ReDFoX
Member
Hello ASR, this is my first attempt posting something here, so I'm sorry in advance for mistakes that I could made. English isn't my primary language so I'll try keeping things as clear as possible.
I've been in "read-only mode" and recenly realised that I gained more knowledge over this year than in 5 previous years when I was usually watching YT and visiting "ordinary" non-english speaking forums and sites. Therefore, about 3 month ago I felt confident in myself enough to actually try and make quasi-anechoic measurements in ordinary flat. My first 2 test subjects were JBL 4312mkii and Pioneer CS-66G. While I don't think that those measurements were properly made and processed, I compared them to existing data from manufaturers and it showed a surprising amount of "truth" in my homemade stuff. So, here it goes...
Subjective part
A friend of mine gave me those 685s for sell, so took the opportunity to measure them. I'm kinda biased towards B&W in a negative way due to brand's sound, however I tried to give them a chance. Well, their interior looks really cool and reminds me of my pair of KRK RP7G4, unfortunately B&Ws have straight cut corners with no rounding at all which leads to higher edge diffraction. In general, the design is quite typical for two-way systems: a conical LF/MF dynamic driver (with a surprisingly soft rubber suspension), a dome tweeter without a waveguide (another dissapointment), and, of course, a bass-reflex design with frontal port. I should also note the unusual chamber behind the HF driver, the fixed “bullet” on LF/MF driver and indentations at the inlet of the port, which, apparently, should reduce the turbulence.
I started with the most difficult thing for these bookshelves - a direct comparison with my 4" monitrosprobably from some German brand. Aaand, 685 sucked. The difference was so huge I started to wonder if I applied wrong eq to them somehow. Worth mentioning, I have a very small room with RT of around 200-250ms and room modes all the way up to ~400Hz (this 2 factors will become crucial later). My monitors were tuned to harman without bass shelf and both the highs and lows on 685 were unrealistically boosted. On the one hand, this created the impression of sound “in the face”, as I like, on the other hand, you immediately understand why the vocal (for example) jumps out and transients are emphasized, and you come to the realization that there's something fundamentally wrong with the sound.
Here's what I wrote during the first audition: "mumbling, no mid frequencies, chymous top.". I tried to deviate from the axis and it seemed to me that part of the spectrum of the upper mid was damped to a lesser extent, which could indicate problems with directivity (and we'll see this later).
In addition, there was a feeling that the port ofbass-reflex system was incorrectly tuned - like too high, in a region where the natural roll-off of LF/MF driver hasn't started yet. Anyway, for some reason the "speed" of bass on these is just "non-existent".
Despite all this, it is worth mentioning the excellent power handling of those: I did not manage to achieve audible degradation even when used one 685 in mono with low crest factor musical material.
In general, I tested the 685 with a few more tracks that I know well, and compared to those unknown 4" gray monitors and noticed that 685s have a much worse separation of sound layers and, in general, the picture is kind of “pushed in”. Whether this is due to the fact that the comparison was made with monitors with a linear phase response, or is it purely frequency dependent stuff that our brain throws at us, honestly, I don’t know, but the images separation is much worse: in the situation where I "see" 3 layers on monitors, on 685s, the first 2 simply “stick together” and the vocals, for example, simply jump out at the listener at certain moments.
All in all, 685 gave me an impression of speaker that compansates for its owner age-dependent hearing loss. Unfortunately for manufacturer, I'm 19 and the amount of highs that this thing produced in nearfiled was enough to cause an ear fatigue, even for such "straight" room curves lover as me.
Objective part
I hope that someone more knowledgable will correct mistakes (if I've done such) in measurements processing since I still has no concrete proof of their reliability.
I took a total of 17 measurements, I guess.
The distance was ~70cm for vertical and horizontal measurements. The room I measured them in is very reflective and on a smaller scale of overall size. That lead to a gate time of 3.5ms. This is criminally small, bit unfortunately I have no opportunity to measure something outside since I live in a block of flats near the city centre. SPL numbers are kinda meaningless since I don't have any spl meters nor usb microphones with SPL calibration. An app on my phone showed levels around 70-80 dBC, but I have no trust in its measurements.
Uh-oh, that's one scary graph. Not only it shows a V-shaped FR, but also tells us that this is unEQuable speaker. Why? Look at the 5-9K region, where tweeter basically radiating in 180 degrees and I heard that in sighted test. It means that we can't pull this region on on-axis FR, because we'll create a peak in ER spectrum. This leads to high room-dependency of the speaker (remember I told that my listening room has RT of about 250ms?).
Looking at polar plots we can clearly see a directivity mismatch and that strange looking resonance. This is the speaker I'd give for those who believe that you can eq everything. No, you can not. I've tried making PEQ filters for this thing, but that HF bell would be impossible to nail since all rooms have different amount of ER so the perception of that region would highly depend on amount of reflection/absorbtion.
After deriving biquad coefficients, I've loaded filters into my DDRC-24 and gave 685s a last chance. It's important, that I listened to them in a different room than in my first test and their tonality without PEQ has changed! I heard that HF peak as kind of a high-shelf boost due to huge aount of undapmpened early reflections. After filters appliction I was both releaved and saddened: my filters did a great job of bringing back those scooped mids, but it was something in highs that I can't describe that still gave me that impression of inflated upper mids.
Maybe I'm doing something wrong, so feel to poke me in any msitakes or inaccuracies that I could possibly made.
