I have really been wanting to audition the Larsen 6 and 8 speakers. They can be (and are designed to) placed up against the front wall, have great bass, and throw up a wall of sound that sounds like a "live" performance, reviewers say. They are very room-friendly.
https://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/larsen-model-62-loudspeaker<< I felt it was important to drive the 6.2s with an amplifier priced more in line with the Larsens, and so I connected them to a $995 Parasound Halo A23. While there was some loss of tonal refinement and detail with the switch, the bass definitely improved. The Parasound puts out 200Wpc into 8 ohms as opposed to 60Wpc for the Passes. Clearly, these little speakers thrive on power; in fact, I later learned that John Larsen’s reference amplifier is a Gamut Di150 LE, which is rated at 180Wpc into 8 ohms. I then did something I wasn’t originally planning on doing—powering the 6.2s with my 200Wpc David Berning Quadrature Z monoblocks, an undeniably unlikely pairing as these amps cost roughly eight times the price of the speakers. The sonic result was amazing, including the bottom end. Bass and kick-drum had satisfying punch, and the organ in the Philadelphia Orchestra’s recording of the Saint-Saëns Symphony No. 3 on an Ondine SACD was majestically massive. Like many well-designed loudspeakers, the Larsen 6.2s will perform well with modestly priced amplification of high quality but also have the potential to sound even better with
über-electronics.
The other opportunity to improve bass performance came when I ran a DSP room-correction calibration with the Anthem’s ARC software. Inspection of the frequency response curves revealed some irregularities from around 30 to 400Hz—a phenomenon I’ve noted with most loudspeakers I’ve measured in this fashion. Employing the calculated room correction helped to smooth out the bass response considerably, on paper and to my ears. The lesson is this: The up-against-the-wall placement of Larsen loudspeakers offers a definite advantage in terms of bass output compared to free-standing speakers in a typical domestic environment. But that doesn’t preclude room-related irregularities in bass response that may require attention with either physical acoustical treatments or electronic room correction.
For its size, the Larsen 6.2 is a definite overachiever when it comes to bass output and dynamics that won’t leave most listeners uninvolved—whether with late-Romantic symphonic repertoire or energetic pop and rock. If you’re going for realistic dB levels with Boris Godunov or Daft Punk, you’re going to be disappointed. For many, though, the 6.2s will effectively transmit the power and excitement of large-scale music of all sorts because of all the things it does so well. What we have in the Larsen 6.2 and other Larsen models is the full realization of a decades-long effort to understand the behavior of real rooms and to leverage those observations in the design of a loudspeaker that will play music with a minimum of coloration and distortion. If your loudspeaker budget is anything up to $5k, the Larsen 6.2 deserves a very, very long listen.>>
