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Andrew Jones MoFi Speakers

Mr. Widget

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That's interesting we both have that impression. It's not that they don't image well, just that the sound didn't quite totally escape the sensation of coming from those boxes. I found they did the "disappearing" better if I listened further away (in the room I was in, the bass would get a little more lean too).
I have never found a wider loudspeaker that did the mini-monitor style disappearing act. This is only my impression and not drawn from any sort of study, but of all the speakers that I have heard, the narrower speakers have typically done the best job of "disappearing".
 

cavedriver

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I still think they could be better at this than what I heard, since it was a short audition. I suspect if you have time to play more with positioning perhaps they'll get closer to your other speakers in that respect. (?)
Yes, I have them although I may easily return them and haven't made up my mind if I'm keeping them yet. So far they are just set up to A/B with the Snells and Lintons and are not positioned optimally (although the toe can be adjusted). Next week they will be moved into a dedicated listening room where I can play with spacing and listening distance. I re-read your first comments about the variable fullness of the bass and am interested to see if I can get more out of them when I have more freedom to move them around. Right now the bass is tight and controlled and reasonably full but admittedly a bit leaner than the very full sounding Snells. Again some of that is the mid-bass bump that Snell put in to please the masses (supposedly), but damn it's pleasing sometimes. (an aside- the next DSP feature- song sculpting). With the rear ports on the SP10's I'll also have the opportunity to play with distance to rear wall. Right now they are 13" from the wall so I would expect I'm already giving them as much of a boost as I should and still retain accuracy but we'll see.

To judge the size of these things here's a picture of one side of the setup. Note that the GoldenEars were just added today for other testing. They're for a movie room, weren't in the way for the SP10 testing, and are probably going back. I had been meaning to hear them for some time and the cost to demo them was negligible. I won't comment further on them, they've been discussed elsewhere extensively. And yes, I have the already tall Wharfedales stacked on top of the Snell's. No judging! I'm short one pair of speaker stands and I sit/stand up to tweeter height for them, and I know they are screwing up the Snell's rear tweeter sound but I don't feel that has interfered with my 80% evaluation. hmm. that picture is at a bit of an angle, the SP10's look even a bit bigger in person.
 

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Dennis Murphy

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Ok, time for a little disclosure-I've been listening to the SP10's at my house for the past week. In short, I agree with most of what MattHooper has said and also what he related from JA sounds right.

There is some treble lift on these speakers but it's not B&W territory. It IS enough to make higher volumes fatiguing faster than on my Linton's or Snell's, but it's at volumes you shouldn't use for that long anyway if you want to keep your hearing. On the flip side, their accuracy and dynamics on instruments like horns are a joy to listen to. The opening title of Star Wars is several minutes of sonic heaven with a couple tenths of seconds of, "ooch, that was just a little much". The silk and paper combo is one of the better implementations of these materials that I've heard in a while. Instruments, especially horns and woodwinds, are clear, seemingly accurate and correctly sonorous without going too far. Voices are clear, clean, and very accurate down to small details and neither too far forward or back.

They definitely are easy to drive. A 130 wpc home theater receiver has no trouble driving them to room-crushing volumes, but also even a Willsenton R8 at a claimed 45 wpc easily drives them louder than you could possibly want. They play loud very cleanly and seemingly effortlessly. Cranking them up is fun and very rewarding minus the eventual fatigue if you go too high. They do not play quietly very well. Both the Lintons and especially the Snell's excel at this - it's one of my favorite things about the Snells- they manage to sound dynamic and enjoyable at virtually any volume down to a whisper. The SP10's have kind of a minimum volume before all the dynamics kick in. It is low enough but it's there. I don't understand what causes this behavior and it's annoying to defend the observation because I know the SP10's, Linton's, and Snells all measure as fairly accurate over a reasonable volume range, so why and how do the Snell's manage to sound so good at low volumes? I used to think it was because they are fairly efficient but now the SP10's counter that explanation.

