These speakers are interesting to me, they come from the before time, before music group started buying everything and a lot of behringers gear was pretty questionable compared to what it is now. Someone there seemed to try a bit with this product and the different revisions. I prefer the 2030 though, really awesome imaging. Behringer seems to have a great product they could sell for more, and improve upon easily but they don't seem to care much as long as they keep selling. They care so little that last time I ordered the 2030a's about 4 years ago, the box was labeled 5 1/4" woofer, but they have a 6"+ woofer. I found this mislabeling in a few other places.
Pros- really low self noise, great build quality, could take eq on the bass for days to get it flattened out, could get nearly PA levels in medium sized rooms, never got close to their limit they just don't seem to care what you put through them.
Cons - crappy power on/off procedure to avoid pops, questionable build in some areas, quality control, tweeter gets old after awhile
Want to talk about the power on/off thing. These things have two power switches, one on the top and one on the back that also controls auto standby. The top switch seems to control whether the unit gets power, and the rear switch enables or disables output to the drivers. When turning it on you want to have the REAR switch set to OFF. Then turn ON the TOP switch. Then turn on the REAR switch to On. Effectively you want the rear switch set to off when powering the speakers on or off to avoid the awful pop on these speakers have.
I had the passive model for a long time but sadly discontinued, active is still a good value but the tweeter made me sell them. I did some mods in the meantime. Couldn't EQ it to do what I wanted. The woofers construction is really ringy, the basket rings a lot and the magnet cover does as well. There's also a little chamber between the magnet cover and the magnet where I think air kinda bounces around and disturbs things but that could be also be nonsense.
I noticed that one of my speakers sounded a little muffled in a weird way. I tried to compensate with volume but that didn't work. Upon taking the tweeters apart I noticed one of the diaphragms was not seated into the magnet all the way. I had to kind of shape the voice coil a bit to get it in right. Measurements seemed show it was performing fine after that so I moved on. Shoddy QC though especially for something marketed as a monitor. The 2030a come with their own supposed measurement plot specific to the speaker but who knows if that's BS.
You don't need to remove the grill to get the tweeter benefits, just the little plastic diffuser on the inside. After the tweeter is disassembled I suggest pushing the diffuser out from the front vs. trying to peel it off from the back, peeling left annoying to deal with residue while pushing didn't. Blue is with diffuser removed.
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The whole tweeter assembly has no wood behind it so it kinda vibrates in place.
The ports are really ringy, like if you tap any part of the front of the speaker you can hear the ports ring. Tap the ports and you get a pitched tone. I wrapped some thin rubber sheets around them then secured them with hair ties. It did this.
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parts.wilsonaudio.com
