Review: Energy Loudspeakers Veritas 2.3 Speaker


Category: Speakers

Let me start of with one word...WOW..I have been a B&W owner for over 15 years..Had a pair of M/803's that I wanted to sell and started looking at other speakers...time for an upgrade. Went to the local Speciality stores and started looked into the B&W N/803's and 804's..they sounded great..looked at other speakers as well..finally got the chance to listen to the E/2.3's...jaw dropping sound stage and clarity.. the speakers just blew me away..yes, I was shocked..and for the price, there is no competition. I have been building speakers and have been a music enthusiast for over 20 years. My electronics are top rate and are better that what was hooked to the speakers in the stores...I am just in heaven with the way the sound at home.
Having been building speakers and reading books on crossovers, speaker design, and driver manufacturing for years, these speakers are built with what I consider the best overall design on the market. The sound is the proof. These speakers are top rate as far as the manufacturing and quality construction goes, there is no better on the market.
The overall design is truly state of the art. Highly recommended after 3 months of heavy pursuit into looking for my next set of speakers. Do not pass up the chance to give these speaker a good listening to if you are in the market. I also have spoken w/Energy corp. and find them to be extremely helpful when it came to answering any questions I had. These speakers need good amplification, as all speakers do, but they come alive w/ the proper power supplied to them

Strengths:
Fantastic sound stage, super detail, and very musical. Can hear thing I never could on other speakers. Easy to set up. Beautiful finish

Associated gear
Aragon 200 watt amp /Aragon pre-amp /
Denon DVD 3300 / custom interconnects /
MIT speaker hose

Similar products
Paradigm, B&W, Boston,Triangle,Infinity,
Mirage
djw
Hello Guys,

I am an owner of the Veritas 2.3 and the 2.0C center. I picked those up about 3 years ago in Ottawa where I live. They are factory seconds, which means they have some cosmetic imperfections but I have inspected every inch of those speakers and the only thing I found was a tiny tear in the fabric of one of the grills, other than that, they are pristine. Being factory seconds also means I paid 40% less than MSRP.

My experience so far with those speakers have been somewhat lukewarm. For the first 2 years, I had them in my basement in a small "area". My basement is large but has this sort of "cubby" hole that is 2.5 feet deep and about 6 feet wide. So they were setup in there because the rest of the basement had the pool table. As expected they were confined and definitively not in an ideal setup position. Althought the sound was decent, I knew it could be considerably better if they had the room to breathe. At one point and just as a temporary excersise, I moved things around so that they were about 8 feet apart. A friend of mine and I spent over 2 hours "setting up" the speakers for positioning all while listening to the same song to get a point of reference. What we ended up with was next to heaven in my basement. They sounded amazing, but that was expected since they were really not positionned properly for so long. However, you could not get out of the room because one speaker blocked the door so they had to "go back" before the wife got home :)
I did however mark the exact location of the spike marks on the floor so that I could put them back once in a while.

So, about a year ago, I sold the pool table and moved the HT system to the much larger area of the room. My very first impression was absolute disapointement. They sounded awful, terrible, like a wet blanket had been thrown on them and the bass simply disappeared. I was totaly discouraged. I had my friend come back again and we went through another 2 + hours trying to position them to make them sound better. The best we could do was in my opinion a 50% better sound, which is still about 50% less good than what I had them before that other time we did this.

All to say that I know they are good speakers, but to me, they have always been very anemic on bass, I would never run them without a subwoofer, there is simply not enough bass coming out of them, or at least not in my room. They are extremely picky in terms of positioning, to the extreme, it took me and a friend quite a long time to get them to image properly. And we have pretty good hearing both of us.

So, I don't know, I was actually thinking of selling them and getting some B&W 803s or 704s hoping they would be less picky and sound better in my room. But since my cash flow does not permit at this time I will do what I can to address the acoustics of the room first and see if I can come up with something to improve the sound. They lack presence, punch, soundstage dispertion, imaging sweet spot is extremely small.

I just find it very odd that my experience does not match anyone elses that I have read so far. Maybe I have defective units ? or maybe my room has acoustic "holes" that swallow certain frequencies and "bumps" that wreak havoc with the speakers..I don't know anymore..

I would appreciate any feedback anyone may have.

Cheers,

Stephane
Your findings are nothing like mine. I suppose it has to be the room. I have a large room with an open floor plan and high ceilings. I do use a sub with my 2.3i's for HT, but not for music. I use the true bypass provided with my Arcam AVP-700.

Bass is as fast as I've heard with any speaker, barr none. It's also very extended, especially for a speaker this size.

One of the things that impressed me most was the amount of bass these put out. The B&W 804's weren't in the same league.

They do have a sweet spot just like every good speaker, but I also don't think they're a fussy speaker to set up. They have exceptional dispersion which makes placement much easier.

BTW, what are you using for electronics? These speakers need a good amp.
Hey John,

They are well fead via an Anthem MCA20 200W per channel amplifier. My Pre-Amp is the Anthem AVM 20 V2. Since my original post I have done much research and the first thing I need to do is address the room acoustic issues before I make any decisions regarding the speakers.

Thanks for your input.

Stephane