late last night i got home after a leisurely drive up the left coast from the show in Costa Mesa. it was nice to be retired and not in a hurry.
debatable whether the larger drivers with less excursion are more or less precise than more smaller drivers given equal or greater air moving ability of more smaller drivers. according to Kevin the new design is more capable, not less. my ears tell me he is the most credible speaker designer i know of.
i would be buying the SYSTEM 9, not the SYSTEM 7. working harder? no. only that due to the physics of driver alignment, and the advantages of the new shape, these smaller drivers have domes, not cones. so driver movement is more visually apparent.
at the show there were comments about the apparent visual (remember domes, not cones) pumping of the sub tower drivers, causing listeners to assume there is a high level of distortion going on, or some other 'problem. the issue is
(1) the extreme deep bass response of the SYSTEM 7 speaker. it can produce frequencies to 'DC', lower than 1 hz,
(2) with vinyl and less than perfectly flat pressings there are going to be subsonic odd frequencies coming through the signal path. normally the speakers will not be able to 'go there' in any way, shape or form. but the SYSTEM can absolutely 'go there' how well it goes there depends on which SYSTEM implementation (5/7/9) is acquired. there was zero of this visual pumping with digital as it does not contain any of this subsonic content, only with the vinyl,
(3) the only downside to this low frequency capability is system power grid and amplifier headroom. at the show the first day (new show location, strange room, lots of details to work through) you had one 15 amp circuit powering the
whole system. then Saturday two more 15 amp circuits were brought in to assist. but when vinyl was played you still had the lights flicker a bit. so a considerable lack of power grid headroom did blunt the excellence of the vinyl. in my room i have 70 amp service to my system with -5- 20 amp circuits feeding just my amplification. and with a SYSTEM 9 i would have 6 amps instead of 4 for just the bass under 50 hz so the excursion of the 24 drivers would be much less.
(4) Herve (darTZeel---preamp and cartridges), Joel Durand (tonearms), and Kevin Malmgren (speakers) were discussing the cause and effect of the extreme low frequencies. what were the slopes of the internal subsonic filters of the dart pre? what setting should the speaker subsonic speaker be set at? what was the new 'LE' version of the Durand tonearm and darTZeel prototype cartridges contributing to these very low frequencies? i'm not the answer guy for these questions. when you push envelopes stuff happens.
yes. but it's 50% more.
yes, 8 feet tall, easily fits in my room.