Double-listen
With this month's article we add a new column to our magazine: Double - listen. Two reviewers instead of one will test those devices that, for one reason or another, will have remarkably drawn our attention. This, we hope, will give the reader a broader and more diversified view of the object

Introduction
Those among you who already know Mr. Dick Sequerra please raise their hand… good, you're quite a plenty I see; those who ignore who he is please refer to his site www.sequerra.com. If you go to the CV page you'll see this gentleman is actually a pillar of the Audio world, in which he's been active since about 1949. His most famous projects in the home audio field have been the famous tuner and the loudspeakers tested here.

The METs
The first release of Sequerra MET is lost in time, I sure remember them in the - now far in time and social habits- Eighties: at that time, they were a countertrend piece of craftsmanship. In fact, in a market where even the humblest mini speaker had its dome tweeter, METs proudly showed their paper-cone ones; where others struggled after edge-mounted speakers and blunt edges in order to reduce diffraction, the two little girls from the US had their wooden front frame while tweeters were even deep-set! In a word, they already were objects of their own breed, objects that surely didn't try to catch the customer's eye with some more or less hidden trick. The speakers under test here are the latest release, the MK IVs.

Construction
SIn my opinion these are very beautiful objects. Little, black, with a slightly fashioned finish and their two fine drivers, METs will give pleasure at first sight. When my wife saw them, accustomed to these washing machines I keep sitting in my house, she expressed herself in a dreaming "really cool…" You have no protection grill, the emission centers of the two spakers are phase-aligned, no chance of bi-wiring (you get one only set of binding posts) while a potentiometer for tuning the tweeter is present; in a word, a sober product, that seems more thought for a "pro" use (as a small monitor, for instance) than for all these pointless practices of we audiophiles.

The two speakers are really beautiful objects, the tweeter immediately catches your eye with its golden "noise tip", the woofer, as you can see in the pictures, shows a very good assemble with a properly dimensioned and shielded magnet, on the bottom of which you can find a decompression hole. The woodwork seems to be MDF and it's completely filled up with absorbing filler, thicker on external sides, thinner in the center.

Performance
I placed the two petty speakers in the center of the room, about three feet off the front wall and two feet above the floor. I allowed six good feet in between. I haven't gone under further tests, since in my opinion the character - the approach to music - of a device comes out at a glance and that is the aim of a test; fine tuning being matter for the fun of the final owner. Not knowing how long had they worked earlier, I left them play for about 50 hours before starting the actual test. I carried out the first listening session connecting the METs to my fifteen-Watt single ended triode, a challenge for a speaker that requires at least thirty… From the first CD the personality of these speakers comes out in both its good and bad features, sound is fast - very fast - the soundstage is wide and well defined, the boxes, thanks to their dimensions, literally disappear. The far ends of the audible range are present and well defined as well, something is missing in the lower part of course, but as far as they can reach, these speakers get the job done. What left me a bit puzzled are mid frequencies, slightly beneath the rest in my opinion. This weakens a bit the speakers' transparency, which is not a top-level one indeed. Dynamic is also very good, only at high volume levels the message gets a bit crunched. But my test couldn't end like this, since you could say that testing such a speaker with a single ended triode is almost like testing a Formula One car in a rally track. Therefore, thanks to my friend Fabio, I had occasion to connect METs to his little but noble YBA Integré with its grand-breed, solid-state 50 watts. Sure things got better, the Integré drives the two petty speakers with greater confidence than Mr. Big Triode, allowing a further low-frequencies extension and easing out that high-level compression. Nevertheless, medium frequencies remain not perfectly defined and, with it, that feeling of limited transparency I can't get rid of. On the other side the stage, the true strength of these speakers, expands itself even more while focus stays untouched. To sum up, a well crafted speaker that takes advantage of precious drivers but that shows a peculiar attitude as well, an attitude that requires an equally specific attention in finding a matching amplifier, capable of elating its strengths.

Listening test by Bebo Moroni

Well Giovanni and me probably look for different things from a loudspeaker, and this is the fine part of the matter and it's also the philosophy of our magazine, a magazine that pursues freedom of thought and freedom of choice - moving anyway from quality requirements that must be consolidated and shared. Or maybe Giovanni is more demanding than myself, as I might have mellowed out with age and tend to excuse not the faults but the personality of the devices, when that is the case. And that is especially true for those devices that have made of personality their point of strengths. And no doubt Sequerra METs have, since their very first release, distinguished themselves among the rest of similar products exactly for the very marked attitude of their own, of being not keen to come to terms with the listener. And this is even more true in these days, when you can find plenty of mini speakers - or compact units anyway- and the widespread tendency is that of replicating, more or less, the same kind of sound. Well that are Sequerra's METs. Do you like them? Fine, you are very likely to be unable to part with them. Don't you like them? You'll hate them, you'll find countless faults in them, countless shortfalls (probably exaggerating, but you know how things go when you love something or when you hate it). METs surely will not leave you indifferent, and I would add that this does not seem a bad outcome to me. I'm fond of that mellow sound of them, of that ability to stay apart from that hyper-transparency and that hyper-realism that nowadays rule thanks to metal tweeters: an improper craze of imitating the sound of planar speakers at all costs, and - worse - the sound of those among them that are in the utmost frenzy to become X-ray tools more than music tools. I find the musicality of the Sequerras to still be superior to that of most of their compact competitors. Sure they must be carefully matched: one has to find partners above any suspects for them, in other words, it's around the METs that you have to assemble your system. You can't add them to an existing set of machines and think it's automatically guaranteed that their performance will be the optimum one. This happens regardless of the absolute quality of the existing system.

The preferences of these loudspeakers go to dynamic, not too bright, solid-state amplifiers: I remember hearing them sounding great with a (so to say) "wee" Mark Levinson No.29, the House's "Old 50 Watt"; with a Jadis JPl pre and a source like the Marantz CD 94, another Great Old Man, with its open and detailed mid range. But I have to notice that in our test METs have come out once more for what they are, or at least for what they appear to me: musical loudspeakers like few others today - with very little competitors nowadays just like it was at the dawn of their production. We got this result having the METs driven by a dynamic, sometimes bordering on screechy, tube power amplifier like the Harman Kardon Citation II (1964, impressive with its musical modernity) in turn driven by the "Phenomena" Bryston BP1 Preamplifier, another record setter in transparency and clarity of the mid frequencies. Firm in the low (as low as they can go), soft in mid, very far-reaching and detailed - but always controlled- in the high frequencies. And if this was not enough, I may add a soundstage which is not crazy wide, but which is so balanced and truthful that very few other speakers have been allowed to match (Dahlquist DQ 10, Stax ELS F1, Pro Ac Studio IV, Rogers LS 3/5a - if well positioned). Beyond any doubt, METs are one of those speakers that can be purchased only after long, thorough listening sessions. But if you chooses them, if you properly drive them, you'll never regret the money you spent - and you can swear on that.