Just got them in today. The large packing containers insinuate the speakers are much bigger than they really are. They are easy to un-box and one person can do it although two is better. The multi-lingual owners manual is about 3/8's of an inch thick although only about 4-6 pages of it are in English. I did not check but finding setup instructions in Swahili toward the back might be possible.
Fresh out of the box with no break in time here is what I noticed after about of 1 hour of listening. I used a PS Audio Direct Stream DAC, ARC REF-5 preamp and Krell DUO 300 amplifier with the speaker baffles setup about 4.5 feet off the long wall in a 24 x 22 foot irregularly shaped room about 12 feet away. My initial impression was that they were boxy as well as muffled sounding and reserved in the midrange, unusual for a horn speaker. Also a low stereo image. Given that the center of the high frequency horn is only about 33 inches off the ground this did not surprise me. I was concerned about them being too low to the ground from the get go so I expected to have to improvise some sort of a riser for them. Getting them off the ground 3.75 inches (on 2x4's for now) made a very noticeable improvement reducing the above mentioned colorations. My guess is that a taller (TBD) riser will be better yet.
They have snappy effortless sounding bass with some extra emphasis between 150-250hz (my guess-not measured) that could go away or be reduced with some break in time. Although I did not have time to try it, a position slightly closer to the back wall, due to higher cancellation frequencies, might ultimately provide a more linear bottom end, say around 3.5 feet out. They do not "disappear" as well as the Array 1000/1400 probably due to the wider baffle. In this way they are more like the S4700 or the Everest. Very dynamic and other than the 150-250hz region they sound very balanced and extended. I am guessing that I will find this speaker pretty free of listener fatigue. Some sort of stand or riser will be mandatory with height to be determined by each individual listener.
One final note. I ordered this pair in the walnut finish which are supposed to come with the dark blue grilles as opposed to the black grilles if one orders the black ash finish. Lucky me I received one grille of each color! So I get to compare side by side before I ultimately chose a replacement blue or black grille. The blue grille has a lot of gray in it. It does not look obviously "dark JBL blue" like I thought it would. Either is handsome. Fit and finish was very good. The walnut grain had more texture and sheen than JBL's walnut cabinets from the 70's.
More comments to come after break in and more experimentation.
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The components are definitely less expensive than the 4365 components. 1501Fe versus 2216Nd-1, 476Mg and 045Ti versus D2430K. Regardless, both systems are very nice, especially if one doesn't want to "hassle" with the additional setup required with the M2.
