Three takes on an EPI speaker- good, fair, & "Eh"

Three opinions, one speaker- good, great, or "Ehhh.." EPI 100s.

Proof it's all in the individual listener's ear...

Here's a quote from a Mr. Walter Tice off of classic speaker pages website discussing the EPI tweeter, which he feels is of an inferior design...

"Used a fairly inferior converse tweeter with poor dispersion which was somewhat mitagated (sic) by mouting (sic) the drivers on two different sides of the box."

From that same page, here's a Mr. Tom Tyson's view on EPI, more neutral, at least in my opinion...

"...EPI Epicure was one of many spinoffs from Acoustic Research. Most notable about Epicure was their "inverted" concave-dome tweeter, reversed from the usual convex dome tweeters made my most folks... Interestingly, they never quite reached the performance level-- flat response, off-axis response, low-distortion and clean sound that AR speakers had. This was probably due to the fact that few other manufacturers went to the trouble to measure the performance of their speakers like AR."

Now, here's a very positive quote from musician and producer Tore Johansson, of Cardigans and Scottish guitar band Franz Ferdinand production fame, discussing his EPI 100s that he uses in the studio for monitors...

"...for a couple of years I've had these American speakers from the '60s/'70s called EPI or Epicure. I have a small model called the EPI 100 with one eight-inch woofer and a concave tweeter and they're so good. I'd have to go up to $10,000 to get something that have a similar sound and these cost me almost nothing, maybe $200. I bought them from a company in America called Human Speakers. Normally when I switch between nearfields and those big Altecs, the difference is too big and I can't make up my mind. But when I switch between the EPIs and the Altecs, it's fine. They're so much more like a proper studio monitor. Everyone who passes the studio comments on how great they sound and they can't believe how cheap they are."
There you have it. While no one is saying that the EPI is a bad speaker, I'm sure one can deduct that the three quoted here all have a certain view of the speaker.

Best part about it, two have the potential of being totally wrong, depending on your viewpoint.

But no one really is wrong. It's all personal preference, my fellow AKers!

For the first two quotes about the EPIs, go here-

http://www.classicspeakerpages.net/epi/epi.txt

To read more about Tore Johansson, go here-

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jun...s/ferdinand.htm

*Note- Pic attached is of Tore Johansson's own personal EPIs.

This post has been edited by thedelihaus on August 29, 2006 08:32 am

Attached Image (Click thumbnail to expand)

Well, Paul, I regret to say that unfortunately I don´t think EPI speakers were ever sold over here, so I cannot give you any sort of opinion.

Regarding the quote.....you know.

Jorge