I actually went to the hifi shop and decided to listen to various speakers. However, when I went to listen to the various speakers, I brought a friend with me who is an audio specialist. I mean, he has speakers and equipment I can only dream of owning. Well in access of $120K U.S and been involved in the audio specialist arena for over 25 years.
He brought along several CD's for testing including classical,rock and vocal.
Sure the rock sounded good as you would expect on the XR4000, but he was also amazed just how well the classical sounded on the Xarus 4000. Vocal was slightly different however with mixed results, some vocal CD's were good, whilst other were simply bad. His experience was that the recording quality simply did not match the speaker pure and simple. Now when I mean vocal, these were CD's with a male or female singer and a guitar or paino. No other instrument. In my ears, they sounded O'K but I could make slight variations in pitch and clarity.
After nearly 3 hours, it was clear that although the Dali Concept 8's were the leader speaker (the reason for me going to the store and buy them as they were my speaker of choice), over the Mordaunts and several other, we both agreed that at more then double the price, the Xarus was the better value speaker (for what I intend to use them for Music and Movies)....
Also I have a very big room to fill the sound with 5 X 8 meters.....so as these are reasonably loud and good quality, they fill my purpose........
I admit that the best way is to go and listen to speakers before you buy. It really does make a difference. I went there to purchase the Dali Concept 8's and in the end, could'nt justify the money spend....
Also my Velodyne CT120 Sub and Kef 90 Center seem to compliment the speakers as well.
As my house is built on concrete flooring with rubber underlay and Dupont carpet, I dont seem to loose much base. However, I did need to turn my Velodyne volume down to 2 from 10 as I had too much base coming from them and the XR 4000................
