Price Paid:  $11000.00 from Pear Audio, Europe

Summary:
The Shahinian Hawk, like its larger brother, the Diapason, must be heard to be believed. What really sets this speakers apart from conventional speakers, is their ability to reproduce large, complex music (late-romantic and modern symphonies!) with a realistic sense of weight and scale. More importantly, this is achieved with complete tonal accuracy (a grand piano sound like a grand piano). On the downside, the Hawks are very demanding on the rest of the system. You MUST experiment with various pre- / power amp combinations to see what works best. In the end, I had to replace my amplifiers to get a decent result.

Strengths:
Ability to reproduce large orchestral music. Tonally accurate. Virtually unlimited dynamic range.

Weaknesses:
Difficult to match with electronics. These speakers require seriously good amplification (I had to replace my pre-amp and power amp).

Summary:
For me the Hawks are the bees knees. They have the ability to produce a peformance. Not just the music replayed, the actual performance. The passion, the power and the space of the real thing. On the down side they need space to work their magic. A couple of metres from the back wall and one metre from the side walls works best in my room. They also need lots of power. The subs are not hard to drive, but the tops are a load and a half. Isolating the headers from the sub units (I use black diamond racing number 4 cones) pays huge dividends.

Summary:
This is by far the best speaker for reproducing orchestral music. The sound is rich and clean, and can be cranked very loudly without a trace of distortion. It does not image the way "audiophiles" want, however to the music lover it creates the most realistic sound than any other speaker.Shahinian speakers add excitement to the music, and yet keep the music very natural sounding.