The circle is now complete — Day 1 with the eFicion F300

Any speaker that shows up — anywhere — in a piano black finish is gonna draw looks. A modular one with all-black drivers, well, that’s gonna draw comments. As I was unboxing the eFicion F300s today, my wife’s helpful comment was: “you know the Emperor is going to be looking for those.”

“They do have a Darth Vader kind of look, don’t they?” I replied.

“If Vader had a thing for R2D2, maybe,” says she.

I love this woman.

The Star Wars references are almost too easy to make, so I should probably restrain myself and show some maturity. Yeah, like that’s going to happen.

The speakers are … ah … dense. Is that nice way of saying heavy? I think it’s a little less unkind than “tubby”, “fat” or even robust. Though, what I was thinking as I was wrestling them into the house, then into the basement, and then into position was:

“DUDE!”

And …

“I really need to start loving low-frequency restricted speakers. I really really really need to stop obsessing about full range speakers. Small is good! Small is good!”

And …

“UGGHHH.”

And …

“I am your Father.”

These speakers are the dual-module variety (obviously), so that does mean that there’s gonna be a lot of extra wiring on the back to hook up the crossover. My loaners came with jumpers, but I’m not certain that this is a standard option. Dunno. I’ll check.

Okay, I checked. Yes, those jumpers come with the speakers. That piano black finish also comes standard.

By the way, the price on these speakers is $16,900. Y-e-e-e-ouch! I’ll refer folks to my explorations on the difficulty of finding a full range speaker for under $20k, however. It ain’t easy. Yes, I do have some Tekton Pendragons in here too — but I’ll save you the suspense of having to wait for the fuller write up. Yes, the Tektons are great and yes they go deep. But. And lets leave it at that for now.

They sport two tweeters, which I think is interesting, one a Heil Air-Motion Transformer (not a “ribbon”) and one that’s rear firing. Not sure that that’ll do much for my set up as I have a bunch of corner-traps that’ll probably obliviate anything heading in that direction, but I’ll spin the reflector on the ASC Tube Trap around just to see if I can get some extra ambiance with the scatter. Maybe I can sense something, a presence I’ve not felt since ….

The drivers on this speaker are all top notch. Carbon fiber all over the place. Impressive. Most impressive.

It’s a little unsettling, staring at me. It finds my lack of faith … disturbing.

“What about vibrations or interference from the two cabinets?” you might reasonably ask.

Vibrations? No. Leave them to me. I will deal with them myself. With Stillpoints.

My review unit came tricked out with a totally optional and completely non-standard set of 16 top of the line stainless steel Stillpoints Ultras ($225 each, or an additional $3600 as I received them) to separate the mid/tweeter unit from the bass cabinet, and to lift the bass cabinet off my carpet. Pretty fancy, if you ask me.

Apparently, there’s another version of this cabinet with “twice the Stillpoints technology” embedded (read: +$7200 option) that “smokes” the version I have here. Bruce Jacobs, the distributor for both Stillpoints and eFicion, said he’d send me some pics to include as “color commentary” in the fuller write up. You’ll have to suffer along with my feeble efforts until then.

I really don’t have much to say about the sound right now as I’m still working out positioning and whatnot, but I’ll offer this: the mid-to-top is pretty shocking. Very clear. Very open. Immediate. Bass also reaches way lower than my Maggies (duh). Dynamics are up, and these suckers fill a room, no question. In fact, I’m finding it really difficult to concentrate on this post as my head keeps whipping around.

The Force is strong with this one.