Buchardt S400 Speaker Review

[Billy Budapest]

But seriously, I had looked at Buchardt (how do you pronounce that?)

“Book heart”

 

[Billy Budapest]

The hype is over.

There is a lot of hype over this speaker. It reminds me of the LS50 when it debuted. A speaker that is not hyped but seems to be the current passive bookshelf to beat is the KEF R3.

 

[maty]

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

When I saw Ron Brenay's measurements of the frequency response I was disgusted. Now, after knowing Erin's (hardisj) I am more satisfied. I am very confident in his way of working, at least in audio.

https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/erinsaudiocorner.11219/post-382411

As for the crossover, I still think it would have been worth it to spend a few euros more on capacitors and resistors. At that price, some kind of internal reinforcements are also expected and damping material.

 

[ta240]

The C-note is smaller and a budget speaker But when DIY-ing it's easier to go for 3/4 inch MDF.
I got a 2-way bookshelf kit with 22mm MDF sides and 5mm heavy damping (mass loaded vinyl) aprox. $300 per speaker.

At 19 times the price I'd hope for better construction on the S400 than the c-note. It also occurred to me that a smaller speaker possibly could get away with thinner sides because there is less surface to flex. Especially at $100 for the pair.

 

[xarkkon]

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

Great that you're responding and great that you're willing to send back more products for review!

I've said upfront that the qualitative part of the review doesn't fully match all that the charts say. Credit to Amir, he puts up the charts so we can all form our own opinions instead of having to blindly follow his qualitative views (in fact, people were criticising him originally for NOT doing subjective reviews...)

As the owner, you've every right to say the same and defend your product as well. However, I hope there wasn't an insinuation that Amir was out to have a "successful" review by being controversial. If that was the intent, I think that's uncalled for. If I misread, then I apologise.

 

[ta240]

It would probably be hard not to hear what has been shown here after reading it but to their credit they ship them for free and only charge €25 for the return shipping from anywhere in the world if you don't like them.

https://www.buchardtaudio.com/try-at-home

 

[Juhazi]

I am 50/50. I don't put much stock in to them alone. But I try to look at the data and see if I can make a correlation to the reviewer's subjective impressions. That's also why I suggested Amir do some head sweeps and post the result so we can have three sets of data to correlate: NFS, his subjective, and his measured in-situ. The in-situ may not tell us everything about what he's hearing but there's enough data to help understand at least some of the factors.

I personally plan to provide subjective reviews for this reason, like I said. It's another data point. But I will try to stay away from straight up giving a thumbs up or down (unless there's a very bad test result) because the truth is there's a lot more to a speaker's overall value than what I think it sounds like.

It is a well known fact that subjective evaluations are mostly based on bass performance - relative spl and perhaps extension. I have noticed a similar correlation with Amir who is "Harman-trained". KEF R3 and S400 are bass-shy compared to eg. JBL HD-1600...

 

[wwenze]

I am intrigued by this picture. I always think the Klippel seems to show way more peaks/dips that don't normally appear. This is one confirmed example.

Problems of nearfield measurement?

 

[hardisj]

I am intrigued by this picture. I always think the Klippel seems to show way more peaks/dips that don't normally appear. This is one confirmed example.

Well, you have to remember, the data presented have two different resolutions.
The black line is gated with only about 8ms window. That means that you have only roughly measured response down to 125Hz. (I know the pic is closer to 200hz, but I was spitballing when I typed up that reply earlier).

But, let's just go with 8ms as an example. 8 ms converted to frequency is (1/8*1000) 125hz. This means you only have an accurate data point at every 125hz.

Given you are looking at frequency response on a log scale, this can be a bit misleading. The higher frequencies are bunched together and you are tricked in to thinking the resolution is higher in higher frequency. It's not. There's still only accuracy in 125hz steps.

On the low end you are viewing the response more wide due to the log scale. So the gaps in data are more apparent. Take, for instance, the 520hz peak. If I have a data point accurate to only 125hz increments then you have data points at 125, 250, 375, 500, 625. A high-Q peak like what is shown in Amir's NFS results (Q ~ 15) would likely not even show up as a blip in the 8ms gated result because you don't have a data point for it. Now, if the Q were much more shallow (like Q = 1) then you're more likely to capture a simblance of that peak. Obviously the specifics matter. But the general point is that the higher the gate time the higher the resolution of data. To get very high resolution that would show the 520hz peak in the NFS data you'd need a large, reflection free window of at least 50ms (20hz resolution).

Therefore, you can use this information and understand that the NFS is capable of very, very high resolution. The measurements are done in nearfield where reflections are so low and far that they are practically non-existent and the resolution of measurement is therefore very high.


