Cerwin Vega at it's very best!

Divorce sale; come and get it cheap before she gets it for free. Ouch! Some people’s tragedies can be other people’s opportunities. Normally I wouldn’t have bothered but the address was just off my morning run route, so why not.

The next morning I dropped by to find the place full of vultures. I was turning to walk out when lo and behold the familiar sight of a set of Cerwin Vega shipping boxes were there staring me in the face. I looked up and the owner was saying, brand new, never even taken out of the boxes. So home they came for a steal of a price.

I bought the speakers for our renovated break room at the shop. We just put in a pool table and big screen, so these would go a long way toward filling the room with sound. Iv owned Cerwin Vegas before and know all too well how good they sound.

The room that we set them up in has a carpeted concrete floor, cinder block walls on two sides covered with framed posters and other decoration, and two wood frame sheet rocked walls with doors and windows. The room is mainly occupied with a pool table, big screen TV, a couple of sofas, overstuffed chairs, table and chairs for eating etc.. The dimensions of the room are twenty one by fifteen feet with a rather high sloped roof that starts at twelve feet and drops to eight and half feet. I only give a room description to act as a point of reference when describing the speaker’s performance.

We play them through a Carver 130 Watt receiver with a Sony CD/DVD player and TEAC cassette player. Although the components are older and donated by the guys in the shop, they were all top of the line when new and still work very well.

The following are the speaker’s specifications straight form Cerwin Vega:

Frequency response: 32Hz-20kHz

Peak power: 300 Watts

Sensitivity: 1 Watt at 1 Meter, 92dB

Dimensions: 37x14x11.2

Weight: 57 pounds

The speaker is built up with a 1” soft dome tweeter with ferro fluid, a 6.5’ midrange with a fiber impregnated cone and a 12’ cast frame high excursion woofer and of course their own crossover with a beautiful black ash enclosure. Although the Cerwin Vega loudspeaker has always been best known for incredible low distortion, crisp awe inspiring lows I think that they should really be applauded for the work in midrange and highs over the last few years.

My last set of large Cerwin Vega speaker’s were the D-15’s. These were very powerful, energy efficient speakers. They didn’t come without some drawbacks though. The Woofer would fall off at low volume settings. It sounded as if it was coming from behind a wall if the volume were turned down. The tweeters and midrange would then overpower the bass. When turned up it had the opposite effect. Although you had decent highs and midrange, the woofers would overpower the sound.

So it was a very pleasant surprise to find the CLS-12 is a very well balanced speaker. The lows and midrange of this speaker are far and away better than I would have guessed. With big boom R&B sounds all the rage today, this is one range that seems to be ignored. Cerwin Vega seems to have held their own in development for the audiophile and you can tell. Putting on some old Hendrix live recordings was just awesome. The reproduction of high and midrange concert sounds takes you right there. I’m so pleased with this part of the CLS that I really don’t want to go on.

Cerwin Vegas woofers have always stood second to none and the CLS-12 won’t disappoint. Yes these woofers will drop down and give incredible 32Hz rumbling frequencies. It would seem a waste to add subwoofers behind these, but some people just cant get enough of that freight train sound. Although the very lows are handled with precision, it’s really the levels above the bottom range that bring total enjoyment. John Bonham’s, Moby Dick is at its very best when played on these speakers. In the R&B scene, my daughter is listening to Hurry! Lets go, the A-fly band. You got me! But it sounds really good on these speakers too, so maybe the speaker is just so good that old dudes can enjoy anything on them.

In the room described above, we get a very full sound at every point within the room. We’ve reconfigured the speakers a few times to see if it’s possible to optimize the sound, but in the end, they work so well in any position that we just leave them pointed down the room the long way, one on each side of the big screen.

The speaker has a very warm friendly sound to it. The entire frequency spectrum is covered very well with no real weak areas in the frequency range. Although they handle the higher tempo digitalized techno beats with precision, you can still throw some Johnny Cash on and enjoy the mellow sounds of analog tube amp recordings.

The CLS is a great speaker and I am so glad I bought it. If it ever comes down to it, these will definitely come home with me even if I have to keep them in the garage. Although I picked them up for less than half their retail price, I would definitely buy them at full price.