Back to the SP10's. Their bass has much of the "fun" and "fullness" that I enjoyed with AJ's Elac DBR62's. Bass is tight, accurate, and full, a great combination. But the extension is not what I would call full range. My old Snell's with their 8" woofers but larger cabinets go deeper by at least several Hz and are a bit fuller in that very end of the range (The Snells are also rather inaccurate in the low-mid bass, giving them a false sense of depth, one of their weaknesses that one must account for). The Lintons also play a little lower, but also a bit less smoothly or accurately, and are more easily overpowered.

Soundstage and imaging are just ok. I agree with MH's comments that the image is a bit tricky. I've played around with toe-in also and currently have them aimed just behind my head in my listening position. Yes you can pick out instruments better than the Lintons or Snells but I also know exactly where the speakers are with most pieces. They do not "disappear". By contrast I often can't tell where Dennis Murphy's BMR's are when I've listened to those. Those are dang hard to pinpoint. My Snell's also form a cohesive image fairly easily, and I've always been happy with them aimed straight into the room, but they have their rear-firing tweeters so their soundstage is somewhat more illlusory than other speakers.

Other than the slight treble rise I didn't detect any glaring highs or lows but I don't trust myself on this, I'm not a musician or trained listener and until someone else points it out to me I often misjudge small inaccuracies in a speakers level measurement. That JA found them to be fairly flat matches my impression.

As an aside, while I still dislike the Willsenton R8 amp with my Lintons and Snell's (loose+loose=sloppy), with the tighter and more accurate SP10's the Willsenton amp adds a slightly more pleasant "rounding" to content and sands off a little of that treble lift. More testing is needed here.
I hope to hear these this weekend. Cavedriver (what's a cavedriver?) and I live about 15 minutes from each other.
 

cavedriver

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I hope to hear these this weekend. Cavedriver (what's a cavedriver?) and I live about 15 minutes from each other.
haha, oh man, my secret testing resource is revealed. Well, rest assured, Dennis's ears are better than mine and we'll see what he thinks of them soon.

Someone once pointed out to me that it could be cave-driver or caved-river. both have meaning to me but I admit it's kind of a lame moniker. Could have been worse, I almost named my car racing team, "Headless Horseman Racing" and painted my helmet like a pumpkin.
 

MattHooper

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Sorry to blow my cover. I probably won't post any impressions--after all, these kind of compete dead-on with my towers.

Too late. You can’t announce you are going to hear them and not spill the beans.
 

airgas1998

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Yes, I have them although I may easily return them and haven't made up my mind if I'm keeping them yet. So far they are just set up to A/B with the Snells and Lintons and are not positioned optimally (although the toe can be adjusted). Next week they will be moved into a dedicated listening room where I can play with spacing and listening distance. I re-read your first comments about the variable fullness of the bass and am interested to see if I can get more out of them when I have more freedom to move them around. Right now the bass is tight and controlled and reasonably full but admittedly a bit leaner than the very full sounding Snells. Again some of that is the mid-bass bump that Snell put in to please the masses (supposedly), but damn it's pleasing sometimes. (an aside- the next DSP feature- song sculpting). With the rear ports on the SP10's I'll also have the opportunity to play with distance to rear wall. Right now they are 13" from the wall so I would expect I'm already giving them as much of a boost as I should and still retain accuracy but we'll see.

To judge the size of these things here's a picture of one side of the setup. Note that the GoldenEars were just added today for other testing. They're for a movie room, weren't in the way for the SP10 testing, and are probably going back. I had been meaning to hear them for some time and the cost to demo them was negligible. I won't comment further on them, they've been discussed elsewhere extensively. And yes, I have the already tall Wharfedales stacked on top of the Snell's. No judging! I'm short one pair of speaker stands and I sit/stand up to tweeter height for them, and I know they are screwing up the Snell's rear tweeter sound but I don't feel that has interfered with my 80% evaluation. hmm. that picture is at a bit of an angle, the SP10's look even a bit bigger in person.
yes, they look wacky without proper stands...
 

