Tower Speaker Reviews

Listening
Having just reviewed the superb, more expensive RBH Signature system ($5475, October 2002), I tried to downscale my expectations of the modestly priced Cambridge SoundWorks rig before doing any listening. One of the last things I'd played through the RBH system was a DVD-Audio disc of Gerry Rafferty's Can I Have My Money Back? (Silverline 2280639). When first issued in the early 1970s (on Transatlantic in the UK and Blue Thumb in the US), this album's melodic, hook-filled, McCartneyesque music and pristine sound quality made it one of my favorites. While the original UK vinyl trounces the DVD-A's sonics by a wide margin, the digital disc, which has a surround-sound ambience track, sounds reasonably good, and I'm happy to see this wonderful music again brought to the attention of the music-buying public. (The disc's Dolby Digital track will play in any DVD player, but the DVD-A track sounds better.)

When I listened to the Rafferty disc for the first time through the Newton Series, I thought something might be wrong with the CSWs or my setup. The bass—the foundation of the music—was deep and robust, but it seemed plodding and tonally indistinct. The mids and highs sounded slow, dark, grainy, and almost formless, with a profound loss of detail and coherence. "Where are the instruments?" I wondered. Rhythmically, the system sounded sluggish and thick, with none of the RBH's clarity, vibrancy, and high-frequency extension and air. I couldn't follow individual instruments in an arrangement; the musical events had turned to soft, formless mush.

So startling were the differences between the CSW and RBH systems that I felt obliged to shut the Newtons down and check all connections and A/V receiver settings. Everything was configured and wired correctly. I checked that the tweeters were operating. They were. I turned down the subwoofer level and contour controls. To no avail.

That evening, my wife and I watched Martin Scorsese's fabulous The Last Waltz, which neither of us had seen since its first release in 1978. With no sonic reference point, the Newton Series did an acceptable job with the extremely well-recorded 5.1-channel musical soundtrack. Low-frequency extension and dynamics were not disappointing, though overall bottom-end control was somewhat soft and sluggish. Not that the sound was boomy—the transition from the very low bass to the midbass was skillfully and smoothly handled by the combination of passive woofer and powered sub.

It's what the system did above that range that was the problem. Dark, thick, and dry, the Newton Series seemed incapable of reproducing high-frequency transients with anywhere near the speed, precision, and clarity of similarly priced systems I've reviewed. When I watched The Last Waltz again with another, admittedly far more expensive Piega speaker system currently under review, the improvements in instrumental timbres, rhythmic certainty, overall speed, and resolution of low-level detail were profound.

Thanks to its configurable S300 surround speakers, the Newton Series performed well spatially, producing a coherent bubble of sound that enveloped the room, and skillfully reproducing front-to-rear and side-to-side pans. No complaints there. For whatever reasons, the MC500 center-channel seemed to provide a better overall tonal balance and resolve more detail than the Towers, with male and female voices free of telltale response aberrations such as chestiness or boominess. Sibilance, as you might imagine, wasn't a problem, given the dark overall sound. Thanks to its vertically arrayed midrange and tweeter, the MC500 covered a wide listening angle evenly, and couldn't be faulted in terms of vocal clarity and comprehensibility.

The problems I've noted were mostly sins of omission. Once my ears had acclimated to the CSW system, the problems, while still obvious, were not as objectionable as sins of commission can be. Better to be soft, rolled-off, and indistinct than bright, hashy, and spitty—especially given the Newton Series' prodigious, reasonably well-controlled bottom end, which extended to below 30Hz. Based on the sound of the MC300 center-channel, using another two of those as L/Rs with a $999.99 Newton P1000 subwoofer might sound better while saving you some money.

Conclusions
As a complete full-range system for just over $3000, the Cambridge SoundWorks Newton Series T500 offers a great deal in terms of design, bass extension, and dynamics. It can play loud and handle explosions and other dynamic sound effects with ease. The designers had their engineering hearts in most of the right places, providing a powerful, built-in subwoofer in each 4-way T500 Tower; a 3-way center-channel that goes beyond the usual ill-conceived, horizontally placed D'Appolito midrange-tweeter-midrange array; and user-configurable surrounds. Build quality and fit'n'finish are also remarkably high for a product offering this much.

But the overall sound left much to be desired, and not just compared to speaker systems costing more than twice as much, like the RBH Signature. After living with the Newton Series T500, I couldn't help thinking of a similarly priced system I reviewed a year ago: Infinity's Interlude IL60 ($2900, January 2002). The floorstanding IL60 tower has built-in 12-inch, 500W powered subwoofers, R.A.B.O.S. bass equalization, and sophisticated Ceramic Metal Matrix Diaphragm drivers—and, like the T500, it's a 4-way design costing $2000/pair. I found its overall sound markedly superior to the T500's, though the Newton is, to my eye, far better-looking. The Interlude IL36c dedicated center-channel speaker ($500), with the same driver sizes and configuration as the similarly sized Newton MC500 (but using C.M.M.D. cones), also outperformed its CSW counterpart by a considerable margin. The 2-way IL10 surround ($400/pair) is not nearly as spatially flexible as the ingenious S300, but it nonetheless outperformed the CSW tonally and dynamically.

Still, my favorite speaker in the Newton Series system is the S300. If its spatial flexibility intrigues you, I definitely recommend it. As with all CSW products, you can try the S300s at home for 45 days and, if they don't timbrally match the rest of your system, you can send them back, return shipping paid.

Writing a negative review is never pleasant, especially when the engineering team put in extra effort and got most, if not all, of the fundamentals correct, and managed to put them in such a sturdy, attractive-looking package at such a reasonable price. It's doubly painful when it comes from a company I greatly respect, and that makes so many other well-regarded products. Perhaps the measurements will explain what so disappointed me about the system's sound. Bottom line: Infinity's comparably priced Interlude system outperformed the Cambridge SoundWorks Newton Series T500 by too wide a margin to ignore.