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Review 2 of 2 Summary:
The RM30si is a slightly scaled-down adaptation of the RM50si. The differences are a slightly smaller physical size, an eight-inch woofer instead of a ten-inch, and $1700.
I bought mine a few years ago after a fairly extensive series of auditions throughout the high-end audio stores of Manhattan and Brooklyn. (An aside: New York City can be a very unpleasant place to shop for this sort of thing.) One of the best experiences I had was at the relatively small, but prominently placed Park Avenue Audio. The people at Park Avenue Audio actually treated me like an intelligent human being, and were quite accommodating. I was shopping for a complete new system (speakers, preamplification and amplification) and after hearing my stated price range, they took me directly to the RM30si. I never actually auditioned anything else at that store, because there simply wasn't a reason to. I had already auditioned about sixteen other speakers within $1,500 of these at various other stores, and the folks at Park Avenue assured me they had nothing else there in that range that would compare. Ultimately, I had to decide between a pair of similarly-priced Martin Logan speakers (now obsolete, I believe) and the RM30s, and after a couple more auditions (sanity checks) it was clear that, while the Martin Logan's had staggering treble and midrange resolution, they were hampered by horrendous bass performance, cosmetic ugliness, and excessive directionality. The RM30s have a sweet spot, to be sure, but they really fill the room with awesome sound, and their bass was the most pleasing of any speaker I listened to. Furthermore, there was no discernable separation between the bass and the midrange, whereas with the MLs, it was always evident whether the sound was coming from the electrostatics or the woofer.
The system I ended up with is the pair of RM30s, a Kinergetics Chiro amp, and a Monarchy Audio pre-amp. All have been thoroughly satisfactory.
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5 of 5