airgas1998

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Sal1950

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That's my preference :)
Mine also mostly.
I got my copy of Stereophile yesterday and seeing as JA both did the measurements and listening test, they blended a little better that usual. LOL
I don't really find a 90db speaker deserves to be called High Efficency, IMHO they have to get up to or past the 95db range for that, 90 is more "Mid-E. LOL As mhardy mentioned earlier you can only have 2 out of 3 in HiE, Small size, low bass. All other things being equal the big goal is low distortion so in almost all cases "small size" has got to go. Subwoofing can help but there is always a compromise there too.
My personal preference has evolved over the years to reasonably HiE speaker matched to a ultra clean SS amp. If I feel the speaker needs some tuning, I'll do it in DRC. I'll take em as large as my room will accept and still allow enough free space around them so they can disappear in the sound-stage. No matter the design, free space air all around the speaker is a absolute necessity for good imaging.
 

Mnyb

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Yes it would be interesting to read what people accomplish with a fully installed and adjusted speaker.
Actually using EQ and room correction, IMO it’s a necessity not and option .
 

mhardy6647

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I just had a weird but not entirely random thought. :oops:
I was looking at the recent "user experience" posts on these loudspeakers and it got me to wonderin' how heavy they were -- which got me to wonderin' about the heavy and dense vs. lithe and limber schools of thought -- and that made me think of R. B. Fuller's Tensegrity.

Anyone know if anybody ever tried building a loudspeaker enclosure with a tensegrity skeleton -- and/or what the resonance behavior of such a construct might be like?

Buckminster_Fuller_Flickr_POET_ARCHITECTURE.jpg


I had a friend in college who went nuts building these things for a while.
 

DSJR

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Yes, I have them although I may easily return them and haven't made up my mind if I'm keeping them yet. So far they are just set up to A/B with the Snells and Lintons and are not positioned optimally (although the toe can be adjusted). Next week they will be moved into a dedicated listening room where I can play with spacing and listening distance. I re-read your first comments about the variable fullness of the bass and am interested to see if I can get more out of them when I have more freedom to move them around. Right now the bass is tight and controlled and reasonably full but admittedly a bit leaner than the very full sounding Snells. Again some of that is the mid-bass bump that Snell put in to please the masses (supposedly), but damn it's pleasing sometimes. (an aside- the next DSP feature- song sculpting). With the rear ports on the SP10's I'll also have the opportunity to play with distance to rear wall. Right now they are 13" from the wall so I would expect I'm already giving them as much of a boost as I should and still retain accuracy but we'll see.

To judge the size of these things here's a picture of one side of the setup. Note that the GoldenEars were just added today for other testing. They're for a movie room, weren't in the way for the SP10 testing, and are probably going back. I had been meaning to hear them for some time and the cost to demo them was negligible. I won't comment further on them, they've been discussed elsewhere extensively. And yes, I have the already tall Wharfedales stacked on top of the Snell's. No judging! I'm short one pair of speaker stands and I sit/stand up to tweeter height for them, and I know they are screwing up the Snell's rear tweeter sound but I don't feel that has interfered with my 80% evaluation. hmm. that picture is at a bit of an angle, the SP10's look even a bit bigger in person.
You may have done this already, but PLEASE take the other speakers physically away from the pair that are playing, as their drivers will almost certainly be vibrating in sympathy and altering your perception as well as frequency response of the pair playing - and making it more bland/worse. First hand experience when our 'single speaker-pair dem room' was turned into a general 'non-B&O' room out of the way shortly before I left - more than two pairs together diluted what the playing pair were doing and everything sounded the same - meh in other words!
 

