I got the itch to do it so I dragged out the Audio Nirvanas, put them in front of my listening position and about armrest-to-armrest apart, hooked them up to the Cambridge, sat down and listened to Bartók’s violin concertos and a disc of Bach cantatas (next session: piano and organ).

I’ll add pictures once I get the space figured out a bit more and tidy up the area some. I have a coatrack that’s now trapped in the corner, but if I put it between the two speakers it’d actually look quite handsome. I called the sedentary element a “recliner”, “armchair”, and “easy chair” for lack of a better word, but it’s kind of a hybrid couch-armchair: it starts like an unusually wide armchair, a little wider than a hospital wheelchair built to accommodate fat people, with a back and armrests, and extends forward five feet, giving you room to lie down with your lower legs curled up or dangling, or just slump down in your chair with legs extended.

Being a full-range driver both the highs and lows are rolled off: the solo violin in the Bartók doesn’t have the dazzle of the Klipsches and their 1” horn-loaded tweeters, and although all the bass notes are there and accurate, there’s no slam in the orchestral bass. Pop music with highly amplified bass parts would probably sound better – orchestral music is all about the midrange, except things like percussion and violin solo. Whether to call the highs “256kbps MP3-quality” is a compliment or an insult depends on how impressed you are with the technology, but I mean that both purely descriptively and in the best possible way. They’re not sharply rolled off until the “extra-musical” (“air”/”dazzle”, above the first few harmonics) notes.

The soundstage is better than I thought it might be. With no strong bass to anchor the focal point (dead between the speakers, where the sound usually focuses), it has a “soft focus” – it’s consistently focused from left to right, resulting in a somewhat flat-in-the-middle “television” sound where the stereo image moves seamlessly and continuously from left to right. Sometimes, especially as in softer passages, this is a virtue; in more chaotic and dynamic ones it can sound unfocused.