It sounds good in every kind of music.I need a speaker play classic as good as play pop,and it is such a speaker.
It is a pity that when I unpackaged the whole new gold-i and set it to my system finding one of its 10" woofer unit was bad.
The agent change a new unit for me in two days .
Now it sounds better and better, but I find that the volume of its 6"
on left and right still has a little different after 2 weeks.

P.S
my system marantz 63se cd
audio reserch ls3
McCormack DNA-1 deluxe edition


" IF IT IS NO TROUBLE AS IT UNPACKAGED ,I THINK IT IS A FIVE
STAR SPEAKER, BUT IT HAD PROBLEM SO I GIVE IT ONLY 4 STAR."

Anyway it really sounds good,and I still like it very much.

I wanted to wait and listen to these speakers for a few months before putting in my comments. I use them in a large room as both music and HT mains. Power is from a Krell 300i. This is a large, kind of ugly looking speaker. It is difficult to place in a room (if you have a small room they will look like a pair of monoliths from 2001, cool or repulsive depending on your taste). The build quality (as I've noticed from looking at several pairs of these speakers in different showrooms, as well as my own pair) is kind of poor-- the panels dont fit flush with the top, the finish is shoddy in places. If you want an aesthetically pleasing speaker that looks like was put together by swiss watchmakers, look elsewhere. However, if you want a speaker that can reproduce accurate bass at high sound levels and can image with the best, I have not heard a speaker that comes close for the $2100 that I paid for these. Very expensive monitors can reproduce a better soundstage, and the big ticket speakers from Thiel, Audio Physic, JMlabs are all better speakers then the PSB in absolute terms. Yet, to get a better sounding speaker you have to spend at least $1000-1500 more. Without taking its relative price into consideration, this is a two/three star speaker, it lacks the full dynamic impact and soundstage clarity and depth of the mega-buck speakers; easily four/five stars however when price is factored in.

I am typing this with a *Big* smile on my face as I just purchased the PSB Stratus Gold's ( not the Gold i's ) and are listening to them. They sound superbly balanced and image wonderfully. The sound is "sweet" in a very pleasant way. Without being long winded, I pretty much agree with all the comments posted so far. I do disagree with the critism regarding the overly rich bass - this is dependent on room placement and proper isolation from the floor. The bass is optimized for a speaker placed in a large open space with no walls nearby.
This leads to my question to other Stratus Gold owners:

1. What is the best way to isolate the speakers from a carpeted floor ?
( do I use some type of spike or stand ? what is the best way to install the spike ?)

2. Has anyone done a comparison of the Gold vs. the Gold i's ?

The reason I purchased the Gold's rather than the Gold i's is that the local Sony store did a blow out price on an older demo model (used by the store for 2 months which saves me the effort of breaking them in) in anticipation of the new model. I took advantage of the sale ( in case you are wondering, I paid less than half retail ) but am wondering what the difference is with new model.

Alright,
I've got the Goldi's wired to an Angstrom 200, Pioneer 704, Sunfire Cinema Grand, and Sony SDP-EP9ES. Firstly, I'll be selling the Sony - it is way outclassed by the other components, especially the Angstrom in standard pro-logic. Taking out the Sony, the sound is the absolute best bang for any buck I have heard. I was able to hear the Eaggleston Works Andra (12k) before I bought the PSB's. The difference? The sound is full and very deep. No need to crank the system up, as the multiple layers of music are astoundingly subtle, but clear. And the bass, WHOAH! These speakers go down, down, down! And it is very clear.

For Home Theatre, I am not as enthusiastic - mainly because I haven't spent the time to really tweak the system. AC3 sound tracks kick you in the forehead, but you wonder how much damage you may be doing to the speakers during explosions etc.

Overall, for 2.3k you can't go wrong. Be sure to buy the cherry wood. Very sexy.

5pts.

This speaker's midrange and high freq end sound very good. Crisp, quick, and clean. However, the bass is a little sloppy, boomy, and uncontrolled, and if you listen to a lot of rock music like me, it fatigues you quickly. Overall, a very good product for the money. Beats the heck out of the much more expensive NHT 3.3's.

