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Dynaudio Emit M10 Review (bookshelf speaker)

YSC

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It's a rare 2 way that does not leak midrange from its port, putting it on the back can help make it less audible, or it might just move the audible problem to a different frequency. Speaker designers should be in top of this, but it's clear from measurements many don't optimise it. The common wisdom spread about ports are often backwards.
just wild guess, maybe it's coz the rear port are more likely to have a smooth and larger opening, as opposed to front ports which tends to be slotted and cause more turbulance/resonance problem?
 

Frank Dernie

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just wild guess, maybe it's coz the rear port are more likely to have a smooth and larger opening, as opposed to front ports which tends to be slotted and cause more turbulance/resonance problem?
IME rear ports are a more logical choice for the reasons @Soniclife and @thewas outline.
The wanted output from the port is at a low enough frequency for it to not matter where it is. The potential not wanted output from the port, which is the in box cacophony leaking out, is at frequencies which are directional, so emitting them from the back is a way to emit them in a way less likely to be heard.
Who is to say that some people may not prefer a bit of extra mid range even if it is not accurate and at selective frequencies because of port geometry?
 

Ron Texas

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"I usually expect bookshelf speakers to produce a good experience stand-alone and these come short." Pay attention to comments like these as it explains a lot. In real life this is what most people want.

This is yet another example of a speaker from a top manufacturer which doesn't cut it. Than you @amirm.
 

PeteL

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I've no idea about your specific speakers, both options can be made to work well. If you put a mic into the port and run a frequency sweep you can see how much midrange leaks out of it.
OK. will do. His website seams down for some reason. They are a slightly taller version of what he called Studio 101. Based on ScanSpeak 18W/8542-00 + SEAS 27TFFC. Great smallish speakers. Simple classic 2 way.
Looks very close on this but they are about a foot from the wall
1614792070482.png
 
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Soniclife

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just wild guess, maybe it's coz the rear port are more likely to have a smooth and larger opening, as opposed to front ports which tends to be slotted and cause more turbulance/resonance problem?
I expect you are right that designers have more aesthetic freedom of port design when it's on the back. I'm not aware of the design of the port itself being critical, I think it's more what goes on inside the box that makes the biggest difference. However some of the Kef white papers describe how their flexible port solves problems.
 

Robbo99999

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Having read the review I'm quite surprised that EQ didn't save this speaker, as the spinorama looks really quite EQ'able with no major sharp dips or peaks, although directivity isn't great which might be the problem. Amir quoted lack of deep bass as being a reason why the speaker remained bright sounding during listening tests even with EQ...but I find that unusual because I think there's been plenty of other speakers that didn't have deep bass that have been reviewed here and have done better in the listening tests.

Me personally I wouldn't like this speaker as indeed the bass is not deep enough (assuming use without subs) and it's too expensive, and I'd choose something with better directivity.
 

daftcombo

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Amir quoted lack of deep bass as being a reason why the speaker remained bright sounding during listening tests even with EQ...but I find that unusual because I think there's been plenty of other speakers that didn't have deep bass that have been reviewed here and have done better in the listening tests.
Absolutely. Focal Aria 906 is much worse in bass extension but it seems Amir liked it better (he only wrote that bass didn't sound as "full"). To me it is an elevated treble issue (3 kHz - 8 kHz) without ability to correct it properly (directivity error).
 

Robbo99999

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Absolutely. Focal Aria 906 is much worse in bass extension but it seems Amir liked it better (he only wrote that bass didn't sound as "full"). To me it is an elevated treble issue (3 kHz - 8 kHz) without ability to correct it properly (directivity error).
Yes, good example.
 

daftcombo

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Yes, good example.
I have a pair of Aria 906 and, thanks to a regular member here, heard the Evoke 20 in my living-room (so could compare). To me, the Evoke 20 sounded too bright (in the itchy area around 4 kHz - 7 kHz), even if they digged a lot deeper in the bass.

The X14 have the same profile. It could be a Dynaudio "house sound".
 

Robbo99999

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I have a pair of Aria 906 and, thanks to a regular member here, heard the Evoke 20 in my living-room (so could compare). To me, the Evoke 20 sounded too bright (in the itchy area around 4 kHz - 7 kHz), even if they digged a lot deeper in the bass.

The X14 have the same profile. It could be a Dynaudio "house sound".
Right, I see the emphasis on the 4kHz-7kHz point you're making as being decisive vs the bass extension.
 

