My first Ascend arrived!
I received my CBM-170SE today. My impression upon listening out of the box is that they are very neutral and transparent monitors. I'm now comparing them with the HTD Level Three Bookshelf (with planar ribbon tweeters) and with my old Wharfedale Pacific Pi30 floorstanders. All speakers are driven by my Panasonic XR57 with its treble set at -2.
I use only classical music for comparison. My standard for speaker choice is that their playback of string and voice must be as close as possible to the tonality of real instruments without losing clarity. I was trained for classical vocal music and still do it as a hobby and go to many classical music performances, mostly opera and chamber music. So I don't think that I'm comparing these speakers by highly subjective criteria since I know what strings and voice should sound like. I don't care about, say, how "deep and tight" the bass is, how "sweet" the treble is, how "warm" or "bright" the sound quality is, etc relative to other speakers. My standard is not unambiguous, but it is how well the speakers perform in reproducing the sound of strings and voice as closely as possible to the sound in my memory acquired from concerts.
Simply put, the winner is the 170SE. I will describe the detail of the comparison later (I don't have time now).
Now I have to decide on other Ascend speakers for my complete 5.1 setup. I really want to go with the 340SE for my mains. But according to measurements, the 170SE's frequency response is flatter than the 340SE and especially their vertical off-axis response is more stable than the 340SE's. Also, some people say that the MTM 2-way design, despite its power handling benefits, is inferior to the traditional TM design in its off-axis performance due to the inter-driver interference---http://www.birotechnology.com/articles/VSTWLA.html.
Again, my priority is music. The major reason for the multi-ch setup is SACD and DVD-A listening. Any suggestion?
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