Deep Audition at Home Review by R.M., USA
Hello, time I introduce myself now that I decided to accept my audition! Been lurking since I placed my order but anywhooo… I’m Ryan and I live outside Seattle WA. Ordered a pair of Quintet15’s with Voxativ AC-PiFe drivers and have been working with Ze’ve on voicing them to my liking. The experience has been fantastic and I think we finally nailed it. Ze’ve has been an amazing wealth of knowledge and truly was interested in understanding what I was hearing, where I felt adjustments were needed, and suggesting tweaks in the configuration, placement, etc to build an absolutely stunning set of speakers. The crazy part is, I feel there are still gains to be had with future upgrades. The fact upgrades are so easy has me excited for where sound improvements may land in the future. But right now I’m just enjoying what we created.
I’d spent most of 2021 on the hunt for new speakers but with the pandemic I was limited in what I could get access and listen to. Nothing was really getting me excited to swipe the CC. Reviews of the Voxativ driver and the open baffle design kept hitting all the right marks so I took a leap of faith on the Quintets, ordering without listening. I’ll spare you details of the journey but I’m happy to say these go beyond nearly everything I listened to previously and those sets that just might edge it out were speakers breaking my budget. Looking back on it, I’m really glad I didn’t pull the trigger on those non-upgradeable box speakers. Who wants speakers they can’t tune in their own environment? Not I! This is too much fun and rewarding.
I did want to call out one thing from my journey I feel is worth mentioning. When reviewing speakers, frequency response is often the objective visual used to denote quality, accuracy, etc. of a speaker. I have a fairly well treated / dampened room so frequency response was important to me. But, nothing “accurate” was really “engaging”. Wonderful to demo, but nothing I truly wanted to listen to very long. And, I can spend 4+ hours a day listening. I was explaining this to my wife when I told her “I really should stop listening with my eyes.” “Are you unhappy when you listen with your ears?” she asked. “No, these things are glorious when I listen with my ears.” And, that’s when I told Ze’ve I’m keeping them. ? Happy to be part of the family and it sounds glorious to be here.