Best speakers ever 4 small room?
18 Hz (6 Db down), 95 db efficiency, in a reasonably small box using an 8" woofer? I'm intrigued by this. How are they able to do this and no one else, apparently, can? There are 15" subwoofers that cannot achieve 18 Hz, how is Audio Note doing it with a woofer half that size? Something isn't right... -RW- |
RW: I cannot really tell you how they do it (dunno!) but it is based on a relatively older design of Snell speakers and the cabinet size + corner reinforcement (they are made to be stuck in corners ideally) + sealed enclosure makes these go down very low, flat until about 25Hz and then 6dB at 17Hz (not 18!)...I can only suggest you audition a pair and see what it does for you..it blew me away when I did - just the base $4,000 model with copper wiring and not High Efficiency- and the idea of being able to place either in corners or free-standing into the room makes them very appealing to me. Many so-called full range speakers are bottom heavy /slow or artificial, these seemed to just play music with fantastic integration between both ways. I could see myself cheating on my Avalon upgrade plans to go AN/E and off the merry-go-round. |
We've designed a number of small rooms and they are far more difficult than larger ones. One of the most important things is chosing the speakers carefully--so your question is a good one. You want speakers that will work with the room, not against it. If the drivers are too large for volume of the room they will never really function the way they were intended to. Every driver has a "comfort zone" in terms of inertia and this range can vary greatly. In general smaller drivers for your room are going to work well and at a later point you may decide to add a sub for that last 1/2 octave, but I wouldn't do that initially. The speakers that we have had experience with and gotten good results in small rooms are Kharma 3.2 and Talon Hawks. We have a room in process with Lipinski monitors and I expect that to work out very well. The other speaker that I have listened to and find excellent is the Magico mini. We have not done a room with this speaker yet, but I expect it will have similar well behaved performance in small rooms. My reason behind not adding the sub initially is many of these speakers have remarkable bass response and in small rooms there is room gain for low frequency. Often times the sub is really not needed so I suggest starting without it (unless you are a bass freak) and then later if you feel you need more bottom end add it. The last thing I'll point out is something we've had in development for a long time. It's a sub-PARC. This is a programmable crossover, parametric EQ, and digital amplifier for low frequency. It is (in my biased opinion) the best way to add a sub to a pair of satelites. As a disclaimer, Rives Audio owns Talon Loudspeakers which I mentioned as a speaker I would highly recommend for that size room. |
