Originally Posted by
audiomagnate
I heard the 1400s at the show as well. They started with a piano piece and I thought to myself, "Wow, that sounds like a real piano, but I'm sure they're going to fall apart on vocals and more complex musical material." Next came a Boz Scaggs tune and I was simply astounded at how "real" they sounded. I wasn't even in the sweet spot of the fairly small room, but I knew I was hearing something very special. By the time the remastered version of "What's New" by Frank Sinatra came on (which I own and am very familiar with) I had worked my way into the sweet spot. It was the most realistic sound I've ever heard from a stereo, ever, period.
When I told the Harmon rep how good I thought they were he immediately started downplaying them, telling me I had to hear the K2s down in the truck at the Convention Center. After I pumped him for more information - they had no literature on the speakers whatsoever - he told me that Greg Timbers had stumbled upon the vertical mid/horizontal tweeter setup, but since they knew vertical horns would flop in Asia, they have never really tried to aggressively market the Array series. It almost seems as if they put these on the market to placate Greg (a total assumption on my part) but that all of the marketing effort goes to the K2/Everest line. I mean, who goes to a CES show without bringing literature?
After hogging the sweet spot for about half an hour I left to listen to the new flagship Sonus Fabers. I'm sure this system was in the $500,000 plus range. Next I listened to the Wilson Alexandria x-2s with some incredible looking tube amps and associated gear. I happenned to see a price sheet for the whole system, it was around $670,000. These two systems sounded very similar to me. I would call them "polite." They certainly didn't sound anywhere near as real as the 1400s, but by this time I was starting to question my sanity. After all, the 1400's retail for a paltry $11,500 and use antiquated 1940s horn technology. How on earth could they sound better that the Wilsons which employ "anti-jitter technology" and which are constructed from "X material" which costs 14 times more than MDF.
I returned to the Harmon suite after a few hours of this audiophile insanity to make sure I hadn't lost my mind, and sure enough the funny looking 1400s sounded every bit as wonderful as they had during my first visit.
The next day I shuttled over to the Convention Center and located the Harmon truck out in the parking lot. This setup was more like a Disney ride than a somber audiophile listening session, but in between "rides" the nice folks at Harmon agreed to put their 7.4 channel Sythesis system into two channel bypass mode and play the two K2s with the same material I had heard the day before at the Venitian. Since I was the only non Harmon employee in the room I got the sweet spot. The K2s sounded excellent, really excellent but not as amazingly lifelike as the 1400s. To be fair, the truck had pretty horrible acoustics, no treatment, and they were using Synthesis electronics instead of Mark Levinson, so it wasn't a fair comparison.
I have been chasing the Holy Grail of a real sounding loudspeaker since I was in college in the 70s. When I heard Mark Levinson's HQD (Hartley Quad Decca) system at the Palmer House in Chicago at some ancient CES show I immediately went home and tried to duplicate it on a student's budget. I even founded my own speaker company, KAS Audio, and designed, manufactured and sold a line of speakers and subwoofers which hold their own to this day. After all, almost every speaker out there today, no matter how insanely expensive, ends up reproducing the highs with a one inch dome tweeter and a cone midrange, as did my designs. The Dynaudio/Morel MDT28 - or a clone thereof - that I used back then is still in use today in most megabuck systems. The difference is, I charged $1000/pair for my floor standing speakers not $200,000.
In short, I think the 1400s deserve to be in every snooty, tubed up audiophile salon in the country, where they would put to shame all the lifeless overpriced hokem that passes as "state of the art" these days.