ROOSKIE

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40Hz is about -15dB anechoic, that’s a lot of room gain needed.
Before correction, in my room I get about 15db boost at 38-48hz as long as the speaker has enough output to excite the mode. Nearly all of my speakers can excite this mode.

... I guess with 1st order electrical filters they have 2nd order acoustic slopes. But here I'm unsure if it can be blamed also on the broader overlap or just some error in crossover symmetry.
Applying a 1st order electrical filter to a driver can give you all sorts of various acoustic roll-offs. There is no reason to expect a 2nd order roll. With excellent design and drivers often a 1st order will give acoustic rolls of 2nd and 3rth order (even 4th). You can also get no roll off at all in case of a hypothetical driver with a severe break-up & or severe rising response.

I have to say that I don't own any back ported speakers now for this very reason. I am surprised that I read that 5 cm Genelec recommendation pop up quite often in the comments, and more generally speaking often being mentioned that rear ports distance are not really an issue as long as their is a bit of room to breathe, often from quite knowledgeable people. I am missing technical knowledge about that, but I did have rear ported speakers in the past and I could swear I was hearing negative effects at distances of about a feet and that the effect is just much less present with front ports, but having not compare or evaluated lately, It makes me doubt my ears, or maybe It could even be about something else than the port and I was not comparing apple to apple, or maybe the good old expectation Bias, but I see here that back wall recommendation vary between models. So, Can we conclude rigorously it has nothing to do with the port and it's a misconception? Anybody could, for personal education point me to good reading material on the subject so I could understand?
Folks have already covered your question pretty well.
I do want to point out the following
Bass waves are huge and in general a few inches of movement pales in comparison to the wave size. (think wave size to port distance on front vs on rear, bottom, top, side or wherever.)
25hz wave 45ft/13.72m
50hz wave 22.51ft/6.86m
65hz wave 17.31ft/5.27m
80hz wave 14.07ft/4.29m
125hz wave 9ft/2.74m
200hz wave 5.63ft/1.72m

That said by moving the speakers you change the SBIR dynamics quite a bit. You can create cancelations and of course mitigate them by placement. This has less to do with the port than it does frequencies usually produced solely by the woofer. (above 80hz)
By moving a speaker closer to a wall or further from it you change SBIR frequencies. Here a few inches can matter as to which frequencies are reduced due to the cancelations from floor/sidewall/ceiling/front wall bounce as many times these are in the 80-200hrz zone.
A speaker 2ft/50cm from side wall,front wall and having a woofer 2ft/50cm off the floor will have a huge cancelation around 125-200 Move it 1 foot and this will possibly fill in quite a bit for example. Good reason to explore making these three distances different if possible.

The speaker also has some amount of Baffle Step compensation involved in the design. From 0db to 6db is normal. 0, or maybe 1 or 2 db for an on-wall, 3 or so for many speakers and 5-6db for a hifi speaker designed to be showcased out on stands and still have full bass and lower midrange.
Moving a speaker closer to the wall that has 6db of BS built in likely will make it sound thick, likewise moving an on wall away from the wall will thin it out audibly.
This is all mostly happening from about 100hz-500hz give or take depending on design and will change the sound very drastically when critically paying attention and has nothing to do with the port design at all. Yet one may perceive it as a port design issue unknowingly.

Really the measurements one takes in room will tell the story. You will easily see what is what using REW, the moving mic method and a decent mic.

just wild guess, maybe it's coz the rear port are more likely to have a smooth and larger opening, as opposed to front ports which tends to be slotted and cause more turbulance/resonance problem?
There is not really inherent reason a slotted port will have more turbulence.
The velocity of air movement in the port causes this turbulence and once it reaches a threshold that all designs have it will chuff.
Generally a smaller diameter port does chuff sooner and more often.
There is a balancing act with port size in a monitor speaker as the box is small and often the required port for a low tuning is long if the diameter is a larger one. (smaller diameter = shorter length for same tuning vs a larger diameter)
This a problem on another level as that a long port is often more likely to have a resonance that is in a frequency region that internal box absorption material can not affect/reduce. There are other ways to reduce this resonance of course, if relying on wool or similar you want that resonance above 1khz or higher so the material can affect the sound waves, that material can't do anything for a 500hz/750hz ect wave.
 
