ELAC - Debut 2.0 B6.2 (Walnut) Walnut

Edited: Since I wrote my review I delved down into the woods of the options of my amplifier, and there were a lot of settings that had been optimized for my original small speakers. Adjusting these settings made the speakers sound amazing. Leaving my original review below incase other people find the same problems when swapping from small bookshelves to these larger ones. However now I hear both the mid range and bass perfectly.My tiny but powerful front Mirage Nanostats speakers finally died and thought these speakers would be an upgrade in power. However, compared to my old Nanostats which I loved ,the bass is really heavy with these speakers. Doesn't help that they are filling up a small living room (with my last three working Nanos taking centre and back left & right) and the bass was overwhelming (powered by a Onkyo TR-N747) when I first plugged them in. It took a lot of tinkering with the amplifier settings to not have the bass just obliterate everything. Now they sound pretty good but I'm still going to get some speaker pads to remove an occasional tweeter trill when playing a record that naturally has a lot of bass. I fell in love with the clear, even Nanostat sound but perhaps they just made me used to very little bass in my music? Going to give them a week or so workout to decide if I'll keep them. Try them in a few different locations in the room.They look and feel fantastic and the build quality is solid.

These speakers leave me almost speechless. I got my degree in, and worked for decades as, a recording engineer, so I know a wee bit about sound. When I needed to add a small system for our dining room, I wanted to get something small, simple, but good quality. I bought Cambridge Audio amps and transports (always loved that British sound) and Blue Jeans cables. That part was easy, but what about the speakers? I bought these Elac's almost as a joke. I did not think that you could get a nice set of bookshelf speakers for 300 bucks, and yet everyone was raving about them. I knew Andrew Jones knows his stuff, so I wanted to see for myself.Holy moly, these are amazing. Crystal clear sound stage. Immaculate imaging. And bass that my $1,500, 70 pound Klipschs can't even touch. From a little 6.5" driver. It's almost magic. These are now my favorite speakers in the house, even though I have speakers that cost many times what these cost. In fact, when I just visited my mother, I noticed that her speakers were dying, so I bought her a pair, too. I can't recommend these enough for the money.You DO need to be aware of one thing though: It is the old "weakest link in the chain" axiom, and how true it is. Hook these up to some mediocre home theatre amp, and the result might be "meh". Same with cables. You don't need to spend a fortune for your cables, but if you think using $20 speaker wires are going to do these justice, think again. I wanted to keep this within a small budget, so I chose Blue Jeans Canare speaker wires (~$100) and BJC interlinks between the CD player and the amp (~$50). Do some research and you can make these little speakers sound like a million bucks. I am so impressed, I am now looking at their bigger brothers for another system (No, not the $85k Elac Concentros - I wish).

I did a lot of research looking for the right bookshelf speaker that would fit my needs. I’m sure there’s a lot of opinions about which speakers are the best value and sound, but I decided the ELACs were worth a shot considering I caught the price at a dip for $239. I have them hooked up to a 70’s Pioneer SX-535 (20 watts per channel) and a Pro-Ject Debut Carbon TT..I had read that the ELACs needed a lot of power to be driven properly, so I was a little concerned that the 535 was going to be a problem paired with these speakers. I can say with confidence that I’ve run this setup through the paces over the past couple of days and can’t believe the sound quality and volume I’m getting. The ELACs look awesome, sound awesome, and are exactly what I was looking for.

These speakers lose higher frequencies at low volume. It is as if the tweeter crossover doesn’t function unless there is a certain level of power input. I would not recommend these for use as background music. They sound great at higher volume levels.

I picked up a pair of Walnut 6.2 Elac Debut on Black Friday, at a much-reduced sale price. I want to like these speakers much more than I should, the build quality is very good and they are solid chunks. After 100 hrs of break-in, I like the spkrs but I don't "love" the sound quality. The Elac's sound less dynamic than my JBL Studio 530 bookshelves but they measure neutral with good power. Sensitivity is average - they do sound better on my Onkyo amp than the Denon. The biggest area for improvement is the tweeter, the driver sounds more than decent. The tweeter could go up a notch. My 30 yr old Boston Acoustic HD9's sounds a tad better than these, which says a lot for the BA's. Very good but not excellent, hence rated at 4/5.

At first I was impressed with these Elac Debut's. They had excellent bass for their size and good all around clarity. But after a few days, I noticed that they lacked any kind of punch in the range where snare drums tend to sit, and rock music lacked a lot on them. I have some smaller kitchen speakers to use as a comparison, and they were putting the Elacs to shame on anything with a strong snare. Granted they are designed to bring out that range, and lack in other areas, but they made it clear what I was missing in the Elacs.But over the course of a couple weeks, the speakers really opened up and gained more upper-range punch. And the advantages of their even tone spectrum became more clear as well. Classical, jazz, electronic, ambient, rock - any kind of music, whether dense or sparse and spacious, all sound detailed and dynamic on these speakers. You really can't ask for more at this price reange.