Review Details

Reference Series High Performance Three-way Floorstanding Loudspeakers

Product Rating:

Product Review (submitted on November 20, 2015):

I bought these speakers to be used in my basement man cave, a very large room, 18 x 30. For reference sake, my main listening room is upstairs, powered by a 250 WPC Carver TFM35 amp and Carver CT17 preamp/tuner, audio sources are a Tascam CC-22mkII for cassettes and cd's, and a Tascam CD-200i for my ipod. These play through Bose 901 Series VI speakers augmented with a Polk PSW505 subwoofer. The sound this system puts out is phenomenal, but not often used as nobody can be home but me when it's in use! So into the man cave went these Fluance speakers. Down there the system is powered by a vintage Sansui AU-G77XII integrated amp, 110 WPC into 8 ohms, with unknown wattage now as it's powering these Fluance 4OHM speakers and a pair of vintage OHM Walsh II speakers, and also in the mix is a Polk PS10 subwoofer. I can say that the amp has had no issues powering this four speaker set-up to ear bleeding levels. The audio sources are a Yamaha T85 tuner and a Panasonic DMP-BDT500 BluRay player. This BluRay player I use for BluRay concert videos, cd's, music stored on SD cards, and concert videos stored on a hard drive.The day the speakers arrived only one was delivered so it got set up and broken in overnight. When the 2nd speaker arrived the following day and was hooked up, there was a noticeable difference between the broken in speaker and the new one, particularly in the upper midrange, and the attack on snare drums was subdued at first, so the break in period is very important. All four speakers are set up along the 30 foot wall, with the Walsh II's in the far corners of the room and the XL7F's set 10 feet apart, five feet from the centerline of the room away in each direction so all speakers are 10 feet from the next closest one. Since the break in period I have thrown a lot at these speakers and they have handled all of it pretty well. Where this speaker suffers a bit is in dense rock and roll, where it can get a bit muddy with a lot happening all at once. Also with the Walsh II's shut off the soundstage of these speakers is noticeably limited in comparison to the Walsh II's and to the 901's upstairs, but what I have found is in a room this size this set-up works beautifully, presenting great sound across a very wide sound stage. I tried the set-up without the subwoofer at first and the XL7F's produced substantial, undistorted bass while playing Bach's Toccata & Fugue from the Telarc Sampler Volume 1, which has pipe organ notes down to about 25 hertz. With the subwoofer on this same selection rattled the joists in the ceiling. Particularly impressive was how they handled Tink Walks Amok from Frank Zappa's Man From Utopia. This is a very demanding instrumental for any speakers, and XL7F's shined at very high volume. Yes there are better sounding speakers out there at considerably higher cost. At $499.00 a pair I don't know where a better bargain can be found for a speaker that looks and sounds this good. -Verified purchase from Fluance trusted store.