Hello,
I just wanted to chime in and say I took delivery of my black matte towers yesterday. Hopefully it will be followed here in the next few days by the STC. I'm rounding out my speakers with the 170 SE's as surrounds and a Rythmik sub.
First blush is that I'm very impressed and pleased with the speakers. I do not have a lot of experience with "critical listening". My other "system" is a Klipsch Quintet with the 10" matching sub. Obviously there is no comparison between the two as they are worlds apart (and rightfully so) but that is what my experience is with so take the following with a little grain of salt. This listening was don in my theater that is 13.5 x 20 x 7.5 and has no acoustical treatments at all.
I have only had about four or five hours with the towers ATM. A mixture of iPod, Pandora, CD's, and a couple of movie samples is where my initial impressions are coming from. One of the things that struck me was how "honest or true" these speakers appear to be. With these speakers source material is very important that was evident very quickly. If you have a crappy, compressed, or otherwise compromised source, these speakers will definitely let you know. They don't hide, or cover up anything and when fed quality material they will have you grinning from ear to ear with what you hear. I tried to listen at all different volume levels just to see what type of range they had and I can tell you that they can go loud, but that is not necessarily impressive into itself a lot of speakers can play loud. Oh, and I'm not so interested just in how loud they go, I'm much too old now to be purely impressed just by that, but how they sound at all volume levels. My little Klipschs would get harsh when driven loud and it would be obvious after listening at higher volumes that you had done so. The towers do so with out harshness, actually it kind of sneaks up on you and then all of sudden you realize wow this is pretty loud. Sound weird I know, but I don't know how else to explain it.
For my music listening they go down deep enough to capture the bass drum thumps and some of the other "popular" music my teens listen to. I did not feel like there was anything I was missing and the clarity of the music was also very prevalent. Not once have they sounded muddled, muddy, or harsh.
During the movie watching I watched a couple of movies that I am very familiar with. I put on the the 170 SE as a temp center to try to get an idea of what I was in for. The towers don't do the heavy hitting that a sub would for the LFE type material, but I would not expect them to and that is not what they are tasked for doing. They do seem to effortlessly handle HT and I can't wait to put the STC in the mix. The dialog and other surround duties were effortless.
I am still in the "Honeymoon Phase" and I obviously will be doing a lot more listening and tweaking with setup, position, and room treatments. I also wanted to say what a pleasure it was working with Dave and Dina at Ascend and that they truly know what customer service really is.
I'm hoping as these speakers ship and make it to their new homes others will chime in with their impressions.
Regards,
RTROSE