I would just like to say thank you to the wives and families of all involved for letting us take part in this GTG and a special thank you to Robb(Hutzal) for the loaning out of the M3's and dropping them off and picking them up from the other side of town, greatly appreciated. Another special thanks to Tex's (Mojo)family for putting up with us and the DB levels
. It was good to see Al(ctown) and Robb again, no matter how brief.
Mojo where do you find the time to do these write ups? It's 10:30 and I am just now getting to it.
I will say Mojo's write up is pretty much dead on. Al kept saying he liked the more detail of the mystery speaker while Mojo was switching them all up, whenever the Bose's were flipped he said "I prefer that one", while I liked the M3s better during the switcheroo between the two. I still prefer the more detailed sound of the M22's over the M3s or the Bose 601's. To me the M22s had a crisper sound, a little more forwardness than the 601s.
I will admit, as Mojo said, the M22s revealing nature makes it hard not to listen critically most of the time, my usuall non-critical listening is done through 6 channel stereo mode which wrecks the soundstage to a degree so you really can't be critical, but it sure fills the room with sound
.
The M3s do sound more like the M60s, that 6 1/2" driver is very warm sounding but seems to dilute the mids just a little, making them more neutral sounding.
Now the subs were lots of fun to fire up and the Mojostein sub was quite good as long as you didn't drive it too hard.
The Hsu was solid and would probably be much better suited to my basement than Mojo's. That open area he has is hard to fill with LFE. The Hsu was tight and showed some good strength during the U-571 scenes but it just didn't have the linear build and drop of the EP600. The Hsu also wasn't capable of filling the room during some of the lower volume LFE scenes it was somewhat subdued, you could hear it but you really had to be listening for it.
The EP400 was definately out muscled in that large area but having brought it back to my place and had some time this afternoon to set it up and compare it to my old D-Box sub, it is a truly great sub for smaller areas. Nice and tight sounding for music yet enough power to shake the walls in the house during the Nemo submarine sliding scene that Al mentioned was really good for LFE. My D-box was purchased back in 1995 for $300 and held its own against the EP400 which is 3 times the price I paid back in 1995 for the D-Box. My old timer has enough muscle to rattle the walls pretty good during movies and thumps away during music but you can hear?/feel the extra depth the EP400 achieves and it sounds cleaner doing it. The punch the EP400 delivers is more forcefull and is not just loud and resonating like my sub. Is it worth the $1000 I can't say($850 no problem
). I know if I had a spare grand to drop on something I think I would keep it, but it just isn't
that much better than my old sub to spend extra money right now.... and the EP500 is only a couple hundred more with lots of head room if I ever move
I am in the process of hooking these 2 subs up in my basement and will report (with pics) back when I get them located and run through some more tests.