Just a correction on my previous review:
Still great speakers, by the way. The thing is, my Hafler DH 500 tripped again the other day, and I dragged back over to the bench, only to discover it had only six power MOSFETs per channel, not the eight I reported. But although I upped the two dc offset protection circuit resistor values to 5.1K, the problem turned out to be cold solder joints (factory wired!) on the ground lugs of BOTH the positive and the negative power supply filter caps. Hard to see, but there, nevertheless. So, what was happening was the Stratus Goldi's at high volumes were moving the amp internally, causing an intermittent at the ground end of both supply polarities. Whether this is the case or not, I've noticed in the past more problems with aging solder joints on solid-wire construction than with stranded-wire construction. It seems that the tendency is to pre-wet the wire ends more so with stranded wire, just to get better control of the wire. This leads to a more complete wetting of the entire joint. While solid wire, unwetted, never seems to get hot enough to take a wetting, and tends to fails more over time. Anyway, I cranked the amp, and nothing broke. Then, after reading a speaker review in this month's Stereophile, I checked the tightness of the screws holding in the drivers, and they were actually loose in every case (all three drivers in both speakers--six drivers in all!). Experience shows that overland travel, while not as tough on a screw jont as airline travel, will still unscrew the odd un-lockwashered screw or bolt, and that is what apparently happened in this case. They're tight now, and sound better than ever.

Hey, that's why they have MIL-STD-810.

So check those solder joints, and tighten those screws. Yuh.

Still 5 stars, and still the best speaker buy on the planet.

My! This speaker really has gotten rave reviews from owners! Guess I'll have to add my name to the list. I own a pair of the original Stratus Golds, and I auditioned speakers in the $1500-$4000 price range before buying these. My choices were narrowed down to the Stratus Gold or the Martin Logan Aerius. The PSB won out because it did more things well- much deeper,undistorted bass; airy,detailed highs; palpable,coloration-free midrange; very good imaging and soundstaging; and excellent dynamics. They sound excellent with a wide variety of music, and although they are not "the best at any price" in any one area, they do so many things very well that I couldn't pass them up (mine were dealer trade-ins and I got them for $1400.00!). I am driving my pair with 75 watt tube monoblock amps
and I am getting clear,tight bass, partly due to using four Arcici Superspikes under each speaker. Attach them to the bottoms with some of that sticky material used to hang up posters and be sure to attach them to the center portion of the cabinet bottom,not the outer edge.
In summary, these speakers are probably the best overall choice for under $4000.00. I have no plans to sell mine. I give them five stars.

Another country heard from:
I got my first taste of the PSB speaker line when I was shopping for a system to replace the aggregation of old leftover components in my computer room. I had an old Kenwood receiver, a Sansui stereo EQ/reverb (!), driving a pair of EPI Model 70 Series II speakers. Oh, and a Panasonic portable CD player. Very politically uncorrect, but when EQ'd with the help of a pink noise generator and spectrum analyzer, not too terribly bad sounding. Ugly, but I digress...

After lots of reading here and elsewhere on the Net, I finally visited a local PSB dealer (Steve at Country Video, 610-828-2600). My selection process is detailed in my review of what I finally chose--the Century 400i's and a couple of Alpha One subs. I looked at the Gold (the originals), but declined to listen to them.

Meanwhile, I was thrashing about trying to fix a real pain-in-the-ass listening fatigue problem in my basement 8-track (analog) studio, caused by what I now know to be the ubiquitous but annoying JBL Control Monitors. Steve called me up and said he was ordering a pair of Goldi's for himself, and could get a better price for everybody if he could line up a few more interested parties. Talk about a line in the water! So I paid him a visit and listened to the (still--the new ones weren't in yet) original Golds. I brought CDs of Robert Cray's "Sweet Potato Pie", Jaco Pastorius' "Birthday Concert", and something else I forget right now.

I had listened to all of the other PSB speakers Steve carries on former occasions--the 400i, 600, 800, 1000, the Alpha and Silver Stratus. Of them, I really liked the 400i's and the Alpha's the best. I purposely avoided the Golds because Steve was so high on them, and I didn't want to fall in love with something I wasn't in the market for. Besides I had a plan to make my JBL's more livable, which of course didn't work, but again I digress. This trip in, however, I gave the Golds the full listening treatment--we used a Lightstar passive pre and the Lightstar amp, as well as a Carver HTR-880 (which I'm more familiar with, owning an HTR-885.1), and various Sony CD players (7- and 8-series ES changers, and a Megachanger, so the source was probably bright, as are some of my own).

