Judge them by their sound, not their looks ...
I snuck into ML's demo room on Sat. night at CES and was treated to a demo of the Summit's.
Upon seeing the Summit, my first reaction was "What have they done to my beloved Martin Logan's?!" Design wise, the Summit is a significant departure stylistically from previous ML products. It is no exaggeration to say they are significantly smaller than the Prodigys, and smaller overall in fact than my Ascents. Despite their size, I believe one of the ML reps stated that the Summit's panel actually has a larger surface area than the panel of the Prodigy!
It is true that there will be an all black finish version of Summit which should start around $8,000.00 and the price of the speaker will increase from there, based on finishes and materials you select as options. The polished chrome version (shown in the photo that started this thread) will be around $14,000. At the demo, an all black Summit left channel was mated with a polished chrome Summit to show there was no difference sonically between the speakers.
The two-channel performance of the Summit's that I heard at the show was simply amazing. The ML reps claimed these speakers would acheive new levels of transparency over previous ML products (even the Prodigys) and they were not lying!
As far as bass performance goes, no one will ever be able to claim ML's are bass shy after hearing the Summits! The rep claimed the Summits bass would go down as deep as 25hz, and judging by the demo, it felt as if that were the case.
From listening to the Summits for about five minutes (FWIW), the bass was solid, deep and clear, but almost too strong, especially for two channel performance. It sounded to me as if ML had isolated each aspect of the speaker's performance and enhanced it individually, but hadn't yet come up with exactly the right harmony between the two elements.
Of course, the summit is still in prototype stage, and knowing ML, they will have that hammered out by the time the Summit reaches its final production stage.
Two days later, I still have reservations about the design of the Summit. I flat out dislike it at first, but as someone posted above, after a while of looking at it, the design can grow on you.
However, any reservations I had about the design were easily surpassed by the performance of the product. Especially when you consider that for $2,000 less than the Prodigys you can have a pair of speakers (in all black finish) that outperforms them!
If you are put off by the design of these speakers at first, as I was, I urge you to give them a listen before making a final judgment on them. You may find, as I did, that their superior performance surpasses any objections you have to their design!
From what I can remember of the demo equipment, each Summit was powered by Parasound amps (probably the big monoblocks - sorry, don't know which model), wired with Kimber Kable KS speaker cables. I may be wrong about this, but I believe the Summits were bi-wired as well.