cavedriver

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You may have done this already, but PLEASE take the other speakers physically away from the pair that are playing, as their drivers will almost certainly be vibrating in sympathy and altering your perception as well as frequency response of the pair playing - and making it more bland/worse. First hand experience when our 'single speaker-pair dem room' was turned into a general 'non-B&O' room out of the way shortly before I left - more than two pairs together diluted what the playing pair were doing and everything sounded the same - meh in other words!
hmm, may need to apply some audio science to this question. It would be routine to find multiple speakers in a listening room, positioned at various places in the room. So then the question is, how close, at what distance, and for which frequencies? Certainly someone has researched this before, and it's probably been discussed in this forum. Any references? I would assume that in terms of all the decay involved (distance to second speakers, energy absorbed just to motivate the drivers in the second speaker, sound transmitted by the second speaker, and so on, that having the second speakers at least 1/2 the listening distance away from the first speakers would be safe, but what about inside that distance? What drivers on which speakers are most likely to cause trouble? I would expect that the combination of large woofers tied to passive radiators on the GoldenEars could return quite a bit of sound energy, but for other speakers with bass reflex drivers I would expect that with the centering force of the magnets mostly all you would get is high frequency absorption from the cone materials and negligible additional return, which mean I just have a bunch of small sound absorbing panels scattered around my room. The bigger problem, I expect, is that there are a bunch of large, solid boxes near my speakers that are messing with the diffraction patterns causing all sorts of unevenness in the sound wave. But as I stated everything was further apart during (somewhat) more serious testing, and yes, I will be isolating each speaker in my other listening room next week for a completely serious analysis. I also need to play a whole lot with the positioning. For example someone linked an article about positioning the HSU concentrics that explained the benefits of crossing speakers like this in front of the listener so that's something I've never tried and will have to experiment with. A review of the images from the Capitat Audiofest shows that AJ had the speakers crossing behind the listeners and toed very similarly to how I have them, but that was in a hotel room with 6-7 chairs for the audience.
 

cavedriver

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I just had a weird but not entirely random thought. :oops:
I was looking at the recent "user experience" posts on these loudspeakers and it got me to wonderin' how heavy they were -- which got me to wonderin' about the heavy and dense vs. lithe and limber schools of thought -- and that made me think of R. B. Fuller's Tensegrity.

Anyone know if anybody ever tried building a loudspeaker enclosure with a tensegrity skeleton -- and/or what the resonance behavior of such a construct might be like?

Buckminster_Fuller_Flickr_POET_ARCHITECTURE.jpg


I had a friend in college who went nuts building these things for a while.
The thing is that would be kind of a solution in search of a problem. Fuller was exploring construction of structures using a minimum of mass. Since we mostly don't care how much speakers weigh (until you've tried to move a 200 pound tower!), there isn't much need to explore trying to build a speaker with a minimum weight. Maybe if you needed to suspend a speaker over an audience or wanted to support one with a balloon, or maybe have a speaker with a very large internal volume. I suppose if the tension elements could be "strung together" and tensioned from a single point you could build a speaker that "collapses" by releasing tension by paying out the string and then "erected" by tensioning the spring whenever you want to listen to the speaker, but again there'd be a bunch of other ways to build a collapsing speaker.
 

Mr. Widget

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I don't really find a 90db speaker deserves to be called High Efficency, IMHO they have to get up to or past the 95db range for that, 90 is more "Mid-E.
+1
No matter the design, free space air all around the speaker is a absolute necessity for good imaging.
Yep... diffusion and absorption need to be there too, but you just need the space. Of course you need a speaker with a proper design as well. All of these things add up to give you the system response.
 

mhardy6647

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The thing is that would be kind of a solution in search of a problem. Fuller was exploring construction of structures using a minimum of mass. Since we mostly don't care how much speakers weigh (until you've tried to move a 200 pound tower!), there isn't much need to explore trying to build a speaker with a minimum weight. Maybe if you needed to suspend a speaker over an audience or wanted to support one with a balloon, or maybe have a speaker with a very large internal volume. I suppose if the tension elements could be "strung together" and tensioned from a single point you could build a speaker that "collapses" by releasing tension by paying out the string and then "erected" by tensioning the spring whenever you want to listen to the speaker, but again there'd be a bunch of other ways to build a collapsing speaker.
I wasn't actually thinking about the mass per se, but the resonance properties of an 'enclosed' tensegrity. Sort of like taking the BBC LS3/5A (and Harbeth) notion of a lossy enclosure to the extreme.

