Intuitive Summits & R.S. Audio Sasons?

Thanks Mdhoover,

I thought this thread would fall off the radar, since these two exceptional speakers are not advertised much.

I'm going to arrange an audition of the Sasons and drive out to Robert's place.

The Summits are not ruled out, I'd like to hear both in my rig.

I believe Dale Pitcher, the Intuitive Design owner and designer, will have the Summits at the Rocky Mountain Audio Fest in October, and is planning a trip to tour his facility in Wyoming. This may be a good place to hear the Summits and some of his newer designs. I personally have not heard the Summits but have a lot of his other, amazing equipment and am looking forward to hearing them.

I own the Sasons and love them, but have spoken many many times to Dale about the Summits too. They are, as you said, both very very good speakers with very little ad or review momentum, and the designers are top notch customer-focused folks. RSA's Steve Rothermel set mine up at my house and although they take literally weeks (45-60 days of constant signal) to break in (and sound like crap unitl then), they sing from 35hz and up, and are the most transparent transducers I've ever heard. The lowest registers are dialed in via a Velodyne SMS-1 and a PAradigm Servo 15. Steve and Robert have plans for other speakers in the line, inclding a sub someday.

What is your system made up of, and room dimensions? The Sasons would love to have considerable room from the front wall, and breathing room from the sides is beneficial also. Dr Hoover has his Summits closer to his front wall and his getting great results. Now that mine are well broken in (October 06), I may experiment with putting them closer (but I'll mark the floor in detail before I do...they are great in their current spot 7 ft out into the room).

Ted

Thanks Ted,

I feel both these speakers have so much more to offer in musicality than all others I listened to (maybe the Avalons and Veritys come close)

Rig consists of CEC TL-2X, Museatex Bitstream into Audio Horizons TP 2.0 to VAC 220 Standard Sig monoblocks.

A "pair" of Def Tech Super Cube 2's (8" drivers) are in my current setup with Kinima HG-1 monitors.

At the moment, I'm in a smallish room 13x14x8 (nearfield at low volumes) till my living room is finished.

I spoke to Doc Hoover and Dale Pitcher at length about the Summits of course, but would love to hear BOTH speakers somewhere (closer) ?

As a owner of the Sasons myself, I cannot speak highly enough about them. In my experience they are the most transparent 2 way speaker I've heard under the $25k mark. They have bass that just doesn't seem possible for a speaker of their size sounding very full into the lowest 30 hertz range making them much more of a full ranger than the majority of other two way speaker offerings.

Although I have yet to hear the Summits, from a technical analysis they seem to be couple notches below the Sasons. For instance, the Sasons have - Cryoed tweeters, Ultra high end cryoed and impedance matched internal wiring that are matched to each driver, flow compensated front internal baffle ribs that eliminate sound re-entering the back of the woofer cones, no binding post metals whatsoever with a direct wire to crossover direct connect inteaad, rear user adjustable custom tunable ports, custom magnetics on each of the drivers and the obvious front baffle diffraction facets and full granite cabinetry.

IMHO only the Kharmas and Magicos speakers seem to come close to the Sasons in using many of their design implementations, yet even those "uber speaker designs" are missing more than just a few of the purist design elements incorporated within the Sasons. The designers seemed to have rasied the bar of a "designed to perfection" two way speaker, where their goal was to completely excise all of the traditional "weak links" that would otherwise keep a speaker design from being truly transparent.