So let's revisit your quote:

I am intrigued by this picture. I always think the Klippel seems to show way more peaks/dips that don't normally appear. This is one confirmed example.

It's not that the data is making things appear that don't exist. It's that most measurement methods don't have a high enough resolution to show them. Anechoic, and now NFS, do. That's one reason why I have been spending so much dang time testing the different measurement methods us DIYrs typically use.

 

[wwenze]

Mmm I see. I always thought gated means the source produces a sine wave and the recorder rejects all information >8ms. Amplitude gets measured and this loops in a sweep fashion. Which would have had no frequency resolution restriction (or at least can be whatever value including log scale).

 

[aarons915]

I may be in the minority, but I feel the subjective listening impressions are also important. Biases aside, it's another data point using a trained listener (Amir) that can either help validate or invalidate the preference rating. There have been a couple of speakers with pretty good preference ratings (Buchardt S400, KEFQ100) that Amir did not like subjectively, while some others with worse preferences ratings have fared better subjectively.

Subjective impressions are important but it seems to me that the only requirements for Amir to be happy with a speaker is for it to have a bass hump at 100Hz and for a single speaker to comfortably play loud enough to cause permanent hearing damage lol...

 

[tuga]

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?

In my view, an observationist listening assessment report should only highlight the shortcomings, unless it is a comparative description in which case one could mention what one speaker does better and worse than the other or others.
If a particular aspect of performance isn't mentioned this means that the speaker performed as expected.
I am very much against the taste-driven infomercial style of traditional magazine reviews. I find them useless to be honest.

Measurements provide all the information that is required anyway, although I would like to see independent FR measurements of the port and the mid-woofer and I accept that there may still be teething issues in regards to the use of the NFS at ASR.
Personaly I would ditch the listening report altogether.

 

[hardisj]

Mmm I see. I always thought gated means the source produces a sine wave and the recorder rejects all information >8ms. Amplitude gets measured and this loops in a sweep fashion. Which would have had no frequency resolution restriction (or at least can be whatever value including log scale).

I don't want to derail this thread but here's a quick example. This is a measurement I took yesterday. The measurement was outdoors, ground plane and had a window time of about 40ms before first main reflection (teal). I then simply moved the gate time down to be only 3ms (Red). I chose 3ms because that's the typical window reviewers use due to floor bounce or side walls. I changed nothing else at all. Only changed the window time.

You can see that in higher frequencies there's a difference but the trace is basically the same; only the magnitude of the variance changes. nothing that really jumps out to the naked eye; especially if you didn't have a comparison and were just looking at a singular set of data. But on the low end you can see the difference really become apparent.

Now, the question is, how much of this is audible? High Q peaks aren't as audible as wide Q peaks, but that also can change with the source material according to Toole's book:

Do we need the high resolution on the lower/midrange? I think so. But if the data isn't capable of showing us we won't know what to listen for. Further, let's say you're listening to a speaker that exhibits a peak that isn't resolved in the data. You'll think you're crazy. But if the data shows it, that's confirmation. Yea!!! lol

 

[koro]

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

Hi Mads,
Could the very “too” flat bass response in Amir’s measurements relative to everything published before have anything to do with the break in period you mentioned?

 

[Sancus]

I was always much more interested in the active version of these. The passives seemed good, but nothing revolutionary at the price point or anything. This review doesn't significantly diverge from that impression to me.

 

[Billy Budapest]

“Book heart”

And that’s as in the English word ‘book.’ People that pronounce it as boooooookart as just wrong. Most people on the internet are using this incorrect pronunciation.

See here for the correct way:

It reminds me of the mispronunciation of Oppo. Most people pronounced it incorrectly as “Ah-poh.” The correct way is “Oh-poh.”

 

[napilopez]

So, given Amir's impedance curve lacks any of the usual fluctuations from a driver or cabinet resonance, your model suggests that the 500 Hz spike is due to diffraction.

As the data suggests some indirect acoustic event AND the S400 cabinet has sharp edges,, diffraction seems most likely bet at this point.

Nice work!

I was wondering why I didn't see the usual blip in the impedance curve, especially if the resonance was as bad as it purportedly is.

Seriously, I can understand about profit margins or not doing over-engineering (instead of airplanes and aerospace industry does) since the components used already does the job.
But for god sake, couldn’t all the big player brands start using better than Benic just for the looks? I could walk down the street and buy them for cents (well actually now I can't since of COVID).

There should be an implicit consensus between all speakers $1k/$2K and above of using just a little bit better parts since they are all going to be torn apart for reviews & audio porn. I don’t think it could hurt them so much investing in manufacture/ownership pride and aesthetical proposes. However, I do not own any speaker brand so I'm sure I'm talking nonsense .

