I have never owned or heard the impacts or Double Impacts. For one, my wife or I wouldn’t want them in our living room, they are too large and quite unattractive to me. Thats not to say they aren't gorgeous to someone else. To each his or her own.
I did own a pair of new Pendragons for a week but back they went. First off, they were much bigger in person then the way they appeared on the web site. Second, I kept asking myself, "where is the bass?" I schlepped those monsters all over my second floor audio room and no amount of placement made a bit of difference. They sounded sterile and hollow. To add insult to injury, the top corners of one of the speakers were damaged and the box was fine. The cheap styrofoam corners had disintegrated in the shipping container and when FedEx used their hand truck, it damaged the unprotected corners.
For a week I ran the Isotek burn in cd for 24 hours a day for 7 days. They sounded no better after 160+ hours of burn in than they sounded cold. At the time, I was using a Classe 15 amplifier which was a 3K piece that output 175wpc, a tube preamp, Esoteric SACD player and all Shunyata cords and power conditioners. There was nothing cheap about the system. So, back they went and shipping was the tune of 250.00 via FedEx ground.
To sum it all up, the bass was almost non existant, midrange was hollow and highs were ok, not dull or bright. Sound staging was decent but honestly I kept thinking that these weren’t high end material. After I shipped the Pendragons back, I purchased GE Triton 2 speakers and was very happy. This Summer I bought new GE Triton References for the living room system and brought the GE Triton Ones upstairs to the music room. I sold the Triton Twos. The System is now powered by all McIntosh and sounds fantastic. One thing I did mention to Eric Alexander was how flimsy the shipping boxes were, had the cardboard been sturdier, the speakers probably wouldn’t have suffered shipping damage.
So there you have it, that’s my take on all of this.
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