Overall verdict and recommendation
“I am going to recommend the Arendal 1610 SLIM 8 speaker.”
“On first listen, the 1610 sounded very good.”
“With these filters in place, every one of my reference tracks sounded beautiful.”
“Once there, you have an excellently sounding speaker ready to go on your wall or any other place where shallow depth is beneficial.”
“The SLIM 8 comes beautifully and powerfully packages in a hard to find shallow, sealed enclosure.”
Build quality and design
“This doesn’t come across in the picture but this is an incredibly well built and solid speaker.”
“The design is gorgeous as well with a curved front panel.”
“It is very difficult to find shallow high performance speakers and we have an example of it here.”
“Cost is up there but so is the component and build quality.”
Measurements and engineering
“But overall, this is very close to what we want to see.”
“I was most impressed by the absence of much audible distortion in bass which we can see in the measurements.”
“Typical ported bookshelf speaker reaches and exceeds 100% distortion. Here, is far more controlled.”
“Objective measurements show only a couple of minor flaws that are easily corrected in EQ.”
“It seems to balance out very well in predicted in-room response if you ignore that:”
Sound quality and listening impressions
“On first listen, the 1610 sounded very good.”
“I threw sub-bass at it and while it did not play it very loud, distortion was minimal.”
“Bass was now full, resulting in warmer sound but then treble came in with more detail and air.”
“With these filters in place, every one of my reference tracks sounded beautiful.”
“And I was able to go to max volume on my Topping LA90 amplifier. It ran out of power before it bothered SLIM 8 in the slightest.”
Read more reviews from Audio Science Review: 1723 Monitor THX, 1961 Center
