Enjoy!
TY, JD.
The middle son of my very excellent neighbors was home and available to help me move the lower cartons, mount the upper halves, and get them in the generally correct places, and they’re up…
…if not connected.. Here is a another view…
Sorry for the poor panorama, but U get the idea.. Currently they are sitting on a combination of carpet and concrete, and of course I have a bunch of alignment, leveling, and distance-setting to do.. I think I’ll biwire them using my current AQ Firebird for the MR and treble and some 8g. Neotec bass cable for the botton end, which will obviate any jumpers.
I’ll be driving them with my Conrad-Johnson ART108As, which are vacuumtubed monoamps with 160 Watts of max. power and which feature all-triode, class-A operation with fully regulated output-stage Voltage rails and the very highest quality parts available.
More later.
PS. Also just received the last solidstate stereo amp that Conrad-John ever designed and built, the MF-2550 SE.. It’s rated at 250 into 8 and 400 into 4, and the SE means special edition which means it has many of those super-excellent-sounding TF-TF* capacitors and special resistors.
Initial impressions?
Quoted from my note in ‘What’s Best…’:
"Got the FR30s running last evening after just ‘plopping’ them down where I always ‘plop’ my speakers and biwired them; this was done while using NO jumpers at the rears of the speakers.. First observation–not enough bottom-octave bass, so I turned on and level-adjusted the GoldenEar XXL SWs and solved that.. Second observation–WAY TOO MUCH treble energy for my tired, old, hearing-aided ears; rotated the speakers so that they’re pointed straight back and solved about half of the too-much problem, to the point that I could listen without grimacing.
The overall sound quality is now almost excellent.. In fact, and I don’t know how the FR30s do this, but they sound VERY much like my SoundLabs, which are still the best-ever-sounding speakers I’ve had.. I’ll soon be adjusting distance, leveling, footing, etc., but they’re definitely worth spending some time lowering that treble energy."
I have to state that their very positive similarities to the sounds of my SoundLabs is a bit uncanny and even a tad weird; last nite I got goosebumps occasionally while listening to many of my most-loved Late-Classical stuff.. Even in their production of a sense of spaciousness, they (with rear tweeter turned off) sounded very much like the SLs, and that’s quite a compliment! 
And this is NOT due to hope; I hear a different sound system about once a month, and NONE of them sounds as good or even much like my Soundlabs.
So, on: (1) soundstage and spaciousness, excellent, in spite of being a monopole;
(2) on overall resolution and musicality for the six octaves from midbass thru upper midrange, excellent;
(3) on treble, much (10dB?) too much for my ears, with or without hearingaids; and
(4) in bottom-octave bass, mostly inaudible but solved by turning on the GoldenEar XXL SWs and tweaking the levels; the low-pass filters were and are set at 40Hz. Rotating the enclosures to point squarely at the back wall eliminated some of the excess treble, but there’s still TOO MUCH.. But that’s solvable, isn’t it Chris??? (Chris, pls PM me.)
BTW, my biwiring has my AQ Firebirds running to the upper-cabinet terminals, and a separate cable running to the bass terminals on the bottom cabinet; this obviates any jumpers.
Here’s a gripe to Paul and Chris–I’ve hated those knurled-nut binding posts from the first time I met them, probably on an M700 amp.. They hurt my fingers to tighten or loosen, and while my 83YO hands and fingers still work well, I have to use pliers to tighten them adequately.. FWIW, I LOVE the Cardas bindingposts, so much that I pay the price for their best-ever CCRR models, the “billet Copper binding post with Silver plating and Rhodium flash”…
Hi Jeffrey,
Thanks for the great pictures.
There is a wrench that comes with the speaker that fits the top of the feet to loosten/tighten then so you do not have to use the knurling.
The treble presentation is quite flat on these I can send measurements etc. There is some break in effect where there is a bit less sheen from the tweeter but certainly not in the range you’re describing. I would recommend turning off the rear super tweeter if you feel like there is excess treble.
We do recommend not toeing in the speakers both for balance reasons and so as to excite the side wall of most rooms more and give a wider soundstage.
If you hearing condition is hyper sensitive to treble, have you tried EQ in roon, dirac or via another means? This would be far more universal for use with your hearing aids than trying to ask to re-engineer speaker passive crossovers (not something that we do on a one-off basis. Sorry. This is a product that has been in the market for 4 year and I am a single loudspeaker engineer working on new model lines. Please don’t expect a PM from the team on this.
Just for fun, you can try bi-wired SC at bottom terminals only, and use jumpers at the top. I prefer this arrangement precisely for the better balance between the high and low frequencies. In fact, using a pair of high quality jumpers for the top boxes gave me a more layback yet detailed high that I thought was what the designer intended. But of course it’s system dependent but FR30 is so versatile so you can try different cable applications.
