Anyone heard the new Reynaud Trente's

A_e_watkins, My pleasure...please feel free to e-mail me if you want a more complete description. kapcm@earthlink.net Regards-Kurt

I own the SP1/2 and expect to listen to the Trentes at a dealer's tomorrow. Will report back.

Okay, I'm afraid I can't give you much guidance on this. The conditions under which I heard the Trentes were so different from my normal system with the Spendors, and the audition so brief, that I don't want to jump the gun on anything. I think the Trentes have a special quality about them, an organic, natural-sounding midrange that I found very appealing. The midrange of the Spendor is also its strong suit, of course. Both are highly musical in this regard but they have different characters (which I wish I had a vocabulary for). Neither is particularly a champ at imaging or detail, but excel at tone. Based on what I heard, the Trente is not as full-range as the Spendors. The bass seemed lacking in pitch definition and was a bit distracting, but many factors could be responsible for this initial impression. I'd like to have the Trentes at home for a while, and may try to do so. By the way, this audition was part of a shootout with the Silverline 15 and the Refernce 3A MM de Capo. All three were outstanding (within the limitations of small monitors) but very different from one another. I liked the Trentes best but narrowly. The Silverlines do imaging and soundstaging like nobody's business, while the Reference 3A have a smoothness in the midrange that may more than make up for shortcomings elsewhere. All are easy to drive, I believe. How can you go wrong?

I must also have been at the same "shootout". Curiously, the listeners were nearly equally divided between the three monitor systems when polled. The silverlines did image very well and sounded very smooth. The Reference 3As clearly sounded the most dynamic, with a strong bass and a bright treble (although I tended to tire a little of the sound after a while). I thought that the Trentes were very impressive and should sound even better on the stands that were designed for them (although that adds about $500 to the cost). These stands have a Helmholtz resonating system that cleans up the bass and extends it by another octave or so.

I want to thank all of you for your input into this comparison. I guess I will just have to try to listen to these somewhere for myself. Again many thanks!