New Tekton Pendragons On The Way

I don't pretend to have any technical acoustic knowledge, but my speakers, Klipsch Epic CF-4s have (2) 12" woofers in a similar high-low arrangement like the Pendragons, with a horn in the center, and they are also not nearly as powerful in the bass as you'd expect by looking at them.
After using them happily for a few years, I was reading somewhere (can't recall where) that with one woofer higher and one lower, there is some sort of cancellation effect that lessens room modes, which I guess is good in some cases, like mine, since my room is 13'x11', but that may be the reason why they are not working well in your room.
Feel free to jump in here Al, and others who know a lot more than I do.

Thanks, John (Roxy54). The technical aspects of speaker and driver design are not a forte of mine. But I believe you are correct that a spaced dual woofer configuration will tend to help with respect to room modes. However I suspect that in the case of your speakers the main reason for the less than expected deep bass extension is that the woofers, which apparently were designed and manufactured by Klipsch, together with the overall design of the speaker, were such that deep bass extension was sacrificed to some degree in order to make possible enough sensitivity at low frequencies to support the very high sensitivity of the horn-loaded high frequency driver. As you may be aware, deep bass extension, sensitivity, and also compactness of cabinet size, trade off against one another in the design of a speaker. And I note that your speakers have a specified sensitivity of 102 db, compared with the already high 95 db of the Pendragon.

Regarding Stereo5's experience with the Pendragon, like Shakey I'm somewhat baffled, but my guess is that a key factor is that the speaker was presumably designed with the expectation that its bass would be reinforced by the acoustical effects of typical placement in typical rooms, and of course his 40 x 50 foot room is decidedly atypical.

Best regards,
-- Al

Al hit it pretty well, but also worth pointing out that the Goldenears contain powered bass drivers. That sets a high bar for potential bass levels that most any modest size high efficiency speaker in particular will likely never match on its own, especially if room acoustics provide no boost, along the lines Al talked about.

There are reasons high efficiency full range speakers are not very popular overall these days. They tend to have to be very big and very expensive in order to compete with the alternatives in regards to bass levels, and bass sells.

As a long-time reader but infrequent poster on this forum, I want to thank everyone who contributed to this thread for their thoughtful, informative, reasoned, and friendly contributions. Thoroughly enjoyed it! I think this is an example of about the best that Audiogon has to offer in its discussions.

You should let them play for at least another 40-50 hours and reassess the bass. I suspect 50% of cases where the owner is disappointed with a new components is due to not letting the component break in. I have experienced this myself and felt a little sheepish after I had all but written a bad report on a speaker/amp/whatever and then after a few more days, realized the component now sounded glorious.