These kind of concerns are why they also sell the 'signature edition' with fancier caps, a fancier cabinet, lifetime warranty and made in Denmark. Obviously more expensive, but at least they give you the option for the people that care about such typical HiFi fluff.

On one hand I agree as I personally like the feel and idea of a strong enclosure. On the other hand I read an interview with Floyd Tool where he downplayed cabinet construction and bracing and talked about using lasers to measure the cabinet contributions amount other cabinet design banter.
I had a pair of the JBL 3 series intro level studio monitors. The big 8" woofer set. No bracing, plastic front pannel, thin metal backside plate and darn they sounded good for the money ($200 a pair shipped from b&h BF) I did not keep them as they were not quite my jam but man they had a lot on offer for nearly no money and no $$ in cabinetry as I understand it.

Yeah, even the new JBL L100 Classic - now cemented as one of my all-time favorite speakers, despite some measurement curiosities - is basically a giant box with what appears to be some basic V bracing.

As insistant as I am, I must remind some people that you can get this

in a coaxial 3-way for 1400~1600€ (found them at 1450€ here). That little HF emphasis isn't even here in the listening window.

I liked the R3 and Buchardt pretty equally when I had them(not at the same time). If I had to I would probably give the edge to the R3, but not by much. I thought the biggest flaw with both of them was a slightly recessed midrange.

If we look beyond just the ASR spin and consider other existing measurements, it's worth noting a few things:

While the S400 looks worse on Amir's rig than existing measurements, the R3 looks better. For whatever reason, the R3 looks better in Amir's setup than it does in other R series measurements -- including KEF's own -- mainly with regards to some midrange dips. Mine:

NRC of R11:


The S400, meanwhile, looks flatter than the R3 in my measurements and buchardts. I also don't think it should be ignored that Amir and Buchardt both use the same klippel machine but get different results. Could be unit variation, but some things, like the bass difference, seem odd.

Also, the S400 has slightly wider directivity, though idk if it's a meaningful difference.

 

[ctrl]

So, given Amir's impedance curve lacks any of the usual fluctuations from a driver or cabinet resonance, your model suggests that the 500 Hz spike is due to diffraction.
As the data suggests some indirect acoustic event AND the S400 cabinet has sharp edges,, diffraction seems most likely bet at this point.

You're throwing two phenomena together here.

First, we have the baffle step "6 dB loss" at the transition from 2pi room (sound is reflected by the baffle) to 4pi room (wavelength of the sound is so large that the baffle is negligible in comparison). This is a more or less smooth transition in the frequency response. The baffle step does not cause resonance.
Without other disturbing effects this can be shown with a spherical enclosure.
https://trueaudio.com/st_diff1.htm

Then there is an effect of the secondary sound sources created by the edges of the cabinet, which interferes with the original signal.
https://heissmann-acoustics.de/kantendiffraktion-sekundaerschallquellen-treiberanordnun/

Here, the path from the sound source center (chassis center) to the edge of the cabinet and the distance to the listener play a role. This interference leads to an rippled frequency response.

What is the effect of combining both effects for the Buchardt bass driver? This results in the curve shown in Post#68 (here only for the woofer):

The lateral edge reflections are too high in the frequency range for the 550 Hz resonance of the Buchardt. Only the upper edge would theoretically be a possible cause but it hardly contributes in the simulation and the Q of the resonance would be much lower.

Edge diffraction has only a minor influence overall and cannot lead to such a pronounced high Q resonance@550Hz shown in Amirs measurement of the Buchardt.

I know that could have been said in just one sentence

 

[Mads Buchardt]

Great that you're responding and great that you're willing to send back more products for review!

I've said upfront that the qualitative part of the review doesn't fully match all that the charts say. Credit to Amir, he puts up the charts so we can all form our own opinions instead of having to blindly follow his qualitative views (in fact, people were criticising him originally for NOT doing subjective reviews...)

As the owner, you've every right to say the same and defend your product as well. However, I hope there wasn't an insinuation that Amir was out to have a "successful" review by being controversial. If that was the intent, I think that's uncalled for. If I misread, then I apologise.

Im not applying that at all and hope it does not come across like that?. That Amir do not like them is what it is. I just hope that we can impress him more with the next mode

 

[VintageFlanker]

And I hope you would take our next product in for review.

Sure thing, @Mads Buchardt.

No doubt your A500 should nail the preference ratings:

I'd love to see you review them in comparison to our Aria 906 you know.

Not sure if my subjective listening does matter that much, but @amirm should definetly measure the 906s. Sending one of mine to him would be quite...complex (especially currently).

Edit: 11K views in less than...24H. I was sure this review was going to become quickly one of the most popular in ASR history!