KaiserSoze
Addicted to Fun and Learning
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- Jun 8, 2020
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I don't know whether anyone here knows or would care, but I just thought I would mention that on the Pioneer Home USA web site, the SP-FS52 tower and the SW-10 subwoofer are both on sale, possibly for closeout. A couple of months back they did this with the sealed sub SW-E10. It was dirt cheap for a while, then suddenly they showed it as "out of stock" or some such thing and then everywhere else you could find it, the price was about double what it was just a few weeks earlier. Anyway, at present the FS52 is $100 and the ported sub SW-10 is $200. Obviously these speakers don't make the A-team however when you consider that you can get a pair of the towers plus the sub for a total of $400, that seems like a great value to me. But then, if they're this cheap, they can't be any good, right? I have no idea, but the fact that they're cheap doesn't mean that they aren't any good. You probably could have listened to them at BB at one point. In any case they're just about bound to be a great value, considering that nowadays about all you ordinarily can buy with $1000 is a pair of little bookshelf speakers with no real bass capability but that are deemed worthy because they use waveguides to force the tweeter's directivity to match the directivity of the woofer at the crossover. I'm bewildered by how much a pair of dainty little bookshelf speakers cost these days. Forty years ago no one would have given you $200 for a pair of bookshelf speakers that nowadays will sell for $1000 the pair and be regarded as a good buy. Expectations have changed to say the least. Used to be that bass mattered. Nowadays you're supposed to know that you have to buy a subwoofer and not be bothered by the fact that that little speaker wouldn't even go as low as 150 Hz were it not for the use of a port. Wait, what was I talking about? Oh yeah, the Pioneer speakers that are on sale. It's got to be a great value, 'cause the combined surface area of the three "woofers" is equivalent to a single driver with an actual 8" radiating surface area, roughly equivalent to a 10" driver when measured across the frame. Which ain't bad, except Xmax isn't going to be the same, and to get Fs to be as low as it really should be for a woofer, they'd have to either make the cones out of lead or else make the suspensions more compliant than it would likely be possible to make them. I have no idea how they turn those little speakers into woofers. Must be some kind of magic. Oh wait, they don't. I forgot, they rely on the port to do the job of the woofer, and you're expected to know that you have to buy a subwoofer. Anyway, you can buy a pair of FS52 and the ported sub all for the low low price of $400, which is without question an honest-to-God bargain in today's world, with or without real woofers. Hopefully I managed not to digress ...