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However, this 4 foot requirement could place difficult strictures on acceptable listening room size for the Tamino. If you only had a stereo array of Taminos up front, the Taminos could fit well into most listening rooms. But things get dicey for a surround array of Taminos. Assuming that you should have at least 6 feet of distance between your listening seat and the loudspeaker line, in order to hear the Tamino or any similar system properly integrate its drivers, this 4 foot requirement suddenly translates into a requirement that your listening room be at least 20 feet long, in order to hear natural tonal balance from the Tamino (that's 4 feet away from the wall plus 6 feet between you and the loudspeaker line, times two for front and back). Many listening rooms for surround sound do not have a full 20 feet for their major dimension, and such rooms are simply too small for you to hear a natural tonal balance from the Tamino. Conversely, if your listening room is much bigger than 20 feet, then the Tamino won't be able to play loudly enough for most home theater tastes, since its maximum loudness playing full range is limited by its tiny woofer bottoming. Thus, the Tamino is best suited to listening rooms having a major dimension of say 19 to 25 feet, if you want to hear natural tonal balance from the Tamino (the 25 foot limit obviously depends on how loud you like to play soundtracks with strong bass). So what then do you do if your room's major dimension does not fall within these limits? Well, if your room size is smaller than 19 feet, you might as well give up on getting adequate warmth out of the Tamino X2, which means you might as well get instead the new Tamino satellite, and couple it with subwoofers (ideally subwoofers all around, so you get true surround bass and truly believable surround spatial ambience). Alternatively, if your room is much larger than 20 feet, then you might be advised to get the Tamino X3, which can play bass more loudly than the X2 and hence can play full range more loudly. So, there you have it. The Verity Tamino X2 is clearly a high end loudspeaker that has many sonic strengths, and it has the most important sonic strengths, including very revealing transparency, very low coloration for most of the spectrum, and very good spatial imaging. Its excellent performance at both frequency extremes, usually the downfall of most loudspeakers, is particularly remarkable, and is especially amazing for a two way entry level system. The Tamino's limitations in bass loudness and overall loudness, and in room placement, are issues you can work around, perhaps by instead getting one of the other Tamino models, either the X3 or the new satellite (coupled of course with subwoofers). The Tamino's single significant imperfection that you can't escape is the midrange crossover region, which has those peculiar colorations. This sonic aspect is something you must evaluate for yourself, to see if you can live with it, or perhaps if you even like it, especially for the way it puts typically too closely miked music and soundtrack dialogue at a greater distance.
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