Zu Omen or Tekton Lore

04-08-11: Zmanastronomy
My Listsning room is small, so I can't put a $30,000 speaker in there to see if it's better or not. It would surely overpower my room."

The key for me was that I tried for years to get big speakers to sound good (Maggie 12s and 1.6, ML Ascent, KHorns, others) in my 12' x 13' room. The first full rangers I got were the Tekton Katz and I was amazed at how much better they played in the small room, and how they filled the room with only 4 watts. Same with the Omens. An eye opening experience to say the least.
I would guess that there are many out there that look at some of these full rangers, or read stuff in these forums, and think they won't work even if they are in a small room. I'm glad I took the chance. I really don't see myself changing around much any time soon.

04-08-11: Sebrof "The Lore and Omen are so close in design I can't imagine that one would be head and shoulders over the other."

They are close in design, yes... but the Lore uses a completely different tweeter - that alone will change the sound, and on top of that the whizzer is in tact and the cabinet is braced and damped to a higher standard, as well as tuned differently. All of that will add up to a different sound - how much different none of us know, yet...

As for your situation, I agree and I never meant any disrespect by what I said, and at this point none of us know the margin anyway. It is good to have diversity... but I am definitely not over the top on what I say. The Lore purchase finally got me off the speaker go around.., and that for me is reason to rejoice!!

YAY! government shutdown averted, so I will call Eric and order a pair of Lores. Any Amp suggestions? I was thinking either Decware Zen Triode or the Peachtree iDecco.

I used a Decware se84cs and it was decent, but no where near the level of the Quicksilver Mini Mites! Try and go for 15+ watts if you are looking for full potentional. Eric has suggested 20+ watts. I would think the Peachtree would be really nice, although not at the level of Quicksilvers but i realize you get allot in the Peachtree package. Congrats by the way!!

As for wattage, the 25 watts/channel of my Dayens Ampino has been PLENTY for my 8 X 15 X 22 ft living room with significant sized opening to dining room.

I've spent a good amount of time this weekend working on subwoofer integration with the Lores. With the Hornshoppe speakers, the last couple octaves of bass are just completely missing. My subwoofer was pretty much on its own with anything under 100 hz or so. My microphone on pink noise measures the Lores performing down to 30 hz before really trailing off. I find the Lore bass to be there, but to be a bit light for my tastes and in my room. Subwoofer supplementation is definitely desirable for me. It's definitely much trickier to have to integrate a third bass driver into the room, though. The EQ curves I have to work up in my Behringer are more difficult, and then there's always a difference between the measurement and what my ears are telling me.

I find the bass quite tuneful and articulate with the Lores, but in my opinion they do need some support for weight in the bass arena and also deepest extension.

At this point, the Lores have about 25 hours of solid performance on them. I wouldn't say that they have opened up substantially more since about the first 10 hours, but I have been listening to them almost continuously, so I'm probably not noticing changes if they are happening gradually.

One concern that has arisen involves some of the mp3's I've played. Most of my collection is lossless ripped from my CD collection. However, I do have some mp3's downloaded from the internet, at various bitrates. I have found with a significant number of these mp3's that volume peaks create a "popping" or "ticking" sound in the tweeter. It's significant enough for most of those songs to make them unlistenable. It's not my amp clipping, as the popping happens no matter the volume of playback. It's the way the Lores are working with the signal itself. Not sure why Lores would be different, but the Hornshoppe speakers never did this on these same files, nor did Omega Compact Hemps or Tyler Acoustics Linbrook Monitors I've had. I hope this situation resolves itself with further burn-in.