Canibefrank
where are the active Argo speakers? anybody seen them for sale?
At Rocky Mountain Audio Fest 2018, Andrew Jones and another guy said they were on a ship on the way here. I have reached out to every ELAC dealer I can find and have gotten two responses:
-Tim from audioadvisor.com advised me they would have them by late November.
-Neal Berg from soundsciencecat.com said they should arrive by mid November, and that he's placed an order... After speaking with ELAC, apparently he is the first and only dealer so far to have an order in.
Considering it won a Best of CES 2018 award, I'm surprised more dealers aren't publishing the specs from their dealer portal and doing pre-orders.
I heard the Adante at CanJam and was somewhat impressed by them... Mostly the lesser amount of beaminess which is my complaint about a three way bookshelf I build recently.. Unfortunately nothing was played with sub bass during the time I was listening (EX: "Why So Serious" has sub bass around 3:20.)
The Argo however was my favorite at the show... Closest sounding thing to a powerful floorstander, and even a 1.5' below my head level, the trumpets in "Main Theme - Jurassic Park" on the John Williams Greatest Hits album came through. I leaned forward and lowered my head to test the more direct response and it was very similar: The trumpets weren't too peaky during the later part of the song, and they had plenty of bass at the beginning of that song, whereas a simply "good" set of bookshelves, or the ones I made (Hivi 3.1/Swan M3,) have just enough bass to savor and not have it get missed easily, but not what I'd call plenty.
For reference I have an like the sound of the Audio Technica AD900, a bright headphone and would say that it has audible bass, but not quite enough as sometimes I have to listen for it.
My JH Audio Lola, (3 way IEM with 8 drivers time aligned) typically makes me critical of speakers as they don't often sound as good (ignoring soundstage obviously.) From memory, the B&W 800 Diamond, Elac Argo, and Focal Kanta No3 are things that seemed promising enough for me to not miss my Lola when listening to speakers, though the B&W was playing some odd music and might have some coloration or it could have been the room. I wasn't familiar enough with the song which featured no real instruments and had an autotuned vocalist. (Human Nature by Sevdaliza)
Where I'm coming from: I'm in the $10k speakers and $1k amp camp, value accuracy, and by that I mean the Etymotic sound signature with a touch of bass like the ER4-XR, or a Focal Twin6 in a treated studio where I used to work, and use original releases of un-remastered CD's and solid state amps whenever I can to avoid added harmonics, noise floor, and dynamic range compression.