All of my listening to the Elacs was done with their tweeters at or below the height of my ears in the listening position. I placed them on my 24" Sound Anchor stands ($700/pair) in the exact positions≲8" from the front walljust vacated by Technics' Premium Class SB-C700 speakers ($1700), which I'd reviewed for the January 2016 issue. Jones recommends stands 22≢4"-tall stands for the Debut B6. The specs for sensitivity and impedance are 87dB and 6 ohms, respectively. The woofer is reflex-loaded with a port that's flared at both ends. The tweeter fires through a screen-like "deep-spheroid" waveguide, which is said to shape its dispersion pattern and, in the process, minimize cabinet diffraction. The drivers, also designed by Andrew Jones, are a 1" fabric-dome tweeter and a 6.5" woofer with a woven aramid-fiber cone, crossed over at 3kHz. The B6 isn't flashy: just a two-way speaker in an MDF box that's a little under 14" high. I trudged on, and tried not to be distracted by praise that sounds sweet on the outside but kind of sour on the inside. Everybody raved, sort of, but always qualified their compliments by saying something along the lines of "It's a great, amazing speaker for $280." This was consistently followed by something like "It won't replace your audiophile speakers," but you should "give it to your kids for their college dorm" or "put them in your basement workshop or summer beach house" or "give them to someone starting out"and "be sure to recommend them to your non-audiophile friends." What the hay? So the Elac Debut B6es are amazing, but not amazing enough for a place of honor in a genuine certified he-man audiophile system?Īs I opened the Debut B6's boxes, I wondered: Should I be reviewing these? Won't I be wasting my readers' time? Then I remembered: I hadn't yet experienced this "amazingness for the price" that everyone else hadincluding those 12-year-olds, whose ears I respected. While I was researching the B6, I also saw other people's comments. In fact, Jones may be the only person to see two of his speakerstwo really different speakersreviewed in the same issue of Stereophile: the TAD Evolution One ($29,800/pair) and the Pioneer SP-BS22-LR ($129.99/pair). (I got the feeling that this is a reboot for the German company's operation in the US.) And I learned that, before going to work for Elac, Jones designed speakers for KEF, Infinity, and Pioneer/TAD. I learned that these speakers were conceived at Elac's new design center in southern California. "What magazine do you write for?" I told him I was a cub reporter at Stereophile and handed him my card.īy the time I received my review pair, I'd read everything I could find on the Web about the Elac Debut series. After a long silence, his smile reappeared. Now he paused, a serious quizzical expression on his face, and studied me closely. I also had an intuition that the diamond of the Debut series might be the slightly larger B6 ($279.99/pair), and I asked designer Andrew Jones if I could review it. But I didn't feel that amazingness that everyone else seemed to feel. Nothing annoying jumped out to bite my ears. People kept asking me, "Herbwhat'd you think of the Elacs?" My polite response was always, "I'm glad I'm not in the business of making $1000/pair speakers." I'd heard for myself how the Debut B5s did all the audiophile-checklist stuff: Bass, midrange, trebleall seemed pretty balanced. In the halls, people were raving: "Did you hear Andrew Jones's new speaker?" Show bloggers went crazy. I was impressedbut maybe not as impressed as everyone else in the room seemed to be. So I walked to Elac's room and listened to the Debut B5 bookshelf speakers ($229.99/pair). "Elac's room is making the best sound at the show," they said.Įlac? I thought. The first I heard about Elac's new Debut line of speakers was from two 12-year-olds at T.H.E.
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