Arendal 1961 Center/Monitor Speaker Review

[rvsixer]

Same speaker now tested in the vertical position.

Arendal Sound Hits a Home Run - 1961 Monitor Loudspeaker Review

We review the Arendal Sound 1961 Monitor, featuring an MTM & waveguide design built with similar DNA to their venerable 1723 series but in a more compact affordable package at $1,100/pair. Home run!

www.audioholics.com

That was tested here as well (just swap vertical/horizontal results).

 

[ifoundacat]

Any idea if this would pair well with Revel Concerta2 M16 front speakers?

 

[MacCali]

Any idea if this would pair well with Revel Concerta2 M16 front speakers?

As in you want to purchase one and use it as a center channel? Or you want to set up a 5 channel system with the pair of revels?

 

[ifoundacat]

As in you want to purchase one and use it as a center channel? Or you want to set up a 5 channel system with the pair of revels?

Thanks for the reply. I have a set of Revels for the fronts and was wondering if the 1961 would make a good center speaker

 

[MacCali]

Thanks for the reply. I have a set of Revels for the fronts and was wondering if the 1961 would make a good center speaker

It definitely would, but the 1723 is your better choice unless size is a factor.

 

[JAJDACT]

According to the Arendal website they are retiring the entire 1961 line,I'm curious as to what the replacement will be,or if there will be one.

 

[O Akroatís]

According to the Arendal website they are retiring the entire 1961 line,I'm curious as to what the replacement will be,or if there will be one.

Meanwhile, bookshelf 1961 speakers are no longer available.

 

[O Akroatís]

It's a pity that we only recently arrived at this forum. Arendal Audio got to know speakers in this way. We had never heard of it until two weeks ago. It's a shame that their 1961 series has now been retired because most of its models are no longer available.
Could one of their ambassadors be Amir?...

 

[Art of sound]

This is a review, listening tests, EQ and measurements of the Arendal 1961 Center or Left & Right speaker. It was kindly drop shipped to me by a member and costs US $599 each or $1,099 a pair.
View attachment 273944
This is a surprisingly compact speaker but is built like a tank. The enclosure feels like cast metal, ala Genelec. It has textured matt finish and feels like you can drive over it and it would not care. The drivers as you see, have no visible fasteners and have very tight finish and tolerances. The look of quality extends to the back:
View attachment 273945
Numerous mounting points are provided. The metal speaker binding is made out of metal and looks so good you may be tempted to have the back side toward you while you listen!

This is an "MTM" configuration (mid-woofer, tweeter, mid-woofer) which classically makes for a speaker with narrow mid-range/treble response. We will see if Arendal has managed to mitigate this or not.

As noted, you can use the speaker in horizontal configuration (as tested) or vertical. There are no ports as is typical in center speakers.

Reference axis was the tweeter center which is inside a deep waveguide.

Arendal 1961 Speaker Measurements
I usually start the review with frequency response measurements. But I think it is best to look at the impedance graph first:
View attachment 273948

Notice how the impedance shoots way up as we get close to DC (0 Hz). This indicates capacitive coupling, or said another way, a high-pass filter. We have seen this as a mitigation against overdriving in some in-wall speakers but not in a normal in-room one. Likely it plays the same role here given the small sealed enclosure.

Now on to our anechoic measurements created using Klippel Near-field Scanner:
View attachment 273949

That is a very smooth response, sans slight elevation above 2 kHz and a couple of peaks. We can see the classic high-pass response in bass but also another one above 10 kHz. There seems to be a small signature of resonance around 15 kHz so maybe that was the reason for that roll off.

Near-field driver measurements immediately tell us why we have a couple of minor humps in our response:
View attachment 273950

The tweeter is resonating there. On the positive front, the crossover is stomping on the woofer resonances out of band which is good.

Edit: forgot to include the Early Reflections and PIR:
View attachment 274217

View attachment 274218


The high pass filter helps to keep distortion way down for this size speaker when it comes to low frequencies:
View attachment 273951

That kind of performance (on the left) is just not seen in such a small speaker. Here is the relative response:
View attachment 273952

A key concern as I mentioned with MTM design is narrow directivity. Let's see that:
View attachment 273953
Yes we have the beaming but with bringing down the crossover frequency, the effect is partially mitigated allowing nearly double the width that we typically see in small MTMs.
View attachment 273954

You should have much wider sweet spot then than you would expect.

