Tír Na HiFi

Incidentally, if I decide to jump in and buy these without even hearing them, you can blame Steve more or less completely. That guy has always been a bad influence!!

Well... not that I would tell you what to do or anything.... but if I may suggest....

Contacting the seller (whoever they are)..... and ask them would they take off the cost of you traveling over for a audition if you were to subsequently buy them....lets say 300 pounds between flights and staying a night over in a B&B / hotel.

Travel over Friday evening...spend all Saturday auditioning.... travel back to Dublin late Saturday night.

It would be a sort of adventure.....with the added bonus of getting the cost of the trip off the purchase price of the speaker. Might be worth it?

I'm actually genuinely considering that, Adrian. Been looking at flight options to Turin and it's a bit awkward, but I certainly haven't ruled it out.

Just knocking on an open door Si! That UK website just goes to show what a bargain those Elipsa SE's that you've spotted really are....

Best of luck with this. In the big scheme of things while taking a trip might be a hassle it seems worth it to get a better sense of the speakers. Wish I could remember the SF speakers better but stuff starts to blur over the years.

Anyway hope it all works out.

http://www.on-off-hifi.de/487-0-CDL1138 ... liope.html
Maybe this might be more bang for buck and move you off the Wadia??

Bit too cheap, Tony. Looks like it came out of a Christmas cracker.

Simon , your plan to visit Turin is good , if only to reassure you that the speakers exist and this isn't a scam. You could always drive and bring them back if you're smitten.

Okay, it seems sensible that I should go and hear them, but the more I think about it the less sure I am about that. I know it sounds crazy, especially from somebody who's blue in the face telling newbies that they need to hear before they buy, but bear with me. Here's my current thinking:

1) Cost.
It's going to cost me a few hundred Euro (at least!) to fly to Milan, hire a car, drive it to Turin and then drive it to a different airport in Milan to fly home on the same day. There are no direct flights to Turin that I can find. It will also require a day off work, since weekend flights are even dearer. Staying overnight would give a tiny bit more flexibility in flights, but not by much, and accommodation just adds to the cost anyway. If I get there and hate them, then I'm a few hundred Euro down. If I get there and like them, then the price has effectively gone up by a few hundred Euro. Which would all be fine, except...

2) What will I learn?
As Ken correctly pointed out, the first and most important thing I'd learn is that the speakers exist and it's not a scam. That's a big question in internet purchases, and I'll come back to that in a minute. Aside from that, I'm not convinced I'd learn anything really substantive, and this is borne out in experience of similar trips and tests in the past. If I love them, it doesn't mean anything about how they might sound in my room (bitter experience there!) and if I hate them, I'll just assume that there are problems elsewhere in the system or room I'm demoing them in. I've heard enough good speakers sound horrible to know that it's hard to make a definitive statement in a strange room and a strange system. The fact-finding trip we did for Steve a couple of years ago really drove this home. Some speakers we heard I might as well say I never heard since the set-up was so different to my own I just couldn't get a handle on them. Even the speakers Steve eventually bought sound COMPLETELY different here than in the demo we had over there. And I don't even need to go that far: My Kharmas sound different in every room I hear them, as do the Quad 57s I have at home. The point is, I don't think I can make a genuine, final decision without hearing them in the man cave, and the only way to do that is to buy them since there's zero hope of a home demo.

3) What if it's a scam?
If the guy is a scammer, he's playing a very long con indeed. He's active on forums and has been for a couple of years, talking about these speakers and the rest of his system as any of us would. He's been very forthcoming in private correspondence about the best kind of amps for them, how much space they need, etc., and has sent me a few extra photos of his system for good measure. He has good feedback from audio-markt.de for other transactions (these speakers are listed there too), and was perfectly happy with the idea of my coming over to Italy to hear them. He favours collection for obvious reasons, but if I want them shipped we've talked about how best to get them here without danger of destruction. Basically, he sounds like one of us. Now, of course that doesn't mean all is tip-top, there could still be issues, but I've no alarm bells going off whatsoever.

4) Other options
I have been researching speaker options for a while, and these are probably the front-runners from that research in terms of cost, performance bracket and availability. I've loved other Sonus Fabers I've heard, they have the kind of sound I'm looking for now, and the Elipsas are meant to be easier to position in smaller rooms than many others (due to their shape they can go closer to side walls, which is my major problem). There are some other alternative speakers on the cards (e.g. the new B&W range, the new Kii Three) but they're new, they're not going anywhere, and they're all more expensive than these SFs.

5) I need to scratch this itch
There's nothing else for it, even if they don't work I need to get them and be sure. I won't even be that annoyed if I end up having to move them on in a few months, because at least I'll know definitively. Besides, they look awesome, and I want them in my room.

6) I can almost certainly sell them on without much loss
Back to part 1 here and trying to keep costs down, but I'm pretty sure if these don't work out I can shift them without taking much or any financial hit. They're a mainstream speaker with a mainstream audience, not something quirky that nobody knows about, so they're sellable. People do this stuff all the time elsewhere, buy something they take a fancy to, sell it on if it doesn't work out. We're a little bit isolated from that here in Paddy-land, but it seems to be the way of things elsewhere.

So why have I bothered type all this out? Because if I can agree a deal I'm probably going to pull the trigger anyway, and I'm still persuading myself I'm not nuts. I know, I know, you don't have to tell me. It's crackers.

I'll keep you posted.

Best of luck Simon.... however is your avatar not of SF's?

I cannot see you going too badly wrong with the SF's ... even if they are not perfect... they will not be too far off the mark.

I do believe variety is important... and one should welcome a change every now and again, Hi Fi is a bit like a voyage... passing different coastlines, ports, oceans etc etc.