Dear Amir.
First of all thank you for taking the time to do the review. The results really shocked me as you can imagine. I was pretty confident with this review as, from a science point of view we know the S400 looks very good which is why we dare to share so detailed measurements on our website as well, we are pretty proud of them even though they are not perfect. Why our data look so different to yours needs to be investigated, its especially odd as we both use the Klippel NFS….
Looking past these differences, I think it's very important to the readers to know that using such advanced equipment as the Klippel NFS, really allow all to look deep into the rapid hole here where many manufactures don't want you to look. It starts to show how many “issues” we deal with in speaker designs (especially passive speakers), and showing it like this, pointing at all issues can make nearly all passive speakers look bad. The Klippel NFS which is arguably the most powerful tools in the speakers development business today, it can give us an insane amount of resolution to our work when designing speakers. I think it's fantastic to utilize this to really take speakers under the loop and showcasing all the potential compromises the designer had to make in the given design. Transparency is fantastic so keep that up. What i'm afraid of, is that your review here completely end up being a tunnel vision hunt for issues and flaws, without giving a second thought to what the manufacturer was trying to achieve with the given design.
Could we have designed them to perform better on paper? sure. Are there better measuring options out there? for sure. Price as an indicator that more expensive speakers mesures better is rarely the case. If making a speaker that looks perfect on paper was our goal, we would have done that, and it could be done much cheaper than the S400 as well. But let's take a step back and ask the question on what we wanted to achieve with the S400?
Now as many know, i'm no engineer, and i'm not the guy that does all hard work to make our speakers perform like they do. What I do is to come up with the design concepts which sadly end up giving me a lot of sleepless nights as I just can't stop thinking about speaker designs!!
S400 was a personal dream project to make an all in one compact speaker, a speaker that tries to move just slightly on what people would think possible for a speaker of this size. A speaker that can work well in difficult rooms, at difficult placements. Uses all high quality parts (even in the crossover for a product at this price), but again as small as possible and with a minimalistic scandinavian design approach to it. It's aimed for the customer that value visuals and size, but still want something that has performance as its first priority. And a design that can actually stand by its own without the use of a subwoofer (although adding subs can be great!). It's much to ask from a small speaker, not something I have seen been done elsewhere to the same degree as the S400 does it. It's still not perfect, nothing is. But sadly a large chunk of what we tried to achieve is more of less overlooked in this review which I think is a shame. Now you can argue that this is not your area as this is mainly a science based review where measurements is the center of attention which i completely understand.
To the mention on the cabinet. Yeah its correct, there are no bracings, it's a tiny cabinet and we did a lot of testing on this and found it not to be necessary. If the cabinet was larger, then we would have had bracings in there for sure (like the A500). You can knock on them and think they might need it, but in practice they don't, and we have never had a single complaint about audible resonances from the cabinet either. Since we can't replicate these issues you are seeing and hearing, we would need to look for a possible issue that might be related to your pair, or maybe even the single speaker you measured on, I'm currently waiting for the engineer to give me some answers to what these artifacts could be that show up on your measurements but now ours.
I see that many question the break in importance of the S400. The S400 is a rare example on how important break in can be on some speakers. Now i know where you stand in this. But here I have to say that it really comes down to the woofers design especially. When we get samples from our supplier (SB Acoustics in this case) we get measurements with the samples units before and after break in (which they do on samples). For these woofers, there is significant changes in multiple parameters. So yes, for the S400 its important which i think all my customer base can agree on
I can't stop to wonder when i read through the review why there seems to be an unnecessary focus to highlight only the negatives, there is really not much positive in here which is the complete opposite to what nearly all other have to say about the S400 around the world, so what happened? One thing is for sure, this surely will start, and have already started a big debate online, so it's surely a successful review considering the views and attention it gets. We have been so fortunate and lucky to have created a product that have been highly praised to the point of hyped. With hype comes extreme attention to them that goes against the stream. Has the s400 been over hyped? I don’t know, but my job is basically telling interested people to still have realistic expectations from this shoebox sized speaker can do. Luckily they have exceeded many people's expectations, otherwise it would never had become a hyped product in the first place right?. Even though this is not the first negative review, I think it would be the most popular as it's SO negative.
It's clear that the sound signature might not be to your taste, that's completely okay as it's impossible to create something that suits all peoples taste. We aimed for a pretty transparent and neutral tuning, which compared to many other brands does come across as slightly warm as we don't follow the trend of the extra focus on the treble. It's all personal preference of course and clearly your listing test are strongly influenced by your taste which did not fall into the favor of the S400 unfortunately.
Lastly I need to get something off my chest that is a bit more on the human and personal side of things. Please don't take this the wrong way, it's more of a general theme towards many reviewers out there. I personally think that as a reviewer, you do have responsibilities. Reviewers are key in especially the audio business. They can have more power than what a million dollars in advertisement can have so it's an important task, trust me, i would piss my pants sitting an evaluating people's work everyday
It's important to remember that there are real people behind these companies, people that have given their lives to creating something that people hopefully like. Many of us are smaller niche companies that rely on reviews and cross their fingers every time a review sample is shipped out the door. It's a huge responsibility to hand over and I think it's VERY important that a reviewer can be subjective in reviews, set aside personal taste in some areas. Only reviewing under what you think and feel is correct for you alone, without any thought to other people's opinions and taste, especially on the subject of sound which is so subjective, then I think there’s an important part missing.
I think most that know, have heard or read anything about Buchardt Audio would find this review unnecessary harsh. I'm not stubborn, or completely ignorant to criticism, in fact I welcome it as it makes our future designs much better which are based very much on the feedback to what we could do better. This is what I love about being so close to the end user and the community. You have way more power than I have in this business, I hope you can take some of my "defence" as positive feedback as well
And I hope you would take our next product in for review.
All the best Mads Buchardt
CEO Buchardt Audio