340SE Initial Impressions: The Democratization of High-End Sound Reproduction
These are the finest home-use loudspeakers I have ever heard in my life.
There, I said it. No qualifiers before that sentence. A few qualifiers here though:
I would consider myself an audiophile and videophile with a passion for researching, designing and building high-performance, low-cost AV and computer systems as a hobby. I won first place overall and first place Sound Quality in the only car stereo competition I ever entered with the comments "That frequency response is so flat, you should go to Nationals." And I built that system on a high-school budget for 1/5th the price of the 2nd-place pro. That was 16 years ago. Thus, I have had a long and obsessive desire to eek out maximum AV performance for minimal money. It is a thrill. I considered buying the best speaker components available that most of the upper "high-end" speaker makers use from companies such as SEAS or Accuton and building a DIY speaker based on the designs of Joe D'Appolito, one of the Godfathers of speaker design. But then I found David Fabrikant's outfit here, after reading dozens of reviews of his speakers with literally almost nothing bad to say about them from some very experienced listeners. I spoke to David, found his story honest and hopeful and his frequency response graphs astounding, and decided to take the plunge.
Boy was I right.
After I unboxed and jacked in my new Ascend Acoustics 340SE pair and I played a full-range test track from the IASCA 1999 Test Disc and then my reference SQ disc, Spyro Gyra's Collection, my mouth was agape the entire time. These are the most faithfully accurate speakers I have ever auditioned below those costing tens of thousands of dollars more, and they are more accurate than most in even that range. I have just been listening to my entire music collection again for the past three and a half hours, and it has never sounded this good. I have heard or owned the best of everything B&W, Boston, Polk, Klipsch and the other mainstream brands make, I have heard Paradigm, Energy, Definitive Technology, PSB, and others in the supposedly higher end "off-mainstream" category, and I have heard Focal Utopia, Krells and Genesis speakers a few times as well. I have Focal Polykevlar components and Image Dynamics speakers in my car. These two simple Ascend acoustics speakers put them all to SHAME. Not because they sound superior to all but the unattainable, spoiled-rich Oil Baron tip top of the line, but because they do so while costing as much as the schwaggiest paper cone **** or Wal-Mart junk you could find. In the kids' vernacular, these speakers just OWN.
I am not even driving them with optimal gear, relying on lossless digital audio stored on my home-built Media Center PC piped through a Denon AVR-2801. That's it. Not even amp separates. I'll be hooking up my Sony CD player again verify my PC as a noise-free source, but it still sounds phenomenal, being so accurate as to highlight faults in the recordings of some albums over others. It is as if I can hear the best and worst use of all those switches and knobs in the recording and mastering studio, and I find myself wishing some of my favorite bands had better recordings. Still, there is no fatigue at all listening to these near-perfect speakers because they are so full, so clear, so true to the sound being fed to their voicecoils.
Given a high-quality recording, most people are not used to listening for, and listening to speakers that become essentially "invisible" by making you think you are listening to a live performance in your living room. The twang of your favorite guitarist's hands moving down the frets, the twitch of a drumstick in a muted rimshot, the swoon of a gifted female vocalist, the FULL full-on bass rhythms of the latest hip-hop beats: all are hard to come by in home audio. Yet, pure sound reproduction accuracy is obviously what David Fabrikant set out to achieve when designing these speakers. The stumper of it all is how he managed to bring speaker "invisibility" to us at these prices. [Aside: How much do you love the internet now?] David, you have provided nothing less than sonic perfection for the masses. The "democratization" of high-end audio is here, and I believe it starts with Ascend Acoustics.
I will likely post more thoughts on these soon, but I'm going to settle into some Dave Brubeck, OutKast, Sublime, Dave Matthews, Nickel Creek, Bach, Mozart, Sting and Gwen Stefani. Music is a wonderful thing for me in my home, again, and I haven't even popped in a DVD yet, so I'll post some thoughts there soon too.
Buy these speakers now so you only have to wait a few months for them. David, bravo and thanks!
Best,
Adam
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Originally Posted by Lou-the-dog
