BrianBeck
Member
My first post on this forum, and I may get banished to ML hell for it, but here goes:
I have been casually looking about for speakers recently. I have had Quad ESL-63 for decades and have enjoyed them very much, but wanted something better in the (you guessed it) bass and dynamics department.
While on a trip to my hometown, Indianapolis, I spent a pleasant afternoon at Audio Solutions, a ML dealer. The CLX ART speakers were featured in their high-end room, driven by huge Classe monoblocks (M300, M600? - didn't write it down). A Berkeley DAC played digital files from a music server. A stack of subwoofers played behind and outside of the CLXs, but again I didn't think to document them. I sat down and spent some quality time listening to music selections that I know well.
The sound? In a word: Great! Detailed, civilized, good imaging, tight, focused, relatively uncolored.
But...slightly etched in the upper ranges. Not grainy or zippy, just that details were outlined. This magnified apparent detail. I have heard this before in lesser MLs. This effect is certainly not unpleasant. Truly great hi-fi, but, alas, this is not the way live acoustic music really sounds to my ears. It is akin to processing a high-resolution digital photo from a professional camera with a great lens in Photoshop, giving it slight edge enhancement. The result is snappy, but the slightly gentler original is closer to what's real. There were two other fellows at the audio shop that day. We traded times in the sweet spot. They thought the sound we were listening to was the best. I didn't argue. It was close to the best. Cables, amps, synergy? Could the CLXs have performed even better with other equipment? Heck, I dunno.
While on another trip a few days later, this time to San Diego, I stumbled into an opportunity to pick up a rare pair of Apogee Divas in as mint condition as they come. After settling on a very decent price, I bought them, figuring they'd be fun to play with and to see if my memory of how great Apogees could sound from decades ago would be validated today. This pair is later vintage, set up with the DAX electronic crossover. I figured if I didn't like them, I could flip them and move on. But - I ain't movin' anywhere.
How do they sound? Well, beyond anything I have heard in most ways, and I'm still experimenting with amps, cables and placement. I won't repeat all the Apogee Diva reviews that you can read on-line, but suffice it to say that I hear naturally vivid tone colors with smoothness unlike anything I've heard before.
Now to compare these Divas with the CLXs I'd heard a couple of weeks earlier: The Apogees use a true ribbon tweeter above 12kHz, about 6' tall and only 0.2" wide. It generates overtones that are about as pure and sweet as the real thing. No etch, no zip or texture, except what's supposed to be there (with great recordings, of course). Hi-Fi guys might say that the highs are subdued. I say not. When you remove all the little peaks, distortions and other nonsense that plagues most tweeters, you're left with the gentle air of the real thing. That is the first, and to me the most obvious, difference between the Divas and the CLXs, while noting that the highs of the MLs are really very good overall. Secondly, the soundstage of the CLXs is tightly focused between the speakers with pretty good depth, but I didn't hear much of an expansive sound stage. It's the old "window effect" that my Quads also have. The Divas billow forth music in a holographic way. It's really spectacular, but it not as tightly focused in the middle (yet, in my home) as what I heard with the CLXs. Someone once described the Divas as presenting music "here" while the other contenders presented music "there". Which is more "absolute" is surely open for debate. The lows, mids and highs of the CLX were all there (with subwoofer assist), but not as seamless as with the Divas. The Divas don't lend one to think in terms of "lows, mids and highs", any more than one would think of these ranges when listening to a live acoustic instrument. Nothing calls attention to itself in the Diva's spectrum. Yet well-recorded instruments do call attention to themselves in a most realistic, even breathtaking, way. I look forward to settling in on the right amps and other components to give the Divas all they need.
I say all this to reinforce the advice given earlier in this thread by a couple of folks to consider Magnepans, Soundlabs or Apogees before jumping into a pair of $25K CLXs. For this kind of money, one could buy a new pair of big Apogees from one of the Graz refurbishment companies or you could take the effort to find a used pair and do a refurbishment with the same people.
