5.0 out of 5 stars Go Big...or Go Home!

A. · October 12, 2014

Go Big...or...Go Home! I am tired of all the mamby-pambies out there telling us small speakers and sub-woofers are the way to go. These are definitely the monster truck of home speakers but, while they are speakers designed for a man, they can play delicate like a woman. I am an Bolo Prime member but, I purchased my speakers new in a private sale and mine were packaged way beyond excessive so, I did not encounter some of the issues mentioned in other reviews. The speakers weigh 116lbs a piece and have thick rubber feet on them. I used furniture mover pads to slide them around my room. With that said, let's get into the meat of the review.Build quality is really good. Quality metal speaker grills, gold binding posts with gold bi-amp connectors for bi-amping if desired. Speaker comes with a owners manual and an additional "party" fuse if the built in overload circuit is blown. A nice touch to have an overload circuit built in to the speaker to protect it from an overload of wattage...admittedly, that might be hard to do though. The front of the speaker features a 1" soft dome tweeter with ferro fluid, set in a waveguide for increased sensitivity, dynamic response and lower distortion. The waveguide config results in near-perfect integration for a supposed seamless convergence of midrange and high frequencies. More about this later. There is one 6.5" fiber impregnated midrange cone and two monster truck like cast frame woofers. The back features the nice gold binding posts, fuse holder and two ports.Specs: 500 watts peak power, rated frequency response of 38hz to 20khz. Speaker sensitivity is 95.3 dB. That is a nice number especially when comparing them to higher priced speakers with a rating of around 86 dB. What that means to the layman is that this speaker will require less power to have the same volume level of a speaker with a lower sensitivity. Personally, I have always found speakers with higher sensitivity ratings to fatigue my ear less because they require less power to drive them.Let's talk briefly about the set up, the room config and the equipment I used. My test centered around my home theater which I primarily use for movie watching but, also have set up as a two channel music room. I played both movies and music on these and had very good results with both. Here is the equipment I used for testing: Emotiva UPA-700, Emotiva UPC-200 (thanks to the folks over there), Oppo BDP-103 Darby Edition, Monitor Audio Sliver 8 center channel speaker, AR Series 303 12" sub woofer, PSA XS15 sub woofer and audiophile grade interconnects and speaker wire. My room is rectangular with Auralex sound deadening pads on all walls and about 19' wide and 15' with my set up on the long wall. This puts my listening ear about 13' from the speaker. I set the XLS-215's about eight feet apart and toed-in slightly to my listening position. With my room depth, I could only get them about 12" away from the wall. They really need to be about two to four feet off the wall to the get the best bass response out of them.I started out with watching the second Transformers movie with both subs and the XLS-215's firing. I thought I was going to split the house in two. After getting my hearing back, I calibrated everything and gave a more careful listen with the dual subs shut off so, I was using only the Cerwin's subs. What I found was quite a capable and able speaker. The sound was never distorted and was always smooth even when it was played at earthquake levels. The sound stage was very broad with superb spatial detail. The stage was spread out very broad and blended well with the rear surrounds with a seamless motion and no variance in detail and did I mention the BASS? Yes, there is bass in these speakers. Response was stellar and faithfully rendered as the sound engineers would want it to be. Folks, this is better than going to the movies. The XLS-215's are speakers with cajones! Next up was the mostly dialog driven American Psycho from 2000 with a stellar 80's soundtrack. The scene where Bateman is getting ready to axe Paul while Huey Lewis was playing is as just crisp and life-like as can be. The music sounded much like it was recorded and intended to be heard. The dialog through out the whole movie was clean and every little subtle nuance in Bale's voice was easily rendered perfectly by the XLS-215's. These speakers have oodles of dynamics.Okay so, we know these big dogs can destroy a real movie theater but, what can they do with two channel music? I used the Emotiva UPC-200 in two channel stereo mode since I did not feel like setting up a separate two channel amp.The first test was the Huey Lewis CD Sports! On the opening cut the "hearbeat" rhythm of the bass drum kicked out with clarity and punch. The guitar had great width and depth while Lewis' voice was dead center of the soundstage. The saxophone solo was full and warm and filled the room nicely with great detail. The driving keyboard bass line of Walking on a Thin Line that plays through the whole song is just a room destroyer with that deep driving bass. I could feel it in my chest and on the chair cushion.Next up was the Dee Snider solo CD called "Never Let The Bastards Wear You Down". On Dee's version of Dion's "The Wander" I was blown away. Listening to the song, it was like I had been transported to a small, private venue to hear the song live. The XLS-215's ability to reproduce the recording material gave the impression that Dee Snider was belting this out live. If it had been a blind listening test, it would have been very difficult to tell if it was "live or if it was Memorex" so to speak. It was as if Dee was standing 15 feet from me singing. While his voice proclaimed he was the type of guy who likes to run around, the drums kicked out directly behind him as if nailed to the center of soundstage while the bass filled the bottom end and the guitar filled out across the whole room.I had to step away after that...I am a believer now. Folks don't get these confused with the reviews stating that Cerwin-Vega makes nothing but frat house speakers. It's just not true. I have been listening to audio for almost 40 years and while this isn't the highest end pair I have had they are very damn good and can compete with those costing twice as much. To pack this much performance in at this price point, I do not know how they do it.Okay, so earlier I had stated they these were gentle like a woman. What speaker review would not be complete with some Norah Jones? On "Don't Know Why", Norah's graceful smoothness played so gently and smooth with warm timbre. The XLS-215's create a great ambient feel and have an uncanny knack of duplicating the ambiance of the recording studio or venue as if the artist was playing live. Detail is remarkable at all listening levels which is what I meant by gentle like woman.Final thoughts and wrap up: My one nit-pick with these speakers is there is a VERY slight directivity with the horn-loaded tweeters. During a few listening sessions when I got up from my chair I noticed a very slight change in the high frequency response. Due the tall 49" nature of these speakers, the highs could be blown over your head and you would not be catching all the detail. To resolve this I put two small one inch thick blocks under each back foot to cant the speaker front downward aiming it towards the listening ear. This resolved that minor detail for me. YMMV.If you want monster truck performance on a Ford F-150 budget then these speakers are for you. If you are fanatical about watching movies at home and refuse to hit the theaters, this could be the ticket for you. Just remember these things are monsters and you'll need help moving them unless you have furniture slides. Spend the time for proper set up and calibration for your room. Most of all, enjoy them. I had to give them five-stars.UPDATE: It's been almost six months and these things have only gotten better as I have made adjustments to the listening area. The sound stage is now 12ft wide between the speakers vs. the 8ft. I had previously. The improvement was very good. I left them slightly toed-in. I streamed up some Diana Krall and gave it a listen. I used an Oppo BDP-103 which does such a fantastic job rendering mp3's over the network and the mighty Cerwin Vegas are so wonderfully neutral with out any discoloration of bass or treble. There is a slight hint of a bright presence in the mids but, it is really only noticeable when playing that type of material such as rock music with a crunchy electric guitar.They really do need a big soundstage. I have them 12ft apart and that seems just right. The vocals were imaged so precise that I thought the center channel speaker was playing! They easily perform just as well or better than speakers north of $2k. Bring your Paradigms, Klipsch and Polks - The 215's will eat them for breakfast.UPDATE 03/2016: These speakers are still amazing. They sound great with all types of music and equally with home theater content. Do yourself a favor and find a pair if you can. You won't be disappointed in them at all. I've done varied listening from rock, metal, jazz, blues, country and movie content along with the series matched center channel speaker. One good track that spans a wide frequency range would be Halie Loren's rendition of "Ode to Billie Joe". The low end guttural bass is smooth and well defined that can be felt as well as heard. Halie's vocals are precise, well defined and defined so well you can hear her delicate pauses between each verse. The soundstage is well balanced and it sounds like she is standing there in front of me on stage. Bottom line: I love these speakers!

