AV Rant #168: Impressions of Salk and Boston
February 25th, 2010
Tom gives you a preview this week of his Salk Veracity HT2-TL and Boston Acoustics RS 334 speaker reviews. A few listener questions from Jim (speaker break-in), Steve (first HDTV advice), Jason (bi-wiring), and Herb (who buys Tom’s love). Michael Bay tries to scare you. Tom admits he was wrong (but it was Dina’s fault). If you are a Logitech employee, Tom would like you to listen to this episode. Separates vs. receivers – what’s Tom’s advice? Thanks for listening and don’t forget to vote for us at Podcast Alley. To see our (mostly) complete collection of show videos, click here. To get our iPhone app, visit the iTunes store.
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I’ll read your review of the Salk Veracity HT2-TL with interest, but the high praise you heaped on this speaker makes me curious about what you compared it with.
Considering that one can get Quad ESL-57 and ESL-63 or Klipschhorns used for about $2000, is this speaker worth it? Have you ever heard the Eminent Technology LFT-8, which is also uses a mix of speaker types (in this case planar for midrange and tweeter and a cone woofer) and is priced at $2000 new?
Alan
I’m glad you got the correction about iTunes’ 256kb bitrate on the new show. I had a good laugh when Tom talked about how ‘hard” it was to find. Dude, I got it that info from Wikipedia in two minutes. 😉
I enjoy the discussions about equipment I can’t afford – really, I do. I also like cutting through the Audio voodoo. I’m new to this so I’m learning a lot.
The opinionated slant Tom brings reminds me at times of Don Cherry (I’m Canadian). He has a way to go before he catches up to Don in the clothing department though. Dina is great as the straight guy too.
Keep up the good work guys.
The story Dina was trying to recall about a car name in a foreign country was the Chevy Nova, which was sold in Mexico for, oh, about a day. Of course, No-va basically means “doesn’t go”. Hey, Mexicans, come buy the Chevy that doesn’t move!
Brilliant marketing and PR department on that one.
Alan,
You make a good point that everyone should remember – a reviewer can only compare to what he/she knows. I haven’t heard every speaker in every price bracket, nor have I claimed to. What I do know is that performance-wise, both subjectively and objectively, the Veracity HT2-TLs are great speakers.
Now, what you’ll find as the price points go up in my reviews is that I tend to be more and more conservative with the value rating. At lower price points, it’s fairly easy to determine if something is a great value but at higher points, there is a lot more competition and the competitors tend to be closer in performance. If you read the review without the ratings, you could probably guess the performance rating but you might have guessed a 4.5 or 5 for value when in fact I gave it a 4.
As for the $1800 SongTowers that won the shootout – well, it won the shootout. Was it a comprehensive shootout of every $1500-$2000 speaker on the market? No. But it was as comprehensive as we could make it. If you go back and listen to some of those podcasts, you’ll hear that people not only refused to participate, but some agreed and then pulled out. We can only do what we can do. If any of the speaker manufacturers you mentioned would like to have reviews and/or be part of a shootout, I’ll be happy to discuss it with them.
Edit – we NEVER give a value rating based on the price a speaker can be had used. It is always based on MSRP. I would also NEVER say in a review, “Speaker X under review is great but you can get speaker Y used for the same price so speaker X sucks.” That’s just not fair to anyone (especially the reader). I’ve discussed that on the podcast multiple times but maybe it needs to be covered again. I would think the reasoning should be fairly obvious.
Manteca also means butter in some Spanish speaking countries.
mmmm butter….
I was told it meant Lard. Which, while still yummy, is a little bit more ick.