I think that probably is the case. With the Elac you can basically draw a straight line through the response all the way to 80 Hz, with the ZA5.2 only down to 120ish. That'll result in a pretty significantly different tonal balance between the two if compared side by side out in the open.
Agreed, this is very unfortunate as this design has proven to present lobing issues. I have the Debut Reference and am seriously considering just getting a 3rd speaker for matching LCR duty.Sadly for people who would be building typical lounge cinema the matching horizontal DCR52 center channel is 2-way design with known issues. @amirm did you send message to Andrew Jones about this review and asked him here to comment? He never came last time you asked.
Is it real wood veneer? Or wood-grain look vinyl?
I agree with you for the most part, although I have seen a couple of 2 way MTM's that measure pretty well.....specifically those with smallish woofers placed as close together as possible, such as in the above design.Sadly for people who would be building typical lounge cinema the matching horizontal DCR52 center channel is 2-way design with known issues. @amirm did you send message to Andrew Jones about this review and asked him here to comment? He never came last time you asked.
DEFINITELY wood grain vinyl; from afar it's not noticeable, but from 2 feet away it's fairly obvious to fans of fine wood surfacing.
I bought the m126be specifically for the seamless mid-high crossover, and what the beryllium brings to the table in terms of transparency and high frequency response. Imagine my shock when the Elac Reference delivered similar performance (caveat: being 50 with hearing loss due to age, I'm not the final word in assessing high frequency resolution). I'm a huge fan of the nuances of female vocals, jazz percussion and acoustic guitar *sigh* yes, I would be equally happy with the Debut Reference with my only objection being a the budget cosmetics of the fake wood veneer. Now this is specific to the music I listen to, so YMMV. I also occasionally rock out to Rush, Queen and Led Z. and the speakers are equals for pop/rock. This is why I've stopped searching for my multi-channel home theater speakers - this is it. I'm not going to do better than 5 Debut Reference speakers.
Just realized its floorstanding big brother, DFT52, has the same price tag.
https://www.elac.com/series/debut-reference/dfr-52/?r=us
Maybe I was misinterpreting things, but I thought the Jones’ Pioneer SP-BS22-LR did pretty well especially for its price.
They are quite deep and large for such a use. While I did not test them as such, I stood in front of them while playing and it seemed to integrate well.
It was good for its price but not star performer.
If going by the preference score, yes. But keep in mind the score doesn’t account for sensitivity, power handling, linearity/compression, etc.
Amir, is this something the NFS can spit out rather easily - minimum distance for proper driver integration? May be useful to include in future reviews.
I really want to point out that there is no such thing as "active speaker hiss". What there is is hiss from cheap active components used in cheap active speakers. For the same money, build the speaker with a passive crossover and a conventional external amplifier. One - it would sound worse because you threw away opportunities to optimise the design, and two - it would probably hiss - because you could only afford an even cheaper amplifier. Complaints about hiss from certain active speakers are all about value engineering. What would you trade off for the same price?
It has such a metric (really, a graph) that is called that but I think it is showing something else completely. Once I figure out useful data from it, I will definitely post.
