Originally Posted by
FirstReflect
Hey look! It's me in those videos!
haha.
I appreciate you posting those links, and I'm even happier that you found my opinions helpful! I've really been blown away and overjoyed at the response AV Rant Podcast has received ever since we changed the format of the show to being pretty much all Q&A. We never intended for it to become a 2 hour show on a regular basis. We thought we'd have maybe 2 or 3 questions a week and then we'd fill out the rest of an hour with some news or something. But there's no arguing with the results! So, hey, if this turns a few more folks on to our little show, I'd certainly love to welcome any and all new listeners!
As for the Sierra-2 and the Sierra Towers RAAL, it's funny that you bring up the topic of bass. When I first got my Sierra Horizon RAAL speakers (I use two of them that are in a vertical arrangement as my main speakers, and they essentially sound very similar to the Towers RAAL), as much as I personally tend to gravitate to treble in terms of what I listen for first, the very first thing that actually jumped out at me was their bass quality.
I come across this frequently; I really think that most people have become accustomed to substantially distorted and inaccurately prolonged bass without realizing it! There is no surprise or shame in that. It is very, very easy for bass to continue to "ring" for quite a while after the signal actually said to stop, and it is also very, very easy for distorted bass to be mistaken as louder or even "fuller" or "more impressive" bass.
I would highly encourage everyone to listen to some really good in-ear monitors with extended bass output. I use the Shure SE535 or SE846 as examples. Once you hear bass reproduced by in-ear monitors like those, it becomes extremely clear just how distorted and over-long almost all other bass reproduction really is!
Bass can be "tight"; it can have tone and texture and detail. While it's easy to be impressed by "slam", tactile "gut punches", and vibration, if you're not noticing individual, delineated notes with texture and timbre in the bass, then you're missing out on what's actually present in many recordings.
So the bass from the Horizon RAAL speakers (and that would apply to the Towers, too) really stood out to me right away because they preserved the same sort of detail, texture, and "quickness" in the bass as those excellent Shure in-ear monitors. That level of transient response accuracy is maintained to the highest degree all the way up through the midrange and into the treble with the Horizon RAAL speakers. So from top to bottom, they are an example of producing only what is actually in the recording!
And that can be an interesting - even off-putting - experience when you hear it for the first time. It really does sound as though something is "missing" if you've not heard recordings reproduced that cleanly before. And there is something missing: distortion and residual sound energy that isn't in the recording and isn't actually supposed to be there! We've all just become accustomed to it, though, because the vast majority of other speakers out there produce far more distortion and residual energy than we realize.
The real key, in my opinion, is to let yourself get used to hearing things through the Sierra RAAL speakers and then going back and listening to your old speakers again. That's when it hits you like a ton of bricks just how much detail is being masked, covered up, and lost by all of the distortion and residual energy from most other speakers.
- Rob H.