Audiophilepure

These are well-engineered speakers, but buyers will need to do a bit of room matching and think about augmenting them with a sub. If being used for home theater duty, I think a sub would be a requirement. For more casual listening the speakers will perform well. Their frequency response, dynamic range, clean undistorted audio, and imaging skills are something I don’t always find in similar speakers. A lot of thought obviously went into the design and manufacture of the PSB T54 speakers.

Although the T54 doesn’t reach as deeply as some other speakers I’ve heard at the $1499 price, I haven’t heard other speakers do so many other things as right as the T54 speakers. Since the deepest low end (if you want it) can be solved with a good subwoofer, I think the T54 speakers represent a solid and competitive value. If you’re not considering using them for home theater, and you have a good match for a room, I have high praise for these speakers.

Great as everything else is, these speakers are equally smooth throughout the frequency spectrum. Those of you that enjoy this aspect of single driver or panel speakers will appreciate how well the three drivers in the Hailey’s work together. No matter how loud or soft the Haleys are played, they deliver the electrical impulses presented to them with one voice.

If you really want to blast the system, you will need more than 15 watts per channel, and though the Haileys reveal a lot at low volume, they are glorious when being played loud. Whether you’re listening to Deep Purple’s Made in Japan, The 1812 Overture, or grooving on some Slowdive, these speakers will take you anywhere you want to go.

Ironically when YG hit the market 21 years ago, under their original ownership they claimed to be the “world’s greatest loudspeaker.” While I can’t make that claim about any one loudspeaker, I’d certainly say that today, YG is in that small top tier of the world’s finest speakers without hesitation.

https://www.whathifi.com/reviews/audiovector-qr-7

Their low frequencies are tuned by a downward firing port. This port exits near the front edge of the QR 7’s base and vents through the small gap between the main cabinet and the plinth that supports it. Such an arrangement tends to make speakers less fussy about placement within a room, and so it proves in this case with the Audivectors sounding pretty balanced from around 50cm away from the closest walls. They don’t prove too fussy about angling towards the listening position either, which points to a decently wide dispersion from those AMT tweeters. We end up with the QR 7 pointing towards the listening position, crossing a little behind our heads, which gives a broad and nicely focused soundstage.

https://www.hifinews.com/content/castle-windsor-duke-loudspeaker

The crossover is a fourth-order Linkwitz-Riley type set at a moderate 2.1kH and featuring air-cored inductors. While it is more common to use iron-cored inductors in the bass arm of the crossover for their reduced copper turns, the slightly higher resistance of these air-cored types is allowed for in the design of the bass/mid driver. The result, according to Castle, is ‘a flat response with an easy load for amplifiers and low distortion’, claims that are largely backed up by PM‘s independent measurements.

Fit and finish of the loudspeakers is immaculate, and they are glorious pieces of furniture in their own right. Magnetically attached grilles are supplied but they are best left in the box, for reasons I’ll return to. Dedicated open-frame metal stands are available for an additional £500 but these were not supplied for review, so the Dukes were auditioned atop mass-loaded Atacama SL-600 stands, and connected to my regular Yamaha C/M-5000 pre/power amplifiers

https://www.hifinews.com/content/martinlogan-motion-b10-loudspeaker

This was recorded in a club, quite audibly without the benefit of the microphones or recording equipment which enabled Graham Nash (above) to deliver such magnificent sounds. Even with these handicaps, the sound was rock-solid, detailed and hardly revealing of its limitations. It may have languished undiscovered for decades, and made no claims to audiophile quality, but, wow! was it engaging through these diminutive MartinLogan standmounts.

Then I put on 1990’s Dick Tracy soundtrack [Sire 7599-26279 1], music made to sound, via the arrangements, as if recorded in the 1940s. Stage width – deliberately, no doubt – was variable, while vocals ranged from Jerry Lee Lewis in full-on sinner mode to Darlene Love and k.d. lang. It boogied from track-to-track, the Motion B10 an open window. If you prefer the analytical, this speaker is a short-list must.

https://www.soundstagehifi.com/index.php/reference-components/1840-recommended-reference-component-t-a-elektroakustik-solitaire-s-530-loudspeaker

In conclusion, Hans writes that the S 530 is different from any other loudspeaker he has heard in more than a decade of reviewing high-end gear—different in the way it looks and different in the way it sounds, which was “profoundly, stupefyingly good.” He declares the Solitaire S 530 the best-sounding loudspeaker he had ever heard. Hans’s praise for the S 530, which pervades his review, earned this loudspeaker a Reviewers’ Choice award at the time the review was published. Those same words earned it our Recommended Reference Component award this month.

https://www.stereophile.com/content/monitor-audio-platinum-300-3g-loudspeaker

 I see I haven’t commented yet on the Platinum 300 3G’s degree of tonal neutrality. This speaker is commendably uncolored. Solo piano recordings are very revealing of problems in the upper midrange, but the piano on the Silverman concert recording sounded both natural and full range, with no notes emphasized. The only aspect of the Monitor Audio’s sonic signature that did occasionally concern me was a slight emphasis to recorded sibilance, more noticeable with the solid state Naim and Parasound amplifiers than with the tubed Audio Research I/50 or, paradoxically perhaps, the class-D NAD. The I/50’s top octave starts to roll off prematurely into low impedances (footnote 1), which could account somewhat for its mitigation of this slight sibilance, though the shape of the Platinum 300 3G’s impedance magnitude trace (fig.1 in the Measurements sidebar) suggests that this rolloff will be minimal.

I finished my critical listening sessions with Joni Mitchell at Newport (24/192 FLAC, Rhino/Qobuz), recorded live in 2022. What can I say? With its lack of coloration and neutral tonal balance, Monitor Audio’s Platinum 300 3G did justice not just to Mitchell’s age-deepened voice but to those of all the singers featured on this album.

https://www.stereophile.com/content/focal-maestro-utopia-evo-loudspeaker

One moment, the Maestros take on the character of a 200lb street brawler, the next, that of a ballerina. They did the only thing that matters in the wild world of hi-fi: connect me to the music. I produced pages of notes full of terms like authority, grace, ebullience, grandeur, brawn. But maybe this says it better than reams of descriptors: During the evaluation of almost every new piece in my system, I make a fresh Roon playlist of songs that show off the product particularly well. On average, I end up with a list of 30, 40 songs. After two months with the Maestros, I was up to 157 tracks. From chamber quartets to EDM, orchestral showpieces to Appalachian folk, delta blues to big band, these exceptional French speakers brought the joy. Astute and revealing, they’re among the hautest of haut-parleurs.