Looking for impressions/reviews of Ascend Acoustics’ Sierra-2EX.

Thinking about making these my next speakers. I’m currently an owner of the CMT-340s, which I’ve been pleased with, but I’m starting to think about upgrading. If I were to decide to keep it in the Ascend Acoustics family, I’m considering the Sierra-2EX. If anyone here has opinions on them, I’d love the feedback. Thanks!

 

@Vibrolux_Reverb is a big fan ... Ascend Sierra 2EX bookshelf speaker review.

 

They are super nice speakers. As Davey mentioned, I am a big fan.

These do require a break in of about 20 - 30 hours and will honestly continue to get marginally better after that for another 100 hours or so. If you decide to get them and audition them from Ascend you may be slightly disappointed at first, but they offer a 30 day trial so you should have ample amount of time to hear what they are capable of.

As cliche as this saying is, they absolutely do punch above their price point. My review linked above covers almost all of my feelings about the speaker. If I had anything else to add, it would be that I still get an equal amount of joy listening to them as I did a month or two ago so they seem to have a lasting quality about them where I wasn't just blown away during a honeymoon phase. As a matter of fact as I continue to spin records in my collection that I haven't heard with these new speakers I am constantly amazed by what I hear.

You will hear people talk about ribbon twitters having a limited field where they sound good and I do not find that to be the case with these. Perhaps other ribbons have this quality, but not these, so don't worry too much about that.

There are only two negative qualities about these speakers that I have ran across.
1 - Records that already have sibilance will be intensified with these speakers. Hopefully you don't have many records like this, but they seem to bring it out more. They aren't however so revealing that poorly mastered recordings will sound terrible. Even more low quality records still sounds good and well mastered records sound phenomenal. It seems to mainly be a sibilance thing, but I am the only person who seems to have come across this so perhaps it is my limited positioning of the speakers atm. I am in the process of moving into a new home and will be able to place them in a much more ideal spot and am hoping that this cures that issue.

2 - The grill isn't magnetic (although I heard they will start to offer this in the future) so with the grill off it has the slightly unattractive grill holes in the front. Not a big deal, but still worth mentioning.


Everything else about them is exceptional and they are extremely fun to listen to with no fatiguing qualities about them whatsoever. I think they do especially well with drums, percussion, vocals, and horns. They do really well with everything else too, but listening to drums and percussion is just mind blowing with these.


For comparison I liked them more than a handful of equally or more expensive speakers that were all tried out on my system. The only speakers I wanted to audition and couldn't were the Legacy Studio HDs. Everything else I auditioned and listened to sounded great to exceptional, but all fell short in literally every department when compared to the Sierra2EX. I couldnt' find a bookshelf that did even one thing better that was under $2000. These are very well thought out and well rounded speakers.

 

Thanks for all the input! I predominantly listen to soul, funk and jazz, so these sound like they’d be a really good match for me.

 

Nice review @Vibrolux_Reverb , thanks!

BTW, I read that magnetic grills are now available for the domestic cabinets.