A look back at the Bookshelf Marathon – Summary

Martijn

Fourteen speakers on two amplifiers, spread over three livestreams, totaling about eleven hours of listening and interpretation. Is it worth making this (time) investment? After 3 Sundays, the conclusion as far as I am concerned is a resounding yes!

In a short time, you get a good impression of the state of the market and what you, as a consumer, can get in a price segment. Fortunately, the conclusion is that all 14 speakers perform well and the price-performance ratio is right. More importantly, you can pretty well pinpoint the differences, which leads to a lot of insight in a short time. Judging from the active chats at the livestreams, this is not only true for us.

I do understand after three of these listening sessions why so few people do this. It requires quite a bit from you if you want to stay sharp and give all products an equal chance. That is what we sincerely try to do. It is up to you to judge whether we succeed in that.

The big lesson

We already knew it, but we are now strongly reminded: there is nothing more important to a good, balanced music experience at home than the match of speaker and amplifier.

Speaker cables, interlinks, power supplies, streamers, switches, record players, CD players, it is all important and very nice…  but if the match between amplifier and speaker isn’t there then you can keep replacing CD players, or buy an even more exotic Ethernet cable for your streamer, but you won’t eliminate the lack of balance in the reproduction. Know that!

The surprises

There were also some speakers that were surprising. For their price, the Sonus Faber Sonetto speakers offer a lot of listening pleasure with a nice balance of sound, detail and rhythm. They continue to sound good at low volume levels, and only have to acknowledge their superiors in the more expensive speakers in this test, regarding the depth of the soundstage. They had tough competition on the second listening round, but held their own proudly.

JBL has a divergent design with their compression driver and it is hard to find a good balance there. Combined with the Nilai amplifier, they took off like a sprinter on the final stretch toward the finish line with a brisk sprint. I struggled to keep listening to tell what they sound like, the temptation to put the notes aside was clearly present. What a party! It is fervently hoped that Hypex and JBL will come to a collaboration to bring an active version of this to market. It shows that technological advances make a lot possible in HiFi, without first having to rob a bank to get all that niceness in your home.

The third surprise were the Neat Petite Classic speakers. Except for their size, there is nothing Petite about these speakers. They were the only speakers that, in combination with the Pass Labs power amplifier, were capable of projecting a bubble of music that you, the listener, sit in. That’s an insane achievement for something so physically small. And it shows that we should cherish our small, independent audio manufacturers.