This is a comparison between 3 versions that I recorded ~1m in listening position with an absorbtion panel behind. This is for purely entertainment reasons because omnidirectional microphone != our ears+brain
I hope that it will help somebody one day and stop them from buying such things. Such situation and speaker are another confirmation of the need for publicly available measurements
Measurements + graph data
I've been in "read-only mode" and recenly realised that I gained more knowledge over this year than in 5 previous years when I was usually watching YT and visiting "ordinary" non-english speaking forums and sites. Therefore, about 3 month ago I felt confident in myself enough to actually try and make quasi-anechoic measurements in ordinary flat. My first 2 test subjects were JBL 4312mkii and Pioneer CS-66G. While I don't think that those measurements were properly made and processed, I compared them to existing data from manufaturers and it showed a surprising amount of "truth" in my homemade stuff. So, here it goes...
This is one of those goofy ahh B&W speakers
A friend of mine gave me those 685s for sell, so took the opportunity to measure them. I'm kinda biased towards B&W in a negative way due to brand's sound, however I tried to give them a chance. Well, their interior looks really cool and reminds me of my pair of KRK RP7G4, unfortunately B&Ws have straight cut corners with no rounding at all which leads to higher edge diffraction. In general, the design is quite typical for two-way systems: a conical LF/MF dynamic driver (with a surprisingly soft rubber suspension), a dome tweeter without a waveguide (another dissapointment), and, of course, a bass-reflex design with frontal port. I should also note the unusual chamber behind the HF driver, the fixed “bullet” on LF/MF driver and indentations at the inlet of the port, which, apparently, should reduce the turbulence.
I started with the most difficult thing for these bookshelves - a direct comparison with my 4" monitros
Here's what I wrote during the first audition: "mumbling, no mid frequencies, chymous top.". I tried to deviate from the axis and it seemed to me that part of the spectrum of the upper mid was damped to a lesser extent, which could indicate problems with directivity (and we'll see this later).
In addition, there was a feeling that the port ofbass-reflex system was incorrectly tuned - like too high, in a region where the natural roll-off of LF/MF driver hasn't started yet. Anyway, for some reason the "speed" of bass on these is just "non-existent".
Despite all this, it is worth mentioning the excellent power handling of those: I did not manage to achieve audible degradation even when used one 685 in mono with low crest factor musical material.
In general, I tested the 685 with a few more tracks that I know well, and compared to those unknown 4" gray monitors and noticed that 685s have a much worse separation of sound layers and, in general, the picture is kind of “pushed in”. Whether this is due to the fact that the comparison was made with monitors with a linear phase response, or is it purely frequency dependent stuff that our brain throws at us, honestly, I don’t know, but the images separation is much worse: in the situation where I "see" 3 layers on monitors, on 685s, the first 2 simply “stick together” and the vocals, for example, simply jump out at the listener at certain moments.
All in all, 685 gave me an impression of speaker that compansates for its owner age-dependent hearing loss. Unfortunately for manufacturer, I'm 19 and the amount of highs that this thing produced in nearfiled was enough to cause an ear fatigue, even for such "straight" room curves lover as me.
Objective part
I hope that someone more knowledgable will correct mistakes (if I've done such) in measurements processing since I still has no concrete proof of their reliability.
Native Instruments Komplete Audio 6 mkii -> Yamaha A2000A -> B&W 685 S1 -> Sonarworks Xref 20 -> Native Instruments Komplete Audio 6 mkii
The distance was ~70cm for vertical and horizontal measurements. The room I measured them in is very reflective and on a smaller scale of overall size. That lead to a gate time of 3.5ms. This is criminally small, bit unfortunately I have no opportunity to measure something outside since I live in a block of flats near the city centre. SPL numbers are kinda meaningless since I don't have any spl meters nor usb microphones with SPL calibration. An app on my phone showed levels around 70-80 dBC, but I have no trust in its measurements.
Uh-oh, that's one scary graph. Not only it shows a V-shaped FR, but also tells us that this is unEQuable speaker. Why? Look at the 5-9K region, where tweeter basically radiating in 180 degrees and I heard that in sighted test. It means that we can't pull this region on on-axis FR, because we'll create a peak in ER spectrum. This leads to high room-dependency of the speaker (remember I told that my listening room has RT of about 250ms?).
Looking at polar plots we can clearly see a directivity mismatch and that strange looking resonance. This is the speaker I'd give for those who believe that you can eq everything. No, you can not. I've tried making PEQ filters for this thing, but that HF bell would be impossible to nail since all rooms have different amount of ER so the perception of that region would highly depend on amount of reflection/absorbtion.
After deriving biquad coefficients, I've loaded filters into my DDRC-24 and gave 685s a last chance. It's important, that I listened to them in a different room than in my first test and their tonality without PEQ has changed! I heard that HF peak as kind of a high-shelf boost due to huge aount of undapmpened early reflections. After filters appliction I was both releaved and saddened: my filters did a great job of bringing back those scooped mids, but it was something in highs that I can't describe that still gave me that impression of inflated upper mids.
Maybe I'm doing something wrong, so feel to poke me in any msitakes or inaccuracies that I could possibly made.
This is a comparison between 3 versions that I recorded ~1m in listening position with an absorbtion panel behind. This is for purely entertainment reasons because omnidirectional microphone != our ears+brain
Measurements + graph data
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