After waiting for a couple of weeks for them to arrive, these bad boys are finally here! I will do my best to keep the review into two separate portions: First all the objective facts about these and secondly, the subjective listening test.
Box, Packaging and Manual: The box looks like ordinary Pioneer, only the gold foil printing of the model number hints of the goodness that await inside. Everything is packaged individually and the set includes the speakers themselves, brackets for 5x7's, uni mount brackets for just about any 6.5" hole, tweeter wedge mount, tweeter hidden mount, crossovers and a gaggle of hardware. Folks, the Pioneer guys were very thorough in making sure they arrive in one piece and with everything you would need to have them playing in reasonable time. The manual is a series of practically inconprehensible pictograms, but does sport a very complete list of the Thiele-Small parameters for the woofer and crossover specs for running them active. The inside box lid also features a series of cut-outs for all the included mounting componetry.
Price and Availability: As many of you well know, I'm a bargain hunter and shop carefully for the best bang for the buck. These carry a suggested retail of $550 from Pioneer and can be had (or could hopefully be had again) for the tidy sum of $217 shipped, off eBay. Shiza, that's %50 off RRP! I purchased mine from "hificaraudioonline". I'll reserve judgement on my buying experience for now, but the 720's arrived in one piece and the box was factory sealed with all the serial numbers still there. Ebay is fresh out, but our friends at woofersetc.com, have plenty and the $50 price penalty over eBay is neglegable.
Meat and Potatos I lugged these heavy guys out of the styrofoam to be greeted by the most elegant looking woofers these eyes have seen in some time. They feel damn near indestructable at a less than svelte 6 pounds each! The basket and solid aluminum phase plug were carefully painted and appear to have been spit shined by the Chinese assembly folks before being boxed up. The 3 layer cone is thin, very rigid and terminates to a firm, microfiber surround. The voice coil appears to be just shy of 2" in diameter and all the glue work was performed without any slop. The screw down wire clasps are of a high quality and the tinsle leads are glued appropriately to the cone to prevent slap while you are showing off to friends! Guys, the woofers are worth $200 alone, they're that nice.
The tweeter is a soft dome made from treated Tetron fabric. The housing itself is sealed, damped and made from machined aluminum. The dome is protected by three thin resin bars and no other grilles are provided. Bummer on the grilles because these sound so good, you wouldn't want anything untoward to happen to them! The mounting options are flush, reverse flush and two-angle surface. The speaker leads are already soldered to the tweeter and that's fine with me.
Listening I carefully placed the set into my 2 cube test enclosures, rearranged my livingroom and placed them on 18", lead filled, spiked stands.
I first placed them off axis as that is how they would typically be installed in your car. Pioneer really did their homework with the off axis response as they sound great like this. The image was stable, wide and had very good depth in my smallish room. A real sense of space was represented on Fiona Apple's track Slow like honey and her voice was simply haunting. With my eyes closed, it really felt like a much bigger room and the detail in Fiona's voice was fantastic. Her voice has such delicate changes in pitch that are very hard to reproduce with realism and the Premiers really shine in this aspect. So delicate and airy these Premiers, it seems shameful to put them into my S2000 where I will miss all of their goodness.
Next up was Becker Brothers cd from 1990, Return of the Brecker Brothers. What a great disc for drums, upright bass and let's not forget the horns! Some of the tracks from this disc were on a great compliation cd from Boston Acoustics in the early 90's. Anyway, the 720's have hardcore bass extention for their size. The upright came over uncolored and each note was rendered with ease even as he played briskly on track 4. Impressive too was the midrange detail where my ears tire after a bit of cheap speaker torture. There was no audible dips or distortion at the 2k crossover point that I could hear. Just smooth all over with my only real complaint being that the tweeter had a touch more sparkle when I turned them on axis. Nothing a touch of eq couldn't bring back for sure.
Right now I'm doing a hodge podge of cd's from Dave Matthews to Dr. Dre. They don't really like rap too much. It could be the piss poor recording quality of most hip-hop, but they just don't sound natural like that. The rendering of rap seemed almost fake. I dunno. They were punchy and the bass is clean, I just think they really are accurate enough to reveal all sorts of flaws. Initially I thought the rap sounded bad because my ears were fatigued, but damn did Dave sound as good as ever! Dave's Matthew's solo album Some Devil has a great track entitled Gravedigger. His voice is raw here and the Premiers remained faithful, centering his voice just above the guitar with the drums just behind and to the right. Amazing stability here. I went back to the rap and it still sounded somewhat bad. Mabye I'm just not in a hip hop mood tonight.
Overall, these things are a steal and they don't really need tons of power to get loud. 100w a side would be plenty for the average listener and 200 for headroom junkies like myself! I like the gains a minimum..