YMMV...
Brian
I have been casually looking about for speakers recently. I have had Quad ESL-63 for decades and have enjoyed them very much, but wanted something better in the (you guessed it) bass and dynamics department.
While on a trip to my hometown, Indianapolis, I spent a pleasant afternoon at Audio Solutions, a ML dealer. The CLX ART speakers were featured in their high-end room, driven by huge Classe monoblocks (M300, M600? - didn't write it down). A Berkeley DAC played digital files from a music server. A stack of subwoofers played behind and outside of the CLXs, but again I didn't think to document them. I sat down and spent some quality time listening to music selections that I know well.
The sound? In a word: Great! Detailed, civilized, good imaging, tight, focused, relatively uncolored.
But...slightly etched in the upper ranges. Not grainy or zippy, just that details were outlined. This magnified apparent detail. I have heard this before in lesser MLs. This effect is certainly not unpleasant. Truly great hi-fi, but, alas, this is not the way live acoustic music really sounds to my ears. It is akin to processing a high-resolution digital photo from a professional camera with a great lens in Photoshop, giving it slight edge enhancement. The result is snappy, but the slightly gentler original is closer to what's real. There were two other fellows at the audio shop that day. We traded times in the sweet spot. They thought the sound we were listening to was the best. I didn't argue. It was close to the best. Cables, amps, synergy? Could the CLXs have performed even better with other equipment? Heck, I dunno.
While on another trip a few days later, this time to San Diego, I stumbled into an opportunity to pick up a rare pair of Apogee Divas in as mint condition as they come. After settling on a very decent price, I bought them, figuring they'd be fun to play with and to see if my memory of how great Apogees could sound from decades ago would be validated today. This pair is later vintage, set up with the DAX electronic crossover. I figured if I didn't like them, I could flip them and move on. But - I ain't movin' anywhere.
How do they sound? Well, beyond anything I have heard in most ways, and I'm still experimenting with amps, cables and placement. I won't repeat all the Apogee Diva reviews that you can read on-line, but suffice it to say that I hear naturally vivid tone colors with smoothness unlike anything I've heard before.
Now to compare these Divas with the CLXs I'd heard a couple of weeks earlier: The Apogees use a true ribbon tweeter above 12kHz, about 6' tall and only 0.2" wide. It generates overtones that are about as pure and sweet as the real thing. No etch, no zip or texture, except what's supposed to be there (with great recordings, of course). Hi-Fi guys might say that the highs are subdued. I say not. When you remove all the little peaks, distortions and other nonsense that plagues most tweeters, you're left with the gentle air of the real thing. That is the first, and to me the most obvious, difference between the Divas and the CLXs, while noting that the highs of the MLs are really very good overall. Secondly, the soundstage of the CLXs is tightly focused between the speakers with pretty good depth, but I didn't hear much of an expansive sound stage. It's the old "window effect" that my Quads also have. The Divas billow forth music in a holographic way. It's really spectacular, but it not as tightly focused in the middle (yet, in my home) as what I heard with the CLXs. Someone once described the Divas as presenting music "here" while the other contenders presented music "there". Which is more "absolute" is surely open for debate. The lows, mids and highs of the CLX were all there (with subwoofer assist), but not as seamless as with the Divas. The Divas don't lend one to think in terms of "lows, mids and highs", any more than one would think of these ranges when listening to a live acoustic instrument. Nothing calls attention to itself in the Diva's spectrum. Yet well-recorded instruments do call attention to themselves in a most realistic, even breathtaking, way. I look forward to settling in on the right amps and other components to give the Divas all they need.
I say all this to reinforce the advice given earlier in this thread by a couple of folks to consider Magnepans, Soundlabs or Apogees before jumping into a pair of $25K CLXs. For this kind of money, one could buy a new pair of big Apogees from one of the Graz refurbishment companies or you could take the effort to find a used pair and do a refurbishment with the same people.
YMMV...
Brian
