Clearwave Duet 6 Monitors

I've been listening to these speakers for over a hundred hours now and am extremely impressed with their performance. Hence this thread so I can alert fellow A'goners about them.

I'll try to keep this short so the first thing to address is the balance of these speakers. I've done some rudimentary measurements and found them to be about +/- 2db from 1KHz down to 40Hz, in room, as is, with no room treatment. I'm also getting great bass down to 31.5Hz. Although I can't hear it, I'm getting measurable bass at 25Hz with the meter at 1 meter from the drivers but nothing at the listening position. This is at normal listening levels. I can live with that. No sub needed here.

The highs are articulate, clear and clean when called for with nice decay, air and ambience. What they never do is make me wince or reach for the remote.

They have very nice delineation allowing me to hear deep into the recording (I can easily hear the rumble of the steam pipes of the church they recorded in on the Cowboy Junkies' "The Trinity Sessions"). Tone and timbre are nicely, if not wonderfully done. Because of the aforementioned, layering is finely done and sound staging is nicely focused and easily the best I've heard in my system. Everything is rock steady which gives a better illusion of depth in my near field listening set up (not easy to pull off).

Instruments and vocals have so much soul, so to speak, being so convincingly recreated. They sound rich without resorting to tricks (and I don't mean rich as in euphonic).

I still can't detect where the crossover is in this two way beaut making for a very credible point source effect.

Build quality is over the top. Knuckle raps result in sore knuckles. The front baffle is 2" and everything else is 1" and nicely braced internally. The finish is beautiful and the Indian Rosewood is striking. The Clearwave website goes into greater and better detail than I can but top drawer parts and wiring are used and I don't see Jed (the designer) making as much profit as he could.

They like power being 85db efficient but I'm told they behave more like 88db. I get more than satisfactory listening levels with my Marantz PM15S2b (90W) and discovered that for some reason, the Duets prefer a thinner gauge speaker cable than what used to work for me. My 16 gauge Tempo Electirc SCs imparted too much of a hooded effect on the highs and fattened out the mids and bass too much. Going to Clear Day single run SCs hit the perfect pairing category award.

That's about it right now.

All the best,
Nonoise