Anyone else own EPI/Epicure "back in the day?"

I use a pair of EPI 202s in a secondary system. They are powered by a Sansui Au999 integrated for a vintage vibe. I also have a pair of EPI 350s used in a garage system. Both sound very good, but in a vintage way. Not particularly transparent and smoothed over treble. As an experiment I once substituted the 350s for my pair of Spendor 9/1s in the system with Roksan amplification. The EPIs were place in corners approximately 18 feet apart. The stereo presentation was diffused, not as tonally even, but the bass was great and on some recordings vocals were more in the room than the Spendors.

One thing that's nice about EPIs is that Human and Tribute Audio but provide extensive parts and service for them.

I had the Dynaco A25s, tthen swapped them for the EPI 100s, and finally settled on the JBL 100s back in university dorm days.

I would rank the EPIs definitely a far distant way back of the JBLs and generally a "pick 'em" against the Dynacos , depending on which receiver you had driving them at the time.

Both of the latter were cheaply made and mass-marketed as part of the "new separates" wave geared toward the 70's college crowd that provided an alternative to the Brit flat BBC midrange sound for college dorm rock anthems of the 70s. For their time, they provided a cheap segway into music for students.

By today's speaker performance standards ....IMO they are not even close to the superior performance of today's quality designed and quality built stand-mounts. (Drivers, crossovers, caps and overall design)

IMO today EPIs represent mid-fi at best -- a nostalgia best suited today for a modest "B" or "C" system .... They are not hi-fi strata speakers.

The first store that I owned was a Team Electronics. We were an EPI dealer and if my memory serves me well, they were horrid. Just awful. Our house brand speaker (Award) which were pretty much junk, sounded better.

We might have sold a different series maybe than some of the other stores, but the EPI's we sold were terrible.

I had a pair of Epicure Model 400's, square footprint omni-style towers with a 6" woofer and 1" tweeter on each of the four vertical faces. Rich timbre and warm tonal balance, okay clarity, but poor image specificity.

I had "rescued" them from a Baton Rouge dealership called Savard Sound, who was using the fairly low-efficiency Epicures to show off the high efficiency of their house brand speakers. They'd switch back and forth without adjusting the volume, to make their much louder Savard speakers sound more impressive. Then they'd crank the 20-watt receiver driving the Epicures into hard clipping so you could hear how lousy the Epicures sounded when you tried to play them loud. When they did that, I cringed and told them to stop that.

Well despite their salesman tricks I could hear that the Epicures were much better than anything else in the store. They were used (trade-ins probably). Anyway I came back the next day and offered the salesman three hundred-dollar bills for the Epicures, and he took 'em. I had rescued a deserving pair of speakers from a slaughterhouse.

Unfortunately they were stolen from me when my college apartment was burglarized a year or so later. So every time I see a pair for sale somewhere, I look to see if it has the same particular yellowish-in-one-spot wood grain coloration on one speaker and chip on the other that my pair did. If I ever run into that pair again, I'm buying them.

Duke

I have a pair of EPI A40s, which is from their second wave product line in the early '80s. I got'em in 1995 for $10 from a coworker. I had to replace the woofers' foam surround which added another $20.

For that money they're a clean, tight little bookshelf speaker. Easy to mate with a subwoofer because of the sealed cab's gentle bass rolloff.

Taken on their own merits, and placed on modern welded steel stands with sand-filled pillars, they could throw spooky-real imaging in a 3D soundstage. Nobody heard them that way back in 1981 on a bookshelf, but when I filled those stands with sand, the merits of these EPIs really "popped."

I did compare them side by side with some newer more sophisticated speakers, such as a pair of Wharfedale 7.3 small floorstanders. It showed that for $10 or $30, these were a steal, but at the same time--as good as those inverted dome tweeters were for their time--the treble didn't have the smoothness and refinement of tweeters from 20 years later, let alone what you can get now.

Parts Express's <$60/pr. Dayton B652-AIR features a folded ribbon AMT tweeter. Adjusted for inflation, they would be $23/pair in 1981 and offer a level of treble refinement practically unthinkable back then.