I've had the A8H speakers that I've been trying to make them work but I think I'm going to return them. Not because they are bad but because they don't really fit my casual listening preferences.
I would say they sound large, neutral, very DAC dependent, and fast.
The stereo field and perceived size is way larger than I am used to. It's a little bit intimidating actually. It's like going to an IMAX theater to watch a casual TV show when you would like it on a small screen in your own home. There's a sense of it being imposed upon you at times. Great reference track for these speakers is Marta - Bip. When the bass drops in, it is ridiculous. Towers over the song like a skyscraper. Feeling of verticality.
The tonality is neutral, but the tweeter is just so polite and effortless it's offensive or less casual to use. Let's take a step back and remember the T-Series (T5V T7V) - extremely similar tweeter that sits in a wave guide that is more than a little bit similar, except they voiced that speaker with an explicit high shelf, because they knew that these AMTs are too polite and don't really work in untreated rooms. They are too fast, too dampened, too vertically limited, and too clean to appear as neutral. I don't mean flat. *Neutral*. Flat is a graph measurement, neutral is the perception of balance. Neutral may not be achieved even when flatness is shown because room interactions or systems that require more treatment to shine. Why is this relevant? If you just set these speakers up casually and run a calibration on them, they are recessed sounding. It's also kind of bizarre that they are the next step after the T-Series, somebody might like a step up over the T-Series and expect a different presentation but will be first perceived as smoother and polite in a bad way. You have to EQ them hotter. They don't cut through anything. They are too clean!
The wave guide is also just intentionally a bit narrow, but it's not the most narrow out there which is nice, and it's also nicer that they have less than 1m driver blending, so you really can use them in nearfield setting.
I don't really have much to say about the mid-range or the bass. The bass is great. It's fast and it definitely removes the use of my sub.
Speaker is also really DAC dependent. Yeah I know I'm going to get shit for saying that. That is the experience I had though. I measured these speakers through multiple different interfaces, which also means different preamps, different capacitors, different tuning, etc. The frequency curves I got were less than 0.5 dB apart. They were nearly identical and yet the sound presentation was vastly different (whatever is causing it is a different variablez it's just not ez pz frequency based). These speakers really do expose different styles of transient preference and width. With the SSL 2 MKII, they became instantly fatiguing and had overly punchy, "slammed" at you style dynamics. Ain't nobody going to be touching a compressor because you can seemingly hear every 0.1 dB of compression used. On the Apogee Boom, that all disappears... No tension and somebody pulled out a Bitwig ASDR modulator to make the transients leaner and ultra digestible. Wider and explicitly layered sounding, like they were gunning for headphone presentation with air added to everything so you can hear the minutia. And then you have other ones like Focusrite which presents a forward image and shows off crass loudness (Pop songs that shout at you like Ava Max - How Do I Dance, Lady Gaga - Garden of Eden), but wider and less aggressively than SSL. These speakers just absorb the presentation like a sponge of whatever you give them.
These are way higher quality than the IN-5, but it's the presentation style that's rubbing me wrong as just a casual listener who doesn't really want to massively modify my listening environment. I think I am just used to a smaller soundstage and presentation. These are so soft/flat/textureless, they don't really fit the kinds of music I listen to or inspire me. Correction, I could tolerate them except the damn tweeter. Eqing them goes a long way but I'm just I don't know I guess I have buyers remorse or perhaps have golden handcuffs because I got them on an amazing deal would not like to let them go because I can recognize some of the quality they have even if it doesn't line up with my preference. I think I'm definitely a dome person now.
