Personas....7F vs 9H

It seems that 7F is not being stocked by many shops.  I've been to a couple shops to listen to Persona, and neither had 7F on demo.  As the largest passive member of the line, it's really important to get a listen to 7F in order to see if the bass performance is even significantly better than 5F or 3F.  I have heard 9H, 5F, and 3F at the same shop and they all seem to sound about the same on mid and high frequencies to me.

The bass performance of the 7F is of course SIGNIFICANTLY better than the 5f.  Just think — the 7f has dramatically more cabinet volume, and two 8.5” woofers that are not only much bigger, but much more intense in design than the 6.5” woofers in the 3F/5F.


As as far as 7F vs 9H...  the value of the two extra woofers, tons of built in power, and anthem room correction almost makes it a steal of an upgrade.  However, $25k is not chump change in any respect.

The main advantage of the 9H besides what you mentioned, are the ability to fine tune the bass response.  Not just flatten it (you need PROPER room treatment, bass traps especially BEFORE room correction for best performance).  Room correction does not correct the room, it just attempts to flatten the bass response.  The beauty of it, however, is that you can really tune it to your liking via Room Gain settings etc. 

In theory, if the 7F sounds too lean in your room, the 9H could be set up to compensate for that very easily.  Especially once you are able to flatten the response with ARC.  In almost all scenarios I would recommend utilizing ARC only up until around 200hz max.  Once you do that, you are able to raise (or lower, but unlikely) the room gain of your new flatter bass response to get the sound just how you like it.  Not to mention the fact that the 9H requires virtually no power to run, considering the sensitivity and no need to power any bass.  It’s a pretty incredible setup and I’ll be amazed if we don’t see similar designs by Focal (utopia with Naim power on woofers?) and other manufacturers soon.

Lots of fun, but don’t think for a second that the 7F isn’t worth every penny.  It’s just that the 9H is truly an amazing value in comparison, as weird as that sounds.