[gadawg]

After reading about the Neolith's I was excited to see them in person at the Magnolia Design Center in Houston. These things do look impressive ... even more so than I had imagined. They were being fed by a pair of MC1.2KW Macs with the new C1100 preamp. I did some casual listening with the cd's they had there with the 550 CD player also from Mac. What I heard was equally surprising as how they looked ... only in the not so good direction! First, I think the room had some issues and was nowhere near large enough with the speakers 3 feet from the front wall and as usual all the other walls were jammed with speakers.

First the good ... they had a very solid image with good separation between instruments and voices and there were very distinct layers in the presentation. Image height at times was very good. Also, even though the efficiency rating isn't as high as their hybrids, the big Mac's had no issue driving them louder than I wanted to hear.

Then the average ... I thought the bass was ok but didn't have the reach of the Wilson Alexx or even the Alexia. It was very tight and clean bass and not muddy in any way and I never once found myself noticing woofers being mated to the panel .. that was seamless.

Now the bad ... I've never heard a Martin Logan speaker with less depth or presence. After 5 min of listening I had listening fatigue and wasn't driving them all that hard. The thought I kept having was that there was just way too much high frequency energy in the room. I thought the c1100 pre might have warmed things up a bit but the overall presentation was bright and edgy and not emotionally involving at all.

I have to believe that the combo of too small a room, less than optimal setup, and overall room acoustics had to be causing most of the issues I was hearing. Heck, my system is not in the same league as this one but to my ears sounds worlds better. Hopefully at Axpona next year the Neoliths will be there and sounding the way I sure hope they can.

George