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I auditioned these, too (Reply to this comment)
by sunspot42x
Before I bought my current main speakers (a pair of Energy eXL-15's that I've reviewed elsewhere on this site), I auditioned the Cambridge Model Seventeens extensively. I came pretty close to buying them at one point, but several of their qualities eventually got on my nerves:
1) Cabinet resonance. I'm unusually sensitive to this issue for some reason - in fact, I can no longer listen to most floorstanding speakers, or even larger bookshelf speakers, as the buzzing of their cabinets drives me mad. It's gotten even worse since I've grown accustomed to the almost resonance-free sound of my little eXL-15's. The Cambridge Seventeens are about as small, but their cabinets don't appear to be dampened at all, giving them a pronounced hollow-box sound.
2) Sharp midrange. These puppies border on shrill with some material - the cabinet resonance may be partly to blame here as well. On the plus side, their imaging is exceptional for a speaker in this price range, probably because the tweeter is being called upon to reproduce more of the low midrange than is usually the case for a two-way speaker. This makes them function more like a point-source radiator than other, similarly-sized bookshelf speakers. Female vocals are quite pronounced and forward, and symphonic material benefits a great deal from their sound.
3) Power requirements. They're terribly inefficient - a common complaint with acoustic suspension designs, and one that's only made worse by their diminutive size. Of course, if you couple them with a powered subwoofer to handle frequencies below about 100Hz, and employ the crossover between the preamp and the power amp, you can reserve a lot of main amplifier power for driving the Seventeens cleanly.
All that having been said, they're still an exceptional value for the price and not a bad speaker at all. In fact, their overall sound reminds me of the audiophile bookshelf speakers of yesteryear, which was probably what the late Henry Kloss intended. A lot of recording studios in the '50s and '60s might have been equipped with speakers that sounded vaguely similar to these, so if your tastes run toward '60s pop these might not be a bad choice. They did an exceptional job for example of reproducing the frenzied guitar work at the end of David Bowie's "Andy Warhol" - it practically sounded like the guitars were in the room. I certainly haven't encountered any other speaker within their price class that could begin to make a similar claim. And their bass, although hardly pronounced, is exceptionally tight and not muddy or boomy, although cabinet resonance is a big problem at high volumes.
Again though, I want to emphasize that they're probably the only speaker of this size in their sub-$100 price class whose sound I'd even bother discussing. The rest are all pretty much trash – save your money and buy a decent pair of headphones instead!
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Nov 09 '02
6:13 am PST
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Re: Could you do me a big flavor (Reply to this comment)
by jag2112
Horse...
Correcting my wording accordingly. I didn't mean to imply that these speakers were powered. My bad.
But as for the banana clips, mine did come equipped with them, which is odd. Now, I did receive mine from, let's say, a very private dealer. I'm checking with him to see if he made some modifications to them.
Thanks for the tip...
-John
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Jan 02 '02
5:49 am PST
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Could you do me a big flavor (Reply to this comment)
by Horswispr,  in Electronics
and check a couple of things before I rate this? It'll get a VH, of course. 1) Does this speaker accept banana plugs? I though it only accepted bare wire (one of the compromises of a $100 speaker). Maybe yours are different from the ones I reviewed. 2) The SPEAKER does NOT have a 150 watt engine! The 150 watt power rating means that the speaker can HANDLE 150 watts. But it's up to the amplifier/receiver to PROVIDE the power. Could you change your wording a bit? Thse speakers are NOT self-powered.
An interesting tidbit is that it's easier to blow up speakers with too little power than with too much power. Distorting small amplifiers generate square waves which fry tweeters.
Thanks!
--Horse in a picky mood.
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Dec 28 '01
4:53 pm PST
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