In the midst of all this drama, including my own critiques of Eric's behavior, I do agree with others that we can criticize available data, design decisions, and handling of reviews without resorting to adhominems and exaggerations about the measurable performance of Tekton speakers as a whole.
It seems like a lot of people are now dismissing the measured performance of all the Tekton speakers out of hand when we just don't have enough to say that about the brand as a whole. Yeah, it'd be great it Eric shared some, but we also shouldn't be assuming all the Tekton's suck from a handful of measurements.
Edit: To be clear, I think everyone is more than entitled to ignore Tekton after the threats of litigation and such. I'll certainly never be buying a speaker from them, barring some oscar-worthy redemption from Eric. But this specific post was prompted by feeling people were talking as if these were the worst-performing speakers of all time, which I don't feel is true. I'm just trying to recalibrate the conversation a bit.
Even after this debacle, I'm fine with most of the Tekton data I've seen. This Lore just measured okay, but I voted "not terrible" (I switched my vote to poor after learning about the feet but then switched it back). Keep in mind Erin *liked* the ones he measured (certainly more than the
JBL L52 I sent in myself!). The Moab's posted earlier weren't that bad. And here's a stereophile
measurement of the Tekton Impact, which was actually the first measurement of a Tekton speaker I'd seen:
I remember being very pleasantly surprised at that directivity performance for a speaker that looks like this:
Granted, the quasi-anechoic measurements make it hard to discern what's going in the lower mids and upper bass, but that is generally a flattish response that would probably score decently in the preference formula, and that most people would evaluate as solid if they didn't know they were tektons. And keep in mind they are $2000 a pair for dual 6.5-inch woofers (and maybe too many tweeters lol). So I never got the sense Tekton was trying to outright scam, even after seeing Eric's behavior here, and I even think he's trying to offer a decent value.
Here's another one
measured by stereophile with triple tweeters.
That one's a bit worse in the listening window, but far from awful. I've seen worse from much bigger names. The directivity in particular is once again quite solid.
I found these measurements of the old Tekton 8.1T, a simple 2-way bookshelf, in a
blog post from 2009. Note the lack of smoothing and tall vertical axis.
So yes, an awful reaction to to reasonable criticism, inconsistent remarks about measurements, questionable design decisions, and unimpressive measurements for some models are all fair game. But there's no need to pile on with personal attacks, and let's not draw immediate conclusions about speakers that haven't actually been measured extensively yet.
I'm not saying this to defend Eric, but simply to point out that we should stick to what's actually known, and isolate what actually needs to be criticized.