Eggleston Who?

This is the 3^rd write up in a series about my hifi system.

I am now working very hard :-) on the review of the Siltech Forbes Lake interconnects for AVXpress. Having the Forbes Lake in the system gave me some new appreciation of my system’s capability, especially the loudspeakers –The EgglestonWorks NINE.

EgglestonWorks is quite a low profile company, you don’t see their products or adverts in the hifi magazines a lot, this is further exacerbated by their products’ long life span and rare new product introduction (well, if there is nothing new, there is no ‘news’ to report, is there?). But I believe that is actually good for us audiophiles. If a long-life-span product can stay competitive with those that change every 2-3 years, that means the product is done right at the beginning, so there is no need to incorporate ‘upgrades’ to the design on an ongoing basis, right?

If you look at the ingredients that EgglestonWorks uses, you will see the same drivers and cabinet design used in the entire product line. The difference is in the scale - the same Dynaudio tweeter and Morel mid-woofer are used in every model, the difference is in the number used; all the cabinets have the familiar ‘darth vader’ shape at the top, the difference is in their sizes. This similarity actually also translates into the speakers’ performance – they have remarkably consistent sound quality from one model to another (I have heard Fontaine II, Rosa, Nine and Andra II in demos), again the difference is in the scale of the sound (bigger soundstage, deeper bass, denser images etc.)

What attracted me to EgglestonWorks is the organic way they produce my kind of music – classical, jazz and vocals. The sound is seamless – the top to bottom integration, to my ears, is excellent, no one spectrum stands out in particular. They also present good body and tonality to the sound. When I listen to jazz for example, I’d think to myself that the double bass sounds so good, it has rhythm, is taut and goes low; when the saxophone comes on, I’d then go, ‘wow, what sexy tone this thing has’; and then the cymbal work has my attention, and I’d be impressed, ‘hmmm… this is rich and smooth…’.

(The Siltech Forbes Lake brought this quality out even more – bass, mid, treble all gain in stature, music flows from one note to another like liquid. But that is the story for the Siltech review)

The other attraction is that they are not afraid to be played loud. One can almost sense as if the loudspeakers are gleefully lapping up every orchestra crescendo or every thwack on a drum track for lunch, with no hint of breakup or distortion at all.

But they are no brute. Matched to my Pass Labs XA60, the NINEs have a slightly warmish tonality, which makes music sound natural. Not that they are totally forgiving, but this quality together with the amps make some badly recorded CDs more bearable.

One thing I do not treat the Egglestons right currently is the space I provide them with. They need bigger space than my current room. The soundstage’s dimensions are restricted and the images are slightly congested.

Looking at the bright side, what this means is that I can get even more performance out of them once I get a bigger room – so I foresee they will stay with me for many more years to come, and I have no complaint about that.