Following up on the comparison of the Heissmann DXT-Mon 182 and AudioFirst Cadentia 3:
My TV/audio room is 20x16 with a downward-sloping, three-beam ceiling from 11' to 8' and a very large opening into another area of the home. It's a pretty good listening room, with reinforcing modes not as bad as other houses I've lived in.
Both speakers have been adjusted with AutoEQ in REW through a MiniDSP Flex 8's interface, plus a bit of touching up to the Heissmann's broad dip centered at about 3000hz.
The Cadentia 3 have an incredibly smooth response and extraordinary clarity, more so than any speakers I've ever owned in 47 years of audio hobbying. Detail out the wazoo, quite striking and unprecedented for me. And they play loud without even a suggestion of strain. But I'm not getting the depth of imaging I anticipated. Not sure if that's because they don't mash up frequencies owing to IM distortion, or something else. Ideas welcome.
The Heissmann are definitely not in the same league in smoothness of response. And I haven't, so far, been able to get the same flatness of response with EQ. The clarity is also excellent but cannot compete with that amazeballs midrange of the Cadentia. That said, the tweeter on the Heissmann is extremely fine. The imaging is superior to the Cadentia in my room, and is indeed beguiling for a box-type speaker. I haven't pushed them to compression levels and don't plan to; I wouldn't expect a speaker of that size to handle big peaks like the Cadentia do.
Next, I plan to boost the Cadentia broadly around, say, 2500hz a little bit in the same way I did the Heissmann and also play around with its room interaction by changing toe-in to see if it gives more spacious imaging. But I doubt it. I think the designer was aiming to bridge the divide between Gen/Neu narrow directivity with less room interaction and, say, Philharmonic Audio fairly broad dispersion resulting in more room interaction. A comparo of the Cadentia 3 and the KEF Blade 2 shows very similar directivity, particularly in the range I can hear at age 61 (above 12khz, zilch).
My Linkwitz LX521.4, of course, interact A LOT with the room because they're dipoles.
I used to think I would buy Gen 8351 or Neu KH 150, but the narrow directivity worried me. I use my stereo pair for double-duty TV (with family members) and music, so studio monitors aren't quite what I need. But I do LOVE the custom ruby-red offered in the 8351B. SOOOO tempted.
Not sure which speakers to keep. Both are, by far, the best conventional speakers I've owned -- and I've owned many, including Dutch 8C, though that's a closer call, for sure -- and I can happily live with either. I still have the Linkwitz dipoles, thinking I might refurbish them with custom woodwork and run them 1/2 of the year and the conventional speakers the other half, just for the hell of it.
For the money, I strongly recommend the DIY Heissmann DXT-Mon 182 if you have basic carpentry tools and skills. Just beautiful sounding, and very high SAF (spouse acceptance factor) because they are really cute and smallish.
For double that money and even without any carpentry skills to speak of, the Cadentia 3 are competitive (on paper) with very pricey studio monitors but more suitable for a mixed-use environment. Not small; a significant presence in a room; not even very pretty, really. My spouse is sort of okay with them, glad that at least there's 15" of air under them when up on stands so that you see the floor.
For fully-built, non-DIY speakers and a lot of money, I would be looking for the KEF Ref 1 Meta as the alternative, or else the Philharmonic Audio if you want lots of room interaction. I think that says a lot about AudioFirst as a new company -- engineering prowess, entrepreneurial risk in the same vein as Ray Cooke at KEF if you look back in time (he gave me a tour of KEF back in 1986, no kidding), and just plain nice to deal with.