Vertically we see much better response of course:
View attachment 273955
View attachment 273956

To the extent you deploy the 1961 vertically, above responses become your "horizontal" response.

CSD/Waterfall graph shows only minor resonances:

View attachment 273957

Finally, here is the step response for fans of that:
View attachment 273958

Arendal 1961 Speaker Listening Tests and EQ
I started my listening in horizontal configuration. I was dreading to hear lack of bass but that was not at all the case. There was plenty of bass with typical tracks. Alas, the highs had a bit of "showroom sound" with extra brightness. So I dialed in a couple of filters for the resonance points:
View attachment 273959

Note that while I started by looking at the measurements, I fine tuned them by ear. I say they may require a bit more work but it got me in the ballpark. Once there, the ability of this speaker play loud and clean surprised the heck out of me. No matter how much I cranked it up, it played clean and very nice! I think the key here was it not doing what it can't do. To wit, I threw my killer sub-bass track at it and instead of getting highly distorted as just about every bookshelf speaker does, it simply played those notes faintly. The spray of distortions in bass into upper range is a problem when this is not the case.

I checked for listening width and it was very good across my entire loveseat. At very close distance, you could detect a tonality change but that was mostly with highs getting narrower and not at all what you usually get from MTMs (where the middle falls out of the picture). It is not as perfect as a non-MTM solution but what is there is very good.

I then rotated the speaker vertically. This comparison was difficult because the tweeter now went above my ears a bit. I thought the overall fidelity improved a bit with upper midrange and lower treble improving slight but this could be a faulty observation. The sweet spot did enlarge with no tonality shift at all across across my loveseat.

Conclusions
Arendal was given a challenge: create a high performance MTM center speaker. While people are quick to completely write-off this configuration for center home theater speakers, there are mitigation techniques. The main one is lowering the crossover point enough so that the dual woofer don't get a chance to beam and stay there. We then get the benefit of dual woofers playing what would be a mid-range in a 3-way speaker (so higher SPL with lower distortion). Mind you, a 3-way speaker can do better but will cost more and take up more space.

The high-pass filter is clever in that it leaves much of the bass response there but takes out what would be pure distortion a small speaker. With this in place, the 1961 is able to produce incredibly high SPLs despite its super compact size -- exactly what you need in home theater applications.

The combination of high pass filter and slight resonances in high frequencies means the sound signature out of the box is rather bright, or put inversely, seems to lack bass to compliment it. With a sub added, this may go away. Alternatively, you can fix it with EQ as I did.

$599 is a fair bit of money for a compact center speaker but for it, you get a beautifully built speaker making you feel like you have gotten your money's worth.

I am happy to add the Arendal 1961 Center/Monitor speaker to my recommended list. It is the most perfect MTM speaker I have tested and oozes good engineering and quality execution.

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As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.

Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/

Tonality score of 3.0 and 50% vote for fine and 30% vote for great.
Is this because of good compression and DI. I wonder how many of them EQ their system and own DVR's that have the functionality.
Looks like some form of bias is in the play.

 

[Dj7675]

Tonality score of 3.0 and 50% vote for fine and 30% vote for great.
Is this because of good compression and DI. I wonder how many of them EQ their system and own DVR's that have the functionality.
Looks like some form of bias is in the play.

Or, as noted in the review…
-Bass is removed with high pass filter intentionally to be used with a sub
-That and dual woofers allow it to play quite loud
-Distortion is quite low, even at high volumes
-Despite MTM it is 25 degree beam width
-Directivity is quite good and it should take EQ quite well (manual or automated) but may not need this once adequate bass is restored
Seems to be quite well deserved rating considering the price point, and MTM constraints.

 

[Art of sound]

Or, as noted in the review…
-Bass is removed with high pass filter intentionally to be used with a sub
-That and dual woofers allow it to play quite loud
-Distortion is quite low, even at high volumes
-Despite MTM it is 25 degree beam width
-Directivity is quite good and it should take EQ quite well (manual or automated) but may not need this once adequate bass is restored
Seems to be quite well deserved rating considering the price point, and MTM constraints.

