Thanks for the kind words!
I think the Pendragons are most definitely "rock speakers". They play REALLY LOUD and the sound quality is as clear as a bell, even with only moderately powered amps. I believe they were actually designed to do this very thing -- to recreate the scale and scope of live music with the scale and scope of live music. That is, big sound stage, high SPLs, and an easy/dynamic sound. To that end, they're just tremendous.
I got this CD for Christmas, a gift from my wife. It's called "Lorraine" from Lori McKenna. The first track is "The Luxury of Knowing". It's a country tune, and not really my cuppa, but there's this bass note that gets dropped into the tune that sounds like nothing I've ever heard before. On the Pendragons, the note is huge, round, deep -- you hear the over tones, the under tones, the fullness of the thing in a way that a near-full range speaker simply will never capture. It's like the Pendragon has "headroom" to spare on even a note that deep, so the entirety of the thing is captured and presented. And all that to say that the bass on these things is just stunning. And if you've never heard true full range speakers, that is, something that can do subwoofer depth, you've been missing stuff. A lot of stuff. To me, right now, it feels like an unacceptable amount of stuff. My eyes are still wide with the shock at how much I've been missing. Holy freakin' cow.
Whew.
Okay, now, that said, the Pendragons sound a lot like Zu speakers, so if you like that sort of thing and/or that makes sense, great. This also means that these are not speakers for the detail-freak. Borrowing a turn of phrase from Srajan, there's absolutely no pixelation and at not time will detail cause you to lose track of the music. Widebanders tend to do audiophile-level detail rather poorly anyway, and speakers voiced warmly like the Pendragons are, are perhaps even more guilty of this. Not to say that detail is lost, per se, all I'm saying is that the Pendragons don't emphasize this in the way that many audiophile speakers might.
To get an idea of what I'm talking about, well, I also own a pair of Magnepan 3.7s, which cut the line between detail and smoothness rather even handedly, being neither pixelated nor smooth, they're simply revealing. If the recording is detailed, the sound is detailed. If the recording is smooth, the sound is smooth. If the recording blows, well. With the Pendragons, the sound is more forgiving than the Maggies, and by a good measure. The Pendragons fail my "Cricket Test" -- on "Roadhouses and Automobiles", a great Chris Jones tune (also country flavored, but that shouldn't be held against me), the engineer added in a bunch of crickets to the opening sequence that are clear as daylight on my AKG-701 headphones, a bit less so on my Maggies, and outright hard to hear on my Merlin VSM-MXR speakers. The Tekton Pendragons fall closer to the Merlins than to the Maggies, that is, until I turn up the volume significantly. The detail is there, yes, it's just that it's not standing out in contrast to the other transducers I have/had on hand. Whether or not this is good thing or a bad thing depends entirely on your listening habits, your needs, your playback chain, blah blah blah.
Now, this is not to say they're veiled in any way. They are most definitely not. Overall, the immediacy is arresting and the tweeter array on the Pendragon is clear and sweet. I'm not getting any hotness, glare or grain out of the treble on these things so Metallica, Ozzy, and Judas Priest sound just as loud and obnoxious and as poorly recorded as they ever do. In a word, those meat heads sound awesome on these speakers.
A note about the upper mids. These drivers tend to go into breakup in this region (see the Stereophile measurements on the Zu speaker -- these are relevant because this is the same driver, minus the whizzer cones and phase plug). Tekton crosses over to the tweeter array before the breakup region, which limits the Eminence drivers to their comfort zone. I've noticed no notching or suckouts, so I'm assuming this means they've solved some of the Zu measurement issues.
Anyway, I think these speakers are hilariously awesome. Full range for $2500? Are you out of your mind?
I find myself grinning like a maniac every time someone drops a heavy beat line into the mix. Like hip hop? These speakers are gonna make you turn off your subs, pack them up and sell 'em on AudiogoN. Like techno? Ambient? Anything with an artificially deep bass track? The 'dragons will have you in stitches and can easily be used to stun or kill small animals.
