The Official Premier Acoustic Speakers Thread

[Yeha-Noha]

On Friday, my new PA-8C arrived from overstock.com.

It's a huge center speaker. It's mean and heavy and buillt like a tank. It's rock solid cabinet construction just like my PA 120 subs. The cabinet matches the PA 120 subwoofer's cherry finish and piano black top and bottom.

I got it to replace my Energy C-C100 which unfortunately was not up to the task of providing adequate sound in a large 30 x 20 room with cathedral ceilings. One of it's woofer blew thus making no sound at all. If you push the cone in manually by hand, you can feel and hear the voice coil scraping on the magnet pole. If you buy Energy speakers, I'd recommend buying their highest end products which are for me just way out of my price range.

That's why I went with the PA-8C. It's solidly built just like my subwoofer. The dual 8" woofers has the same piston area as one of my PA 120 subwoofers. The PA-8C sounds so much better than the C-C100. It's better built too. The C-C100 cost me about $275 four years ago. The PA-8C, $235.

I am still breaking it in. I have set it to large in my AVR's bass management during break in. The dialogue is already much tighter, louder, clearly more understandable, than the dialogue I got from the C-C100. My HT shares the same room with the dining room and kitchen. Even when I am making a snack in the kitchen while a movie is playing, I can hear all the dialogue just loud and clear. That never happened with the C-C100. I had to be in the HT area before I could clearly understand the dialogue. This baby just seems to be a dialogue projector. I don't know how else to put it. And I have positioned it horizontally under my 52" LCD screen. If vertically placed on the floor, it's nearly as tall as my C-300 towers. I will probably set it to small after break-in especially since it's teamed up with the C-300 towers which cannot keep up with the PA-8C set to large. Once I buy a pair of PA-8F towers, not sure when depending on how long it takes me to sell my C-300 towers, I will have a timbre match fronts again. However, I really haven't heard any unusual sound effects by not timbre matching so far.

The PA-8C bass is another story. It integrates quite naturally with my dual PA 120 subs. It holds its own too. It's not boomy bass like the C-C100's. I had to plug both ports in the C-C100 to reduce the boominess. The PA-8C bass, otoh, is tight and very musical too.

The PA-8C is a tad brighter in the highs than the Energy C-series speakers. I kind of expected that with the silk dome tweeter which seem to be more oriented toward the highs. The highs are however not overbearing but are clear, natural, and distinct. The highs are dispersed quite well throughout the room.

Here's another thing, I ran YPAO, of course, after adding the center. To my surprise the parametric EQ only corrected the room response for two frequencies: at 200 HZ -1.5 and at 600 Hz +2.0 db. The C-C100 was PEQed at over a dozen frequencies the worse being at 63 Hz where it cut the level -10 db and again -8 db at 100 Hz even with the port plugs in place! At the other end of the sound spectrum, the C-C100s range in the 5000 HZ to 10000 Hz would be corrected for the lack of highs by applying 8000 Hz PEQ +6.0 db. The PA-8C is sitting in the exact same location as the C-C100! I really do like the slightly crisper highs in the center channel though. My wife instantly noticed the difference and she said that was money well spent. Wow, now getting a high WAF is the icing on the cake!