stereo5 - congrats! Enjoy the heck out of all your References. Having had a cancer scare this winter, I realize more than ever that you never know what life has in store. I say go for the gusto while you can.
Rick - we are currently speaker shopping and auditioned the Triton line last week. Long story short, we fell in love. The 3+ is the one we zeroed in on (the 2+ is a bit over our budget) and it should fit well in our medium sized room. The spousal unit has a fondness for stand mounts but I've been lobbying for full range floor standers. The 3+ delighted us both.
We listened to the Triton 7s, 3s and 1s, with a variety of electronics feeding them - from a Yamaha AVR, to Rega Brio and Marantz integrateds, to Krell separates. The various Tritons all sounded from a) very good (7s) to b) outstanding (3s and 1s). Bass was set at neutral for all models.
Tritons are the big bang for buck speaker du jour, but as far as I'm concerned, they totally earn their accolades. They possess a combination of virtues I highly value that are hard to find in an affordable speaker - large soundstage, openness and transparency, dynamic speed, coherence, good bass, plus easy to drive and place in the room. Last but not least, the 3s are smooth, without being too lush, which is important to us. We listen to 80% classical, have a fair number of older and historic recordings, many in mono. I don't need hyper detail. I especially don't need anything with a treble bump. Even on well recorded material, some highly regarded speakers we auditioned made massed strings sound hard and glassy when pushed, but not one Triton model had a problem with strings or any large orchestral music dynamically or tonally. No compression, not even at loud volumes. Love that ribbon tweeter. I was even more impressed that we couldn't detect where the various drivers handed off throughout the range - believe me, we tried. There's some serious crossover voodoo engineering going on with the Tritons.
I'm surprised the Ones "sucked" at your second audition. The 1s are highly transparent and will reflect the gear upstream. I've found that lower end Rotel amps can sound a bit thick/grey but seldom have I heard one sound actually bad. I know some audition rooms are smaller than ideal, as was the room at our local dealer's, so maybe the Ones overloaded the room. At our audition, positioned about 7- 8' apart, about 18-20" from the back wall and toed in toward the listening position, the 3s and 1s both sounded great. I actually think the Tritons are fairly forgiving of speaker placement, but with all that bass power I'd surely hope the dealer had the Ones pulled away from the wall. You could go back north for another audition, or ask your southern dealer for an audition with gear more appropriate to the 1s and take some time to play with positioning. Anyway, good luck on your speaker quest and let your ears decide.
