Quote Originally Posted by soonerczech
I was reading a review where they used the 340 as the center and said that it blended flawlessly with the others, I believe that ascend does use the same drivers in the two speakers with the 340 having an extra woofer and larger volume. The only thing holding me up with the Swans is the lack of any real review of them used in a HT setup. I also read a good review of the Rocket ELT system. I've tried posting this question in the speaker discussion but nobody responded except some guy that told me I needed to try Magnepans. Which sound nice but my dogs would tear them to shreds or urinate all over them.
Unfortunately, the Ascend CBM-170 and CMT-340 speakers, do NOT use the same tweeter. I have verified this fact directly with Ascend Acoustics. You can also see it when comparing the CBM-170 frequency response to the frequency response of the CMT-340. The CMT-340 shows a dip at 3000 Hz that gets worse off-axis. It also has a rising frequency response from there to about 18,000 Hz. If you read the reviews of the Ascend Acoustics speakers carefully, at least one reviewer mentions that the CMT-340 gets shrill at high volume levels. Such shrillness would be expected from the CMT-340's frequency response. If I had wanted somewhat shrill sounding speakers, I would have bought Axioms. At least the Axioms have a smoother midrange than the CMT-340. Fortunately, Ascend makes a center version of the CBM-170 that has the logo located on the side of the grill so that it looks OK when placed on its side.

I had to eliminate the Magnepans as well because my wife and I didn't think they would survive our 6 year old son, his friends and our 18 month old dog. Such thinking also led to the decision to wall mount the speakers out of harms way rather than use speaker stands. And, as I mentioned before, the decision to wall mount the speakers led to the choice of the Ascend CBM-170s which are fairly compact and have built-in threaded inserts for attaching to wall mounts.