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Dennis Murphy

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There may or may not be some confusion about Dynaudio's use of and "slavish devotion to" first order crossovers. The crossover in the M10 is an exceedingly inexpensive cap and coil (1st order electrical) that produces a fairly steep acoustic roll-off in the tweeter, and a messy I don't know what in the woofer slope. I repaired a pair of these not too long ago and was amazed at how little money Dynaudio had spent on the crossover. The inductor isn't even a steel laminate--it's a tiny sold iron core that had fused under some kind of electrical assault unleashed by the owner. I'm guessing the total Xover cost at around $3. The only true 1st order acoustic Dynaudio crossover that I'm familiar with was in the old Gemini MTM kit. In order to achieve true 1st order acoustic slopes over the requisite 2 octave range, Dyn had to resort to an exceedingly complex electrical circuit that must have had at least 15 components. The off axis response was a mess, and I finally replaced it with a much simpler 2nd order electrical circuit; In any event, I don't think Dynaudio has any particular devotion to 1st order crossovers, either electrical or acoustic. I think the main motivation in this instance is economics.
 

Ilkless

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There may or may not be some confusion about Dynaudio's use of and "slavish devotion to" first order crossovers. The crossover in the M10 is an exceedingly inexpensive cap and coil (1st order electrical) that produces a fairly steep acoustic roll-off in the tweeter, and a messy I don't know what in the woofer slope. I repaired a pair of these not too long ago and was amazed at how little money Dynaudio had spent on the crossover. The inductor isn't even a steel laminate--it's a tiny sold iron core that had fused under some kind of electrical assault unleashed by the owner. I'm guessing the total Xover cost at around $3. The only true 1st order acoustic Dynaudio crossover that I'm familiar with was in the old Gemini MTM kit. In order to achieve true 1st order acoustic slopes over the requisite 2 octave range, Dyn had to resort to an exceedingly complex electrical circuit that must have had at least 15 components. The off axis response was a mess, and I finally replaced it with a much simpler 2nd order electrical circuit; In any event, I don't think Dynaudio has any particular devotion to 1st order crossovers, either electrical or acoustic. I think the main motivation in this instance is economics.

It's always been part of the identity of the Dyn home audio line though, see for instance:

Dynaudio has used first-order crossovers for decades: we stuck to our guns even when other manufacturers said it didn’t matter, or used higher-order designs to make their drivers work.

I have always assumed they meant first-order electrical, because, as you said, first-order acoustic is difficult to achieve properly. It just conveniently happens that the first-order mystique also helps with economics, if one aims for first-order electrical and is selling to a customer base that does not necessarily know the difference between electrical and acoustical slopes.
 

617

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To my understanding as a beginner that seems like a reasonable choice of crossover frequency for horizontal directivity matching with these drivers.
Maybe it's the crossover slopes? I guess with 1st order electrical filters they have 2nd order acoustic slopes. But here I'm unsure if it can be blamed also on the broader overlap or just some error in crossover symmetry.

There's really no such thing as a first order electrical crossover; in theory a single cap or coil will give you a first order electrical crossover, but the variable impedance of the drivers in question will not result in a first order acoustic response. Outside of esoteric trash you're not going to see that approach.

If you want a first order acoustic response, which is a pretty outdated idea frankly, you actually need very special drivers and a fairly complex crossover, since you need to shape the response over many octaves instead of like one and a half. Dynaudio makes very damped woofers and robust tweeters, which helps a lot, but you sacrifice a few things.

For one, efficiency tends to be very low. For another, spatial alignment of the drivers becomes even more critical as the bandwidth they share is very large. Dynaudio doesn't physically offset their drivers for some reason; as a result the most linear axis may not be in line with the tweeter as is often assumed. Some dynaudio models feature the tweeter on the bottom to 'aim' a peaky response region at the floor where the listener may have a carpet.

The wide shared bandwidth was a good idea maybe 30 years ago, but there are simpler and better sounding ways to make a speaker now.

Ironically, the best way to make a first order speaker without killing efficiency and having to contend with driver misalignment is to use an active dsp crossover. The dsp can massage the response of each driver into a beautiful shallow slope, and you can use time delays to account for the spatial alignment of the drivers.

Dynaudio knows what they are doing and I suspect that they have determined that it is better for their speakers to have a recognizable sound rather than a neutral one. I wouldn't buy these but I can see the appeal from the few I have heard.
 

