I was able to make my way to a local store today. Thought I was going to be able to demo the Salon2 - but, apparently they’d had them on the showroom floor for over a year and hadn’t sold a pair. So, they reduced the price (30%) just to get rid of them at which point they sold in 45 minutes... yesterday.
I’d brought 10 of my favorite SACDs - covering a wide range of music to listen to...
I listened to a pair of F226BEs which they had hooked up to a ML SACD player & ML amp. The ML player kept playing the 44.1KHz CD layer on the SACD. The sales guy couldn’t get the player to actually read the SACD layer. Finally he had to stream some songs from Tidal - kept complaining about the ML app and SW interface. I thought the speakers played some content very nicely; but other content did not sound right to me at all.
Next up, 802-D3... that room had been torn apart. Sales rep hooked up a 100W/ch amp to drive them. Mid/Low-range sounded muddy (under powered perhaps?) - I’ve heard them sound much better using the same SACDs at Best Buy Magnolia centers - so presumably it was the amp.
Lastly I tried the Aerial T7. These seemed to play nearly all the content I brought well; however they weren’t as good as the other speaker’s on the content that the other speakers excelled at.
Guess I’m going to need to find some other locations to do more demos.
Thanks again to y’all for the feedback and suggestions!