As some of you might remember my wife and I have long been fans of the older, louder Cerwin Vegas, her in particular. We've owned three pair of the DX9s, still what I consider one of the "best bang for your buck" speakers and have enjoyed them thoroughly over the years as our general purpose weapon of choice for low level two channel music listening, as fronts in our home theater system (great choice for fronts!) and as general party speakers (high efficiency and big power handling makes them very LOUD when needed and nearly indestructible!)

I sold our last pair (*her* last pair) not long ago when my speaker collection out grew our storage space, flipping between the DQ-20i and the AR9LS in their place. Recently I found a new home for my Infinity Kappas with a good friend of mine, someone I *think* could be a budding audiophile... or at least speaker junky She was good about the sale of the CVs, begrudgingly affirming my belief that the other two pair in our living room were capable of producing a higher quality listening environment than the CVs, but never quite happy.

So last weekend, when I tripped across an ad on CL for a pair of mint (a few snags in the grills, that's it) Cerwin Vega D9s, a speaker we had never owned or even so much as heard, for what I considered a very good price, I surprised her when out of the blue I asked her "Hey, what would you say if I told you I wanted to buy you a pair of Cerwin Vegas?" She was as curious as I was to see how the D9s would perform compared to our many memories of the slightly newer DX9s so we jumped in her Grand Cherokee (just big enough to carry them home!) and headed to Bellevue to pick them up!

We got them home and positioned them similar to what we would do with the DX9s and started listening... The first thing out of her mouth when YES "Owner of a Lonely Heart" came on over the cable channel (I know, not the highest quality recording to sample) was "I think the bass is a little loud."

For the previous month all she had heard were the AR9LS and occasionally the DQ-20i so I teased her a bit with "I think your ears have just grown accustomed to listening to speakers that do bass right."

We switched back and forth between the D9s and the AR9LS and more than once she exclaimed with amazement "That's the ARs?!?!?!?!!!!" I had to laugh. I showed her the L-pads on the D9s and explained how to make use of them and then left her alone for awhile to play whatever music she wanted to on them. Later that night we watched the new DVD release of "Defiance" (an excellent movie!) and like the DX9s the D9s were superb at movies, especially with high dynamic range sound FX, explosions and the like, but I think, like me, she has grown to prefer the sound of the ARs over the CVs, finally! They will probably live in our living room for a while more yet before I swap them with the DQs that are currently in storage.

Still a neat speaker! Previous owner said he had bought them new in 1989 and had since never lived some place where they could be placed and played to their full advantage... claiming that since new he had probably only played them a total of maybe 100 hours!

(click to see full size images)





This post has been edited by Oktyabr on June 08, 2009 04:38 pm