Technische Daten:

One 1" Cloth Dome Tweeter, Two 4 1/2" Mid/Bass Drivers

MFR: 70 Hz  - 20 kHz ± 1.5 dB

Impedance: Nominal 7 Ohms

Sensitivity: 91 dB - 2.83 Volts Applied

Size: 20" H x 8" W x 10 1/2" D

Weight: 25 Pounds Each

Sound:

Setting the SC-Is up on 24" stands straight out of the box in the room positions that I generally have found to work best with small free-space speakers—the Spica TC-60s, for example—proved disappointing. The balance, while neutral through the upper midrange and treble, was excessively lean, with a shelved-down bass. But before I started experimenting with position, I read the comprehensive owner's manual.

There it was, on page IV-4, paragraph D: "The driver's 'free-air resonance'...is directly related to the combined moving mass...and the mechanical compliance of the suspension system. Since [the suspension] is usually fabricated of an impregnated cloth or foamed-plastic material, whose 'mechanical stiffness' becomes slightly more compliant as it vibrates and flexes over time, usage tends to gradually lower the resonant frequency of the driver—a desirable trait that improves, to a small degree, a loudspeaker's performance."

Although the drive-units receive some break-in at the factory, DAL suggests it takes about 12–15 hours for the woofers to reach their specified 80Hz bass-tuning frequency. Accordingly, I ran them in on the pink noise and swept-tone track from the XLO/Sheffield Lab Test CD at 6V RMS for 12 hours before I did any serious listening (footnote 2). The playback level for the pair would have been a neighbor-disturbing 95dB, but I wired the speakers out-of-phase and faced them toward each other, a couple of inches apart. In this way, though the drive-unit suspensions are being mechanically worked, almost all the acoustic output cancels. The cancellation was excellent, confirming DAL's claims for close pair matching. What sound is left is mainly radiated from the enclosures; it was interesting to note that this was dominated by frequencies in the middle of the midrange: 500–700Hz. Perhaps this was an indicator of the SC-I's cabinet resonant behavior (see later).

Well, after a day of muted whooshing sounds, I set the speakers back where they'd been and put on the new Peter McGrath–engineered Mahler First Symphony on Harmonia Mundi (HMU 907118). The lower-midrange/upper-bass was now more fleshed out than it had been before. While this will always be a rather light-balanced loudspeaker, it no longer sounded lean'n'mean. The power region of the orchestra was reproduced in pretty good measure, with the big bass-drum whacks at the start of the fourth movement superbly well-defined. Ultimately, however, I moved the speakers closer to the wall behind them. This did bring up the midbass, but too close to the wall and the speakers' superb soundstaging was compromised. SC-I owners should experiment carefully here—mere inches can mean the difference between perfect and paltry sound. But with the SC-Is some 15" in front of the LP shelves, the bass drum in the Mahler had a satisfying mix of leading-edge clarity and weight to the body of its tone. Perhaps also because I was now sitting a little farther away, the upper mids now seemed slightly better integrated with the treble.

Putting the bass to one side, the area where the SC-I did perform better than almost any speaker I've had in my listening room—even the $8000/pair B&W Silver Signatures—was in the solidity of the stereo images it produced. In this respect, this inexpensive speaker seemed as good as my memories of the much more expensive SC-IV. Centrally placed vocalists seemed to hang in space just in front of the plane of the speakers. Was this palpability of image accurate? It must have been; "stereophonic" is derived from the Greek word stereos, meaning solid. More solid is more better, right?

On the "Mapping the Soundstage" tracks on Stereophile's Test CD 2 and our forthcoming Robert Silverman Concert CD (see November, pp.68–75), the soundstage was as accurately and stably defined as I've ever heard. The sound of the voice and handclaps in each case could be heard to take the path expected from the microphone technique used, with very good image depth. This is excellent performance.