First you'll assemble the stands. Four screws bolt the base with its metal outriggers and top-adjustable cone footers into the uprights. Another four bridge the uprights with two metal braces on top. One of those braces receives a wooden alignment dowel, the other the thru-bolt into the speaker's metal base. I much preferred this stand's solidity, level feature and matte finish to the high-gloss single pillar stand I'd tried under the Raidho X1t. Like it, the dual-pillar stand slants the speaker back. That creates time alignment and a slightly racier look. I found the docked combo very attractive.
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This system began with a battery-power Shanling M3 Ultra microSD transport forwarding USB to an ultracap-powered Soundaware D300Ref bridge. That forwarded I²S via 6m HDMI cable to a Denafrips discrete R2R Terminator Plus DAC. Next the system hit an icOn 4Pro for remote-controlled autoformer volume, then an icOn active 4th-order filter with 80Hz high pass to a Crayon CFA-1.2 speaker amp; and 80Hz low pass to a dual 9½" active Dynaudio sub whose 2.5ms latency compensates by 86cm forward placement on the sidewall. In this kind of space with a sub, you'd not want or need bigger boxes. On the visual score, cute wins every day! How about break-in? "I think if you let them run for 50 hours, they should be past the significant part of it. The whole 300-hour discussion is just not worth the wait." Cute indeed!
When the approved burn-in period was over, I penned a brief MB1B overview for darko.audio. There emergency eye surgery and strict doctor's orders had temporarily paused usual content creation. In it I paraphrased this speaker's core personality: easy listening with substance. I defined the first half as absence of even subliminal annoyance; and the second as reaching into the 6½" to 8" Ø drawer not for 35Hz bass—think mid 50s instead—but vocal/instrumental density. It's no tipped-up, forward, pseudo-res-hawking 'quickie' transducer. It won't spoil the majority of our music-first library by brutalizing its inherent recording-quality flaws. I also wrote that "part of this amenable voicing must be down to a tweeter that doesn't suffer the distortions generic dome tweeters typical for this class do. Across the wider presence region which dovetails carbon-fibre and poly film with crossover overlap, there's zero metallic aggravation." As to how close it comes to genuine Raidhos, "you won't get their amazing resolution or startling microdynamic reflexes. That takes more extreme drive units. But you will get a similarly refined tonality that won't play favorites on musical styles; and an arguably more to-the-gut perspective because this tuning speaks less to 'seeing' and more to 'feeling'. Whenever a voicing is less about the quasi visual aspects and more about tone, textures and sonic materialism instead of ultimate airiness, speed, precision or transparency, it more naturally speaks to our gut. That's back at easy listening. It makes that from-the-belly engagement easier. It's a different connection point than listening with one's eyes for maximum separation and imaging spectacles."
That's the nutshell version gleaned primarily from this upstairs setup. To unpack it more fully, let's travel downstairs where other ancillaries drove up the res; and bigger cubic volume the SPL.
