As some of you know, my company is a dealer for Paradigm speakers. Originally, our goal was to mostly carry their in-wall products due to emphasis we have on good performing technology that fits people’s home décor. But no sooner than we listed the brand on our web site, we started to get a lot of calls, and I mean A LOT OF CALLS, from people wanting to buy the traditional floor standing units. So to take advantage of this opportunity, we decided to showcase a good sampling of Paradigms for our show floor.
If you have not looked, Paradigm makes a broad range of products. Not wanting to make our place look like the typical stereo box store, we wanted to be selective about what we showed. I must admit, I was rather resistant in carrying their smallest units. We have a focus on high-performance products and I just couldn’t see a little box performing well enough, especially in a large showroom (our space is wide open). But my team pushed by saying there were a lot of calls for their smaller units. So we decided to bring in two of their smallest speakers: The Atom and Signature S-1. I will write up another article on Atom and will focus on S-1 here.
S-1 is part of the Paradigm premier Signature line which itself as part of the Reference line (I know it is confusing but stay with me). The line has beautiful curved panels, best finishes, and their best performing transducers in them. This also means that it is the most expensive in the line. But being a Paradigm, the retail prices are still pretty reasonable by high-end measures. The S-1 is the smallest and lowest cost unit at $1,795 MSRP.
Here is a picture of our setup and the S1:
You can see the S1nestled between the supreme S8 to the right ($16,000), and Studio 20 to the left ($1,300).
Here is a close up:
You can see the diminutive size relative to my Motorola Droid2 phone. The whole thing is just twice as tall as my cell phone! We are talking small guys here. In the words of a friend who came to see them, “I could have 5 of these and no one would hardly see them in my room!”
Our source was a touch-screen Lenovo PC, filled with our reference tracks which we have listened to countless times now since I created them a while back.
To power this speaker, the first thought was to drive it with the Peachtree Nova. This is an $1,100 DAC+amp. It has an 80 Watt amp. The speakers did sound good with these but the real moment was when we hooked it up to the Mark Levinson 532H, 200 Watt/Channel, dual-mono amplifier ($8,000) with the Nova acting as the DAC via the USB connection. OK, shoot me. That is the “smallest” amp we had on hand
. Our new reference amp had arrived for the Revel side of the house and we retired the 532H placeholder to the Paradigm section.
The 532H really transformed the sound of these little gems. The highs became pristine clean. The mid-range was sweet and distortion free. Now get this. With the 532H, there was quite a good amount of bass. I had to keep telling visitors to put their hands on the speakers as they would think the S-8s were playing instead!
This was a revelation to me. I would have never intuitively tried to “over amp” small speakers like this but here I was. To confirm, we went back to the Nova. This time the difference was even more apparent. The highs became edgy, the bass lose, and the sound was just muddy. To be sure, it was still “hi fi” sound. But clearly the Nova was holding back what these little speakers could do.
We then compared the S1 against the S8. It was remarkable how much family resemblance there was. Tonally they sounded nearly identical. The highs and mids were exceptionally close. Of course, the bass improved fair bit now. But that was mostly it. You were not getting cheap sound vs. expensive but rather, the same experience with somewhat reduced bottom-end.
A lot of credit goes to Paradigm for taking such a small package, and at such low cost to reproduce sound so good and so clean.
Spec wise, these speakers have 8 ohm nominal impedance. Sensitivity is 87/90db spl. Frequency response varies +-2db from 65 Hz - 45 kHz (20 Khz off axis). Low frequency extension is 43 Hz. No wonder there is good bass there.
If you want to build a high-value but high-performance system, I can’t recommend these speakers highly enough. Their tiny size allows them to disappear in the room making it an easier sell to whoever approves your purchases.
If you have not looked, Paradigm makes a broad range of products. Not wanting to make our place look like the typical stereo box store, we wanted to be selective about what we showed. I must admit, I was rather resistant in carrying their smallest units. We have a focus on high-performance products and I just couldn’t see a little box performing well enough, especially in a large showroom (our space is wide open). But my team pushed by saying there were a lot of calls for their smaller units. So we decided to bring in two of their smallest speakers: The Atom and Signature S-1. I will write up another article on Atom and will focus on S-1 here.
S-1 is part of the Paradigm premier Signature line which itself as part of the Reference line (I know it is confusing but stay with me). The line has beautiful curved panels, best finishes, and their best performing transducers in them. This also means that it is the most expensive in the line. But being a Paradigm, the retail prices are still pretty reasonable by high-end measures. The S-1 is the smallest and lowest cost unit at $1,795 MSRP.
Here is a picture of our setup and the S1:
You can see the S1nestled between the supreme S8 to the right ($16,000), and Studio 20 to the left ($1,300).
Here is a close up:
You can see the diminutive size relative to my Motorola Droid2 phone. The whole thing is just twice as tall as my cell phone! We are talking small guys here. In the words of a friend who came to see them, “I could have 5 of these and no one would hardly see them in my room!”
Our source was a touch-screen Lenovo PC, filled with our reference tracks which we have listened to countless times now since I created them a while back.
To power this speaker, the first thought was to drive it with the Peachtree Nova. This is an $1,100 DAC+amp. It has an 80 Watt amp. The speakers did sound good with these but the real moment was when we hooked it up to the Mark Levinson 532H, 200 Watt/Channel, dual-mono amplifier ($8,000) with the Nova acting as the DAC via the USB connection. OK, shoot me. That is the “smallest” amp we had on hand
. Our new reference amp had arrived for the Revel side of the house and we retired the 532H placeholder to the Paradigm section.The 532H really transformed the sound of these little gems. The highs became pristine clean. The mid-range was sweet and distortion free. Now get this. With the 532H, there was quite a good amount of bass. I had to keep telling visitors to put their hands on the speakers as they would think the S-8s were playing instead!
This was a revelation to me. I would have never intuitively tried to “over amp” small speakers like this but here I was. To confirm, we went back to the Nova. This time the difference was even more apparent. The highs became edgy, the bass lose, and the sound was just muddy. To be sure, it was still “hi fi” sound. But clearly the Nova was holding back what these little speakers could do.
We then compared the S1 against the S8. It was remarkable how much family resemblance there was. Tonally they sounded nearly identical. The highs and mids were exceptionally close. Of course, the bass improved fair bit now. But that was mostly it. You were not getting cheap sound vs. expensive but rather, the same experience with somewhat reduced bottom-end.
A lot of credit goes to Paradigm for taking such a small package, and at such low cost to reproduce sound so good and so clean.
Spec wise, these speakers have 8 ohm nominal impedance. Sensitivity is 87/90db spl. Frequency response varies +-2db from 65 Hz - 45 kHz (20 Khz off axis). Low frequency extension is 43 Hz. No wonder there is good bass there.
If you want to build a high-value but high-performance system, I can’t recommend these speakers highly enough. Their tiny size allows them to disappear in the room making it an easier sell to whoever approves your purchases
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