5.0 out of 5 stars Cerwin-Vera has one of the best Sound, Build Quality & Price Value combinations in today’s market

E.S. · January 12, 2017

The Unpacking:The cabinet quality and speaker quality is unmatched at this price range compared to other brands. After receiving the XLS 6C yesterday, I first removed the high quality metal grills (No cheap fabric or plastic like other companies use) to inspect the tweeter and woofer quality. Both looked well made from the outside. I removed the Tweeter and was very impressed with the very large driver motor enclosure kept cool with Ferro Fluid. Many other speaker companies cut costs on the tweeter and install cheaply made tweeters in this price range. I then removed one of the woofers and again was very impressed with the large driver, magnet, housing and build quality of the speaker. The inside of the cabinet was well lined with insulation and the frequency crossover looked like it was high quality.Sound Quality:My Pioneer A/V receiver has MCACC which basically syncs all your 7.1 speakers to the same volume, equation frequency, distance, etc., from your main listening position. My Left and Right speakers are 17 year old Cerwin-Vega E310. Over the years I have listened to many speakers and have never had the urge to replace them. They still sound fantastic. However, I have tried several other company’s center cannels and never got the seamless sound from left to center to right speaker. As actor’s voices in a movie scene travel from left to right, their voice should sound exactly the same moving from left speaker to center speaker to right speaker. (The Revenant has several scenes like this). The Cerwin-Vega E310’s always sounded clearer had more detail than the other company’s more expensive center channels that I tried. What a difference it made when hooking up the XLS 6C. All three speakers (L, C, R) worked seamlessly together like it was one speaker. I ended up spending hours watching movie scenes and listening to 5.1 music. I could clearly make out what the actors were saying even with the very loud background noise in Suicide Squad and other movies that are normally difficult to hear the dialog while the world is being destroyed in the background.In Summary:The Cerwin-Vega XLS line has been out for many years now and you hardly see any buzz on the internet anymore about the Cerwin-Vegas home speaker lineup. Well, I can tell you that the Cerwin-Vega home line of speakers are still one of the best sounding and best values in today’s vast market of speaker companies. I attended the 2016 RMAF (Rocky Mountain Audio Fest) in Denver and listened to many rooms of speaker configurations with prices up to $100,000 a pair. While the build quality of these speakers may last several centuries, the sound is just not that much better to justify some of those crazy prices. To my ears, Cerwin-Vera has one of the best Sound, Build Quality & Price Value combinations in today’s market.

ottime per home theater

s. · June 16, 2014

casse eccellenti per home theater con bassi dirompenti e profondi, medi definiti e bilanciati.unica pecca: leggermente voluminose adatte a chi a spazio

Musique pour toujours!

R.S. · January 15, 2020

Excellent produit et livraison rapide et fiable. Meilleur prix avec Bolo.ca !! Pay less, get more!

Xls 215 cerwin vega enceinte

l. · August 2, 2017

Super produit Hi-Fi, rapport qualité prix imbattable,Elle fonctionne bien mieux que les klipsch Rp280.Bien entendu il faut avoir électronique adapté dériere.

Excelente sonido...

A.L.G. · July 28, 2019

Suenan perfecto!!!

Price here was hard to beat-remember to buy quantity 2

T. · June 26, 2020

Good sound quality-pretty speaker -i bought these based on looks not power handling but ,they still thumpYou should get a pre amp or a monoblock if you intend on running these in a home theater