617

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There may or may not be some confusion about Dynaudio's use of and "slavish devotion to" first order crossovers. The crossover in the M10 is an exceedingly inexpensive cap and coil (1st order electrical) that produces a fairly steep acoustic roll-off in the tweeter, and a messy I don't know what in the woofer slope. I repaired a pair of these not too long ago and was amazed at how little money Dynaudio had spent on the crossover. The inductor isn't even a steel laminate--it's a tiny sold iron core that had fused under some kind of electrical assault unleashed by the owner. I'm guessing the total Xover cost at around $3. The only true 1st order acoustic Dynaudio crossover that I'm familiar with was in the old Gemini MTM kit. In order to achieve true 1st order acoustic slopes over the requisite 2 octave range, Dyn had to resort to an exceedingly complex electrical circuit that must have had at least 15 components. The off axis response was a mess, and I finally replaced it with a much simpler 2nd order electrical circuit; In any event, I don't think Dynaudio has any particular devotion to 1st order crossovers, either electrical or acoustic. I think the main motivation in this instance is economics.

Wow Dennis I never thought they'd actually just do the cap and coil. Of course Epicure managed to get by with only the cap.
 

beagleman

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That is interesting. Jupiter came online in December 2016. They may have been testing older speakers to establish a database or achieve a baseline for their older measurement techniques?

https://www.dynaudio.com/dynaudio-a...-new-dynaudio-research-and-development-center

The rear-ported "bookshelf" discussion is also interesting. I had a pair of Emit M10s that were purchased for a bookcase in my living room. I could not get them to perform at a satisfactory level with or without port plugs. (Note: I do not have DSP capability in that room, simple bass and treble controls only.) I ended up with front-ported KEF Q100s in that location and have been much happier.

Challenging for any speaker:
View attachment 116033


Not sure how much the rear ports were causing your issues.

Seems the corner loading of one speaker being right against the wall, and both speakers having lots of reflective wood under the front of them, extending out 4-5 inches may have caused some of the issues also.
 

Dennis Murphy

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Wow Dennis I never thought they'd actually just do the cap and coil. Of course Epicure managed to get by with only the cap.
As did Advent, Dynaco, and Boston Acoustics on their entry-level speaker. it can work OK if the woofer has a natural roll-off that somewhat coincides with that of the filtered tweeter. My measurements of the M10 were actually smoother than Amir's, and I didn't find the speaker particularly bright. Just kind of run-of-the-mill.
 

Dennis Murphy

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It's always been part of the identity of the Dyn home audio line though, see for instance:



I have always assumed they meant first-order electrical, because, as you said, first-order acoustic is difficult to achieve properly. It just conveniently happens that the first-order mystique also helps with economics, if one aims for first-order electrical and is selling to a customer base that does not necessarily know the difference between electrical and acoustical slopes.

Thanks. I found the Special Forty discussion confusing. Dyn apparently uses an impedance compensation circuit to flatten the impedance curve, which is fine, but then they also claim they paid added attention to phase alignment. There's only so much you can do about phase integration with a cap and a coil. (And, of course, phase alignment doesn't mean the result is transient perfect on the design axis. It just means the woofer and tweeter are in phase at the crossover point. They may, for example, still be a cycle apart.) I find it difficult to believe that Dyn's more expensive 3-way speakers use first order electrical slopes. You could read their statements to just mean that they are continuing to use first order circuits, but not always.
 
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MZKM

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There may or may not be some confusion about Dynaudio's use of and "slavish devotion to" first order crossovers. The crossover in the M10 is an exceedingly inexpensive cap and coil (1st order electrical) that produces a fairly steep acoustic roll-off in the tweeter, and a messy I don't know what in the woofer slope. I repaired a pair of these not too long ago and was amazed at how little money Dynaudio had spent on the crossover. The inductor isn't even a steel laminate--it's a tiny sold iron core that had fused under some kind of electrical assault unleashed by the owner. I'm guessing the total Xover cost at around $3. The only true 1st order acoustic Dynaudio crossover that I'm familiar with was in the old Gemini MTM kit. In order to achieve true 1st order acoustic slopes over the requisite 2 octave range, Dyn had to resort to an exceedingly complex electrical circuit that must have had at least 15 components. The off axis response was a mess, and I finally replaced it with a much simpler 2nd order electrical circuit; In any event, I don't think Dynaudio has any particular devotion to 1st order crossovers, either electrical or acoustic. I think the main motivation in this instance is economics.
Hey Dennis, do you happen to know what the heck Dynaudio means by “1st/2nd order crossover” for the larger M20 bookshelf?
 

Dennis Murphy

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Hey Dennis, do you happen to know what the heck Dynaudio means by “1st/2nd order crossover” for the larger M20 bookshelf?
I would assume that means a coil on the woofer and a series cap + a parallel inductor on the tweeter. first order electrical-second order electrical
 
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