Dynamixion_car_by_Buckminster_Fuller_1933_%28side_views%29.jpg
 

Mnyb

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hmm, may need to apply some audio science to this question. It would be routine to find multiple speakers in a listening room, positioned at various places in the room. So then the question is, how close, at what distance, and for which frequencies? Certainly someone has researched this before, and it's probably been discussed in this forum. Any references? I would assume that in terms of all the decay involved (distance to second speakers, energy absorbed just to motivate the drivers in the second speaker, sound transmitted by the second speaker, and so on, that having the second speakers at least 1/2 the listening distance away from the first speakers would be safe, but what about inside that distance? What drivers on which speakers are most likely to cause trouble? I would expect that the combination of large woofers tied to passive radiators on the GoldenEars could return quite a bit of sound energy, but for other speakers with bass reflex drivers I would expect that with the centering force of the magnets mostly all you would get is high frequency absorption from the cone materials and negligible additional return, which mean I just have a bunch of small sound absorbing panels scattered around my room. The bigger problem, I expect, is that there are a bunch of large, solid boxes near my speakers that are messing with the diffraction patterns causing all sorts of unevenness in the sound wave. But as I stated everything was further apart during (somewhat) more serious testing, and yes, I will be isolating each speaker in my other listening room next week for a completely serious analysis. I also need to play a whole lot with the positioning. For example someone linked an article about positioning the HSU concentrics that explained the benefits of crossing speakers like this in front of the listener so that's something I've never tried and will have to experiment with. A review of the images from the Capitat Audiofest shows that AJ had the speakers crossing behind the listeners and toed very similarly to how I have them, but that was in a hotel room with 6-7 chairs for the audience.

A guess the inverse square law , baffle to baffle would be very bad across the room better , just get someone to hold up a sheet of paper beside the front baffle (like a continuation of the baffle ) you would hear that .

The other effect that the speakers are some kind of passive resonator when not used ? i would not dare to guess how much or little that does ?

But not having objects close to a speaker is good practice .
 

DSJR

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hmm, may need to apply some audio science to this question. It would be routine to find multiple speakers in a listening room, positioned at various places in the room. So then the question is, how close, at what distance, and for which frequencies? Certainly someone has researched this before, and it's probably been discussed in this forum. Any references? I would assume that in terms of all the decay involved (distance to second speakers, energy absorbed just to motivate the drivers in the second speaker, sound transmitted by the second speaker, and so on, that having the second speakers at least 1/2 the listening distance away from the first speakers would be safe, but what about inside that distance? What drivers on which speakers are most likely to cause trouble? I would expect that the combination of large woofers tied to passive radiators on the GoldenEars could return quite a bit of sound energy, but for other speakers with bass reflex drivers I would expect that with the centering force of the magnets mostly all you would get is high frequency absorption from the cone materials and negligible additional return, which mean I just have a bunch of small sound absorbing panels scattered around my room. The bigger problem, I expect, is that there are a bunch of large, solid boxes near my speakers that are messing with the diffraction patterns causing all sorts of unevenness in the sound wave. But as I stated everything was further apart during (somewhat) more serious testing, and yes, I will be isolating each speaker in my other listening room next week for a completely serious analysis. I also need to play a whole lot with the positioning. For example someone linked an article about positioning the HSU concentrics that explained the benefits of crossing speakers like this in front of the listener so that's something I've never tried and will have to experiment with. A review of the images from the Capitat Audiofest shows that AJ had the speakers crossing behind the listeners and toed very similarly to how I have them, but that was in a hotel room with 6-7 chairs for the audience.
I never did forensic analysis on this aspect (so 90% of you would dismiss my comments out of hand) but the sonic issues were repeatable and easy to hear if you knew the room and some of the speakers listened to. Drive units are designed to vibrate at audio frequencies and I'd posit that not all are well loaded mechanically or electrically and may just be more easily excited, especially in bass frequencies. Back in the 80's we went stupid on this and would have nothing to do with comparators and walls of speakers as I started with, so forgive the knee-jerk when I spied several quite large loudspeakers all grouped and/or stacked together when you're trying to audition a speaker for purchase. One way kind-of round it is to place speakers not in use face down on the floor, or maybe facing a side or back wall. Someone somewhere I hope may well have done response and impulse measurements to see what happens. It can't have just been a silly ploy by Linn as we peeps demonstrating had to lug often large boxes in and out of the dem room ;)
 
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