soon as he turned down the volume everything sounded normal again, but a tiny sound for the room. I think they understandably can't handle bass at too high volumes. This was a very large room, my listening position was probably 12+ feet away from the speakers, and there were several feet between me and the rear wall. Also the room was very wide, probably 30 feet, and it was basically empty except shelves on the walls with gear, and the two framed listening chairs at the sweet spot. we probably were asking too much volume out of the Concertinos for such room size. The Concertos sounded great in a similar room, so I would say if someone likes the sound of the Sonus Fabers better than any other speakers, then I would suggest choose between the Concertinos or Concertos depending on your room size.
Well that goes for my exposure to speakers this weekend.
Cheers,
Raul
, to enlarge and refine my mental database of speaker sounds and signatures). Will try to compare Titans and Mini's again if I have a chance. But now they are at their 3rd version right? Probably there are slight differences compared to 2 years ago.
