German engineering brings to mind names like BMW and Mercedes-Benz. From my background as an installer and product manager, it also brings to mind phrases like over-engineered, prohibitively expensive and impossible to service. It may sound bitter, but sometimes engineers take a product concept and create things without keeping the customer in mind.
Now that you know my bias, I'd like to introduce you to the German-made Rainbow CS 265.25 Germanium components. These component speakers are rather normal in appearance - and that's a good thing - so one would hope they're easy to install and will sound even better.
Impressions
The Rainbow CS 265.25 component set comes in a 13.5" by 18" by 4" briefcase-sized box. Several lifestyle and product images arranged in the shape of the Rainbow stripe adorn the top of the box and a carrying handle completes the briefcase look.
Opening the box, you're presented with a nice layout where all of the pieces are visible. The crossovers catch your eye first, with clear acrylic covers revealing the neatly arranged coils, caps and resistors. The aluminum cones of the woofers are visible through the black perforated-metal grilles, and the tweeters peak out from under a small cardboard bridge that holds them securely inside the box.
The 6.5" woofers are handsome units with textured silver cast-aluminum baskets, aluminum compound cones, inverted dust caps and rubber magnet boots. The cones consist of two aluminum skins separated by a thin layer of foam. This should make the cones light and stiff (good things) and also eliminate the sometimes harsh breakup modes characteristic to standard aluminum cones. Rainbow uses butyl rubber for the surrounds, woven Nomex for the spiders and Kapton material for the voice coil formers.
The 25mm silk-dome tweeters use a ventilated motor structure that's stated to be "ferrofluid free" on the backside of the driver. Behind the dome is a tuned acoustic volume (like an enclosure for a woofer) that provides for a lower resonant frequency and better control.
The crossovers use air-core inductors to resist magnetic saturation, foil capacitors for better sonic quality and resistors encased in machined aluminum blocks for better heat dissipation. All in all, this set has the appearance and quality of parts commonly found in more expensive sets.
Setup
I installed the components in a pair of sealed 2.25ft3, fiberfill stuffed test enclosures. The tweeters were placed very close to and directly above the woofers so that there would be little to no phase error amongst the drivers. When I install a product, I like to use as much of the supplied accessories as possible. For the CS 265.25, this meant installing the woofers using the supplied mounting rings, grilles and hardware. I cut new baffles and fit the woofers into cutouts measuring 166mm across. Rainbow supplies the set with plated Torx button heads screws that make for ultra-secure installations.
Mounting the tweeter using the supplied flush-mount cups required somewhat large 49mm diameter holes. To my dismay, the mounting instructions for the tweeters showed different parts than what were supplied, so I held them in place using silicone caulk. Included was the center bolt for the backside, but no pressure clips to make use of them. My conversation with the stateside distributor indicated that early sets wouldn't have the clips, but that omission should be corrected by the time you finish reading this review. Until then, hot glue or caulk are acceptable methods for installation.