Anyone else own EPI/Epicure "back in the day?"

The first store that I owned was a Team Electronics. We were an EPI dealer and if my memory serves me well, they were horrid. Just awful. Our house brand speaker (Award) which were pretty much junk, sounded better.

We might have sold a different series maybe than some of the other stores, but the EPI's we sold were terrible.

I had a pair of Epicure Model 400's, square footprint omni-style towers with a 6" woofer and 1" tweeter on each of the four vertical faces. Rich timbre and warm tonal balance, okay clarity, but poor image specificity.

I had "rescued" them from a Baton Rouge dealership called Savard Sound, who was using the fairly low-efficiency Epicures to show off the high efficiency of their house brand speakers. They'd switch back and forth without adjusting the volume, to make their much louder Savard speakers sound more impressive. Then they'd crank the 20-watt receiver driving the Epicures into hard clipping so you could hear how lousy the Epicures sounded when you tried to play them loud. When they did that, I cringed and told them to stop that.

Well despite their salesman tricks I could hear that the Epicures were much better than anything else in the store. They were used (trade-ins probably). Anyway I came back the next day and offered the salesman three hundred-dollar bills for the Epicures, and he took 'em. I had rescued a deserving pair of speakers from a slaughterhouse.

Unfortunately they were stolen from me when my college apartment was burglarized a year or so later. So every time I see a pair for sale somewhere, I look to see if it has the same particular yellowish-in-one-spot wood grain coloration on one speaker and chip on the other that my pair did. If I ever run into that pair again, I'm buying them.

Duke

I have a pair of EPI A40s, which is from their second wave product line in the early '80s. I got'em in 1995 for $10 from a coworker. I had to replace the woofers' foam surround which added another $20.

For that money they're a clean, tight little bookshelf speaker. Easy to mate with a subwoofer because of the sealed cab's gentle bass rolloff.

Taken on their own merits, and placed on modern welded steel stands with sand-filled pillars, they could throw spooky-real imaging in a 3D soundstage. Nobody heard them that way back in 1981 on a bookshelf, but when I filled those stands with sand, the merits of these EPIs really "popped."

I did compare them side by side with some newer more sophisticated speakers, such as a pair of Wharfedale 7.3 small floorstanders. It showed that for $10 or $30, these were a steal, but at the same time--as good as those inverted dome tweeters were for their time--the treble didn't have the smoothness and refinement of tweeters from 20 years later, let alone what you can get now.

Parts Express's <$60/pr. Dayton B652-AIR features a folded ribbon AMT tweeter. Adjusted for inflation, they would be $23/pair in 1981 and offer a level of treble refinement practically unthinkable back then.

The EPIs from the late 70's were part of the 'New England sound' style of speakers when such distinctions were relevant. EPI's founder and head designer was Winslow Burhoe, who was part of the design team at Acoustic Research. Burhoe makes a modern EPI equivalent today available from Direct Acoustics .

My first 'real' system was a pair of EPIs 100s, a Pioneer 636 receiver, and Dual 1257 turntable.

The EPIs 100 were your typical 2'X1'X1' vinyl clad, large bookshelf speakers and were comparable in price to the Boston Acoustics and Advent offerings of the time. A pair back in 1979 cost roughly $150/ pair, if you caught a sale. I remember paying about $175 for my Pioneer receiver and about the same for my Dual turntable with cartridge. So, I had the 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 equation going on for what was a mid-fi system ... better than a compact, better than store brand electronics, but not in the big leagues either.

The EPIs overall sound was warm and polite. When compared with a $400 pair of speakers from Polk or Infinity today, I would think that you would find the EPIs sounding rather closed in and wooly. The midrange was spot on, treble was rolled off, and the bass sounded tuneful enough, but it did not go very low. I held on to the speakers for about 10 years before giving them away. I upgraded to KEF Q55's and never looked back.

Rich

Compared to horns and JBL titanium tweeters, the EPI might have been polite by comparison, but compared side-by-side with ARs and Advents (which I was able to do in a single store), the EPI "spring air" tweeter was noticeably faster and more extended. My A40s don't sound particularly closed in compared to modern speakers, just a bit rougher.