I think that is what the speaker must Have been playing ie "Chevrolet hub cap with a ball-peen hammer"
it is a really good speaker...though a bit over priced for what it can do.
The Manger name is continuing in this discussion and out of curiosity, I dug out the old CES report of the Absolute Sound's reviewer who attended the show:
Quote:
Good sound at the official CES:
The venerable B&W Nautilus 801 speakers sounded very musical and right, driven by a NIRO integrated amp sourced from a mid-line Sony SACD player. Jim Thiel showed the latest CS1.6 model using Boulder and VTL amps and at about $2,300 per pair (substantially under the price category that I was supposed to consider for the magazine) demonstrated a far better sound compared to speakers costing much, much more. Richard Vandersteen's Reference Monitors ($6,995 per pair) were excellent. So too were Verity Audio Fidelio speakers ($7,995 per pair), van Schwiekert VR-4 speakers, all driven by decent electronics of Nagra, Hovland, Meitner etc....
Bad sound too...:
Manger, the latest German manufacturer to promote a bending wave tranducer, was demonstrating their Zerobox speaker system producing sound completely foreign to my experience. To call the Manger sound "musically unnatural" would be a gross understatement. The Manger driver looks like a hub cap for a 1956 Oldsmobile and the sound I heard reminded me of a steel hub cap being tapped by a ball peen hammer. Although there were several contenders, I'd vote for the Mangers as the worst sound at the CES. The Joseph Audio speakers in the Ayre room were bright enough to heat-seal plastic bags across the hall. At high volume levels, this sytem could make my ears bleed but two magazine reviewers were happily listening to Sheryl Crow sing "If It Makes You Happy" at rock concert levels. Magenpan presented a multichannel demonstration that sounded dreadful, thin, harsh, shrill and nasty. Two old friends, Jim Smith and Casey McKee, demonstrated the Avantgarde hornspeakers using SET amps. The appeal for this product eludes me. The sound was dynamic and relaxed but extremely colored and musically unnatural. Imaging was virtually absent. There were a number of horn speakers at the show like Lowther but none could produce sound that I could relate to and I can no longer tolerate speaker systems that can't deliver flat frequency response within a +/- 10dB window of error, and believe me, none of these could.
Unquote:
I am not saying or agreeing to any of these but it is always good to read others' viewpoints (this is only one of them) before using our intelligence and logic to derive our own conclusions to what we hear.
Probably one of the last postings in this forum from my side, especially after reading some recent statements in various links.
Let me close with a couple of lines from an old (Simon & Garfunkel) song:
"People talking without speaking,
people hearing without listening..."
Finally, let me hope we will one day get a big breakthrough in speaker technology, hopefully following the development of an automobile without an internal combustion engine.
cheers.
murali
