One of my N-Sats has given up so I have been shopping for replacements. I have a 5m x 5m room and they will be driven by my Nova and underpinned by my Velodyne DD12 sub; budget was about £1.5k - 2,5k. There is plenty of choice of stand mounts in that price range but one thing that narrowed it down was my requirement for fabric grilles as I don’t like the look of bare drive units in my living room. That immediately ruled out ATC and Neat even though they both sound good to me when I have heard them. Brands that I like both the look and sound of are PMC and Dynaudio. I also recently heard Kef R3s sounding very good and was interested in hearing any others that may be contenders.
As I live within 20 miles of at least 4 specialist dealers you would think that having comparison dems would be easy but no-one stocked all my contenders so I had to split the dems across 2 dealers. The first dealer set up a different model Dynaudio than I asked for - Special 40s rather than Evoke 20s. The Special 40s sounded quite good but I much preferred the Evoke 20s and could happily settled for these but then the dealer redeemed himself by insisting on hooking up Harbeth P3ESRs. I was reluctant because I had them down as aimed at classical music but said OK, let’s feed them some Captain Beefheart at a decent volume. To my amazement they sounded excellent and over a range of music I preferred them to both Dynaudios.
I then went to the next dem about an hour later, hearing Kef R3s against PMC Prophecy 1s. I had heard the Kefs last week when buying a CD transport and they sounded very good but when the PMCs replaced them they were in another league and that’s what I ended up buying. They sound superb in every way and both I and my wife agree they are much better than the N-Sats,
I did a lot of research on line to find stockists but it seems that dealers tend to have a limited range actually available for a listen. An extreme example is a dealer that listed 18 CD transports, so I was up for travelling 100 miles but when I rang up they only had 2 that I could actually hear. To me that blurs the line between dealer and box shifter. Getting a good deal was interesting. The best the first dealer could offer was £250 off the Harbeth if I took one that a customer had tried at home and returned. The second dealer knocked £875 off the PMC to match the price of an ex dem one at another branch. Best sound and best deal!