Feel free to ask any questions and I will post better pics when my GF brings the good camera back.
Box, Packaging and Manual: The box looks like ordinary Pioneer, only the gold foil printing of the model number hints of the goodness that await inside. Everything is packaged individually and the set includes the speakers themselves, brackets for 5x7's, uni mount brackets for just about any 6.5" hole, tweeter wedge mount, tweeter hidden mount, crossovers and a gaggle of hardware. Folks, the Pioneer guys were very thorough in making sure they arrive in one piece and with everything you would need to have them playing in reasonable time. The manual is a series of practically inconprehensible pictograms, but does sport a very complete list of the Thiele-Small parameters for the woofer and crossover specs for running them active. The inside box lid also features a series of cut-outs for all the included mounting componetry.
Price and Availability: As many of you well know, I'm a bargain hunter and shop carefully for the best bang for the buck. These carry a suggested retail of $550 from Pioneer and can be had (or could hopefully be had again) for the tidy sum of $217 shipped, off eBay. Shiza, that's %50 off RRP! I purchased mine from "hificaraudioonline". I'll reserve judgement on my buying experience for now, but the 720's arrived in one piece and the box was factory sealed with all the serial numbers still there. Ebay is fresh out, but our friends at woofersetc.com, have plenty and the $50 price penalty over eBay is neglegable.
Meat and Potatos I lugged these heavy guys out of the styrofoam to be greeted by the most elegant looking woofers these eyes have seen in some time. They feel damn near indestructable at a less than svelte 6 pounds each! The basket and solid aluminum phase plug were carefully painted and appear to have been spit shined by the Chinese assembly folks before being boxed up. The 3 layer cone is thin, very rigid and terminates to a firm, microfiber surround. The voice coil appears to be just shy of 2" in diameter and all the glue work was performed without any slop. The screw down wire clasps are of a high quality and the tinsle leads are glued appropriately to the cone to prevent slap while you are showing off to friends! Guys, the woofers are worth $200 alone, they're that nice.
The tweeter is a soft dome made from treated Tetron fabric. The housing itself is sealed, damped and made from machined aluminum. The dome is protected by three thin resin bars and no other grilles are provided. Bummer on the grilles because these sound so good, you wouldn't want anything untoward to happen to them! The mounting options are flush, reverse flush and two-angle surface. The speaker leads are already soldered to the tweeter and that's fine with me.
Listening I carefully placed the set into my 2 cube test enclosures, rearranged my livingroom and placed them on 18", lead filled, spiked stands.
I first placed them off axis as that is how they would typically be installed in your car. Pioneer really did their homework with the off axis response as they sound great like this. The image was stable, wide and had very good depth in my smallish room. A real sense of space was represented on Fiona Apple's track Slow like honey and her voice was simply haunting. With my eyes closed, it really felt like a much bigger room and the detail in Fiona's voice was fantastic. Her voice has such delicate changes in pitch that are very hard to reproduce with realism and the Premiers really shine in this aspect. So delicate and airy these Premiers, it seems shameful to put them into my S2000 where I will miss all of their goodness.
Next up was Becker Brothers cd from 1990, Return of the Brecker Brothers. What a great disc for drums, upright bass and let's not forget the horns! Some of the tracks from this disc were on a great compliation cd from Boston Acoustics in the early 90's. Anyway, the 720's have hardcore bass extention for their size. The upright came over uncolored and each note was rendered with ease even as he played briskly on track 4. Impressive too was the midrange detail where my ears tire after a bit of cheap speaker torture. There was no audible dips or distortion at the 2k crossover point that I could hear. Just smooth all over with my only real complaint being that the tweeter had a touch more sparkle when I turned them on axis. Nothing a touch of eq couldn't bring back for sure.
Right now I'm doing a hodge podge of cd's from Dave Matthews to Dr. Dre. They don't really like rap too much. It could be the piss poor recording quality of most hip-hop, but they just don't sound natural like that. The rendering of rap seemed almost fake. I dunno. They were punchy and the bass is clean, I just think they really are accurate enough to reveal all sorts of flaws. Initially I thought the rap sounded bad because my ears were fatigued, but damn did Dave sound as good as ever! Dave's Matthew's solo album Some Devil has a great track entitled Gravedigger. His voice is raw here and the Premiers remained faithful, centering his voice just above the guitar with the drums just behind and to the right. Amazing stability here. I went back to the rap and it still sounded somewhat bad. Mabye I'm just not in a hip hop mood tonight.
Overall, these things are a steal and they don't really need tons of power to get loud. 100w a side would be plenty for the average listener and 200 for headroom junkies like myself! I like the gains a minimum..
Feel free to ask any questions and I will post better pics when my GF brings the good camera back.