If aesthetics aren't part of the equation along with 0.5db drops in compression or distortion above 86db @1m. Do we have controversies around this score.
id presume the formula would have more important metrics like on axis and reflections and bass response. Can someone point me to a good explanation on the score calculation or discussion related to this.

Klipsh RP 500C-II 4.1 500USD
Klipsh RP 504C-II 4.2 600USD
Monoprice
Monolith THX-365C 4.5 500USD
Elac
Uni-Fi 2.0 UC52 Center 4.8 320USD
Elac
Uni-Fi Reference UCR52 3.9 700USD

Normally there would a methodology to score something like rtings uses FR for 60% of their speaker scores along with some other metrics including distortion which id presume takes up less than 10% or 5% of the score. I don't follow rtings but im stating it as an example of how people have these biases and how they can be removed in standardized testing.

 

[Steve Dallas]

If aesthetics aren't part of the equation along with 0.5db drops in compression or distortion above 86db @1m. Do we have controversies around this score.
id presume the formula would have more important metrics like on axis and reflections and bass response. Can someone point me to a good explanation on the score calculation or discussion related to this.

Klipsh RP 500C-II 4.1 500USD
Klipsh RP 504C-II 4.2 600USD
Monoprice
Monolith THX-365C 4.5 500USD
Elac
Uni-Fi 2.0 UC52 Center 4.8 320USD
Elac
Uni-Fi Reference UCR52 3.9 700USD

Normally there would a methodology to score something like rtings uses FR for 60% of their speaker scores along with some other metrics including distortion which id presume takes up less than 10% or 5% of the score. I don't follow rtings but im stating it as an example of how people have these biases and how they can be removed in standardized testing.

Keep in mind the preference score is not an official part of ASR and is calculated and posted by independent members here. Also, it was not developed for center channel speakers.

More information on how it is utilized is here:

US20050195982A1 - Method for predicting loudspeaker preference - Google Patents

A general model is provided for predicting a loudspeaker preference rating, where the model's predicted loudspeaker preference rating is calculated based upon the sum of a plurality of weighted independent variables that statistically quantify amplitude deviations in a loudspeaker frequency...

patents.google.com

 

[beaRA]

Normally there would a methodology to score something like rtings uses FR for 60% of their speaker scores along with some other metrics including distortion which id presume takes up less than 10% or 5% of the score. I don't follow rtings but im stating it as an example of how people have these biases and how they can be removed in standardized testing.

You said it yourself in your previous post, the preference score only evaluates tonality. Other factors like distortion, compression, intentional bandwidth limiting, and dispersion width need to be taken into account for the specific application. The measurements are there so you can evaluate for your individual requirements.

The poll is not meant to be scientific, so of course it is subject to bias. This speaker excels in the necessary categories for its intended application, so I happen to agree with the poll results. You don't have to agree with the poll because it is not an objective measure of quality.

 

[Art of sound]

You said it yourself in your previous post, the preference score only evaluates tonality. Other factors like distortion, compression, intentional bandwidth limiting, and dispersion width need to be taken into account for the specific application. The measurements are there so you can evaluate for your individual requirements.

The poll is not meant to be scientific, so of course it is subject to bias. This speaker excels in the necessary categories for its intended application, so I happen to agree with the poll results. You don't have to agree with the poll because it is not an objective measure of quality.

I get it but since the poll for multi channel and home theater was much less than stereo i was curious as to why so many voted this way for a center channel. Interesting.

Also i found this in sean olive’s lecture about distortion.

Here is the link https://www.dropbox.com/s/25md4nta1...er Sound Quality Erin's Audio Corner.pdf?dl=0

 

[beaRA]

I get it but since the poll for multi channel and home theater was much less than stereo i was curious as to why so many voted this way for a center channel. Interesting.

Also i found this in sean olive’s lecture about distortion.

Here is the link https://www.dropbox.com/s/25md4nta14dqity/Predicting Loudspeaker Sound Quality Erin's Audio Corner.pdf?dl=0

Perhaps some stereo listeners are practicing empathy and recognizing the strengths for home theater even though they would not buy the speakers for themselves.

Indeed, preference thresholds for distortion are not well understood. I use it more as a proxy for output capability, though I prefer compression plots.