The cabinets are wide and shallow, and they aren’t especially heavy, and the drivers look quite ordinary. They are so traditional, a two way ported box. They look mundane, even in the beautiful finishes that Peter offers. Nothing in the last 30 years prepared me for the sound of these speakers. * All cable and power cords Audience AU 24 and one of JC Audio’s ISO on each piece of equipment The Sound * The Amp and the CD players sit on Sistrum stands * Sony 777es SACD player modified by Kern with Super clock II and power supply, blackgate capsĪnd vashay resistors and the VSEI 4.5 mod * WAVAC MD 300B SET Amp 10 Watts per channel, transformer coupled, with Western Electric * Audio Ideas Guide Imagers II circular neoprene ring on AN-E SE’s tweeters Then it seems to click, it’s wide, it’s deep and it’s big when it needs to be, and small and precise as it is right now as I sit here and listen to Mary Lou Lord sing and play her guitar. I turn on the music and ask them to imagine speakers being on the stands. When visitors have a really hard time with this, I get some speaker stands out, set the stands 5 feet from the front wall and three feet from the sidewalls. Now I can’t imagine why anyone would want speakers sticking out in the room when it’s not necessary for a lifelike soundstage. The truth is, the music is in the same place in my room, the speakers just simply moved. If you are like me and have spent all your audio life listening to speakers several feet out into the room, then at first this is a hard change. They sound great out in the room, (and even my publisher uses his beautiful AN/E SEC Silvers that way) but to get the full glory from them, I think they need to be in the corners. As Peter recommends, the speakers were place in the corners about 3 inches from the rear wall. The stands elevated the speaker to the point where my ears were parallel to the tweeter. Look at the capsule review of the Sistrums below. The speakers were set on two 10-inch Sistrum stands. My pair has the optional piano black finish. The SEs are 94.5dB efficient with Audio Note AN-SPx silver speaker cable, Audio Note solid silver wired inductors with Black Gate capacitors and Audio Note copper foil adjusters in an a Russian birch plywood cabinet. I thought they were best bang for the buck, having had plenty of time to listen to the SEC Silvers, which I could not afford, and the Ls that I wanted to step up from. The AN/E SEs were at the time right about in the middle of the line at $8,000 (2 1//2 years ago). All of them are 2-way in rear-ported enclosures with an 1″ tweeter and an 8″ bass driver. Now there are versions at $40,000 (SEC Signature) and over $100,000 (Sogon). At the time I got them, the Es came in $2,500, $4,000, $8,000, $12,000, and $20,000 (SEC Silver) versions with varying amounts of copper, silver, and Black Gates. My AN-E SEs are a couple of years old, they are not of the current model. Part of the uniqueness with any Audio Note product is that Peter makes several versions of each model. As we’ll see in this review, none of these apply to the AN/Es. At least with the QUADs there was a reason to think you should try something else because of the lack of deep bass, rolled off highs, and the fact that they couldn’t play loud.

If I ever get rid of them, I’m sure I’ll regret it even more than the QUADs. The Audio Note Es that sit in the corners of my room are there to stay I hope. It was in that pursuit that the Audio Note E speakers entered my life. I got off course for a few years and wandered into the land of soundstage and pinpoint imaging, but my love of music brought me back to the original pursuit. I spent a lot of time trying to find a speaker with the strengths of the QUADs and Klipsch, but without their shortcomings. There were many others that came home with me for evaluation, but there’s only one that I wish I had never gotten rid of, the QUAD 57s. There are a lot of speakers I have liked and owned: Advent, Altec, Celestion, Gershman, Infinity, KEF, Klipsch, Spender, Spica, and Vandersteen.

Audio note woofer