As Perot says, long story short--I couldn't make these speakers sound bad. Couldn't do it--not with a small plaster room with lots of shelving and a paper thin carpet with average speaker cable and interconnects, or with a bright source playing bright material. Just perfect sounding music--deep even bass, clear non-fatiguing mids, and sweet articulate highs. Hard to tell what the soundstage "looked" like, and I don't even know if I can judge such a thing in a foreign environment, or care, as having played music (trumpet, primarily) in Philadelphia and New York for 26 years, I know what real sounds like, and these things sounded real. So I said, "Get 'em".

A few days pass, and the Goldi's are in, and I'm trying to line up friends to help me move them, as I have somebody else's lungs in me and am still a little bit weak when it comes to 90-pound speakers, and Steve calls and says he has them on the floor, checking them out, and I better come and get them before somebody sneaks in on a Saturday night with a sixpack and starts breaking them in for me. Say no more, I'm there with the hatchback. In the '88 Acura Integra 5-door they go, boxes and all, and it's home to wait for help.

But before I pull out the money and direct traffic around my car, I A-B them with the original Golds on the Lightstar(s). These are not the same speakers! They are minus a significant amount of bass, and lack a certain indefinable "rightness" in the highs that Steve's 3-year old Golds have in spades. I figure, what the hell, I've read enough reviews that all say they are virtually identical in measured response to the originals, so it must be break-in, and I cart them away. Nothing can be as bad as the JBL's, I figure.

Finally set up in my 26' x 26' Berber-carpeted basement studio, about 7 feet apart, with the front baffle about 2 feet in front of some 4' x 6' Sonex panels, connected to my Hafler DH 500, with an AGI 511A "high speed" preamp and a Sony carousel CD player Toslinked into a Theta Cobalt 307 DAC, I crank them up, waiting to cry out for lost bass. But hey--lots of bass. Too much bass! Out of the EPL loop comes the X-10D. Better bass, less of it, and tighter, more controlled. But the Hafler starts tripping at odd intervals. Oh no, I think--overheating. Off comes the bottom rack panel--no help. Over to the bench goes the Hafler--I set the dc offset and idling current per the manual, but it still trips. I replace the old Monster speaker cable that is green under the plastic covering--not good, I think--with AudioQuest Type-4 bi-wire (4 cables, two per speaker), and it still trips. Open up the patient one more time--the manual mentions that with some "turntable and cartridge combinations" the amp can perceive bass as dc offset, causing it to trip. Up two 3.9K resistors to 4.7K, put in a high-speed fan toggle switch to be safe, and we go again. Got it.

What a tussle. I'm looking at Sonographe amps, talking to my buddy with an Aragon 8008ST, and all the time thinking, these damn Goldi's--they are going to cost me an amp. I can't believe it. But thankfully, I'm wrong, and what am I left with? The Hafler has never sounded so good. It's power MOSFETs, with 8 devices per channel, provide natural-sounding mids and crystalline highs with powerful bass (despite claims to the contrary by Bipolar advocates), in a virtually blowout-proof design, which is important even in a home studio. And the Goldi's, so stifled in their debut beside their forebears, are coming more alive with each music-filled day.

I'm convinced--source, schmource. If you don't have the speakers right, there isn't anything you can do at the source end to fix it. And the Goldi's represent, to me, the best buy in a truly world-class boxed design at everyman prices. Five big ones, please. Thank you, Steve.

Remember--be an organ and tissue donor and inform your family of your decision. A PSA from a PSB owner. That is all.

Just acquired a pair of Stratus Gold due to good experience with PSB - Alpha, 500, and Stratus Silver. Vifa drivers have always been personal preferrence as well. After a week of listening and comparison to the B&W 801 using many different sources in various combinations. In my humble opion, the B&W 801 shall retired.Signal sources: 1) Digital - 7 different CD players and DACs(bitstream as well as ladder type). 2) Analog - Sukimo special and Grado Prestige.
Pre-amps: 1) Tube: 12AX7 2)Solid states: J-fet, bipolar, and op-amps
Power amps: 1) 150W/ch bipolar class A. 2) 200W/ch class AB mosfet (both are home designed and home built).

I've owned an original set of Golds for three (3) years. Having listened to just about everything out there, I can truly say that you'd have to pay a TON more money to get any appreciable gain in sound quality. These are by far the best value in audio. Wonderful imaging, exceptional dynamics with good amplification. I cannot say enough good things about these speakers...and apparently, the major audio publications (i.e. - Stereophile's recommended list for over 4 years) concur! Bravo PSB! Unless I become a zillionaire, I will never get rid of these speakers!