I just bought a pair of the Uni-Fi Reference UBR 62 speakers. Here are my thoughts:
Background:
We are near the end of an extensive home renovation. My previous speakers were paradigm Millenia 30's mounted on either side of the TV, paired with a sub-woofer. They looked good (made wife happy) but, as far as sound goes, I'll just say that they had a poor price/performance ratio. They were not irritating to listen to, but music never really came to life with them. This time around we are not putting speakers on the wall (the TV will be centered above the fireplace where the blue junction box is located in the picture I attached), and my wife was giving me serious push back on even having speakers at all in the family room.
A few weeks ago I came across a review of the UBR 62 speakers by Cheapaudioman. He really likes them, but the key was that, aesthetically, those speakers in white/oak match our family room decor better than any others I found and, being bookshelves, they are not too large. Without telling my wife, I ordered a set of factory reconditioned UBR 62's $300 below list price. That worked out - I gave them a careful inspection, and they look brand new. I also ordered a set of nice, but cheap, stands from Amazon. I figured once my wife saw the setup, and how the speakers match our decor (even the oak vinyl wrap on the speakers matches the wood flooring on our stairway), she might be able to tolerate them. That also happened to work out for me.
Sound:
Initially I hooked up the speakers to my Adcom GFA-5802 amplifier, and setup the speakers a couple of feet in front of the wall spread about 8' apart, without a subwoofer. By themselves, the UBR 62's have pretty good imaging and sound staging, and respectable lower bass extension for bookshelf speakers. But, they are lacking a bit in the midrange. Vocals just seem a little repressed. It could be the dip from 250 Hz - 700 Hz Erin identified in the frequency response. Also, my family room has a significant room response dip that centers around 150 Hz or so, which made matters worse.
Next, I brought my subwoofer online (Velodyne HGS18BG) and started tuning the crossover with my new MiniDSP SHD. Initially I played with 24 dB/octave and 48 dB/octave Linkwitz-Riley and Butterworth filters between 80 Hz and 120 Hz. The 150 Hz centered dip remained problematic though. I could equalize it out with the DSP (Dirac Live), but my concern is that adding 8-10 dB of boost to the bookshelves in the 100-200 Hz region might be pushing the 6" woofers a little hard at high listening volumes. So, to fill in the 150 Hz dip a bit, I experimented with overlapping the bookshelves and subwoofer in that frequency range. I thought the woofer (located in the audio cabinet to the right of the speaker in the picture, door open while listening) might be detectable pushing over 100 Hz, and it is detectable during the frequency response sweeps, but while listening to music from my listening position, I can't detect that the bass is coming from the cabinet, and the sound stage is preserved. The filters I ended up using were 120 Hz 48 dB/octave Butterworth on the bookshelves and 200 Hz 24 dB/octave Butterworth on the subwoofer (the subwoofer also has a built in roll-off above 200 Hz). I never before envisioned using such a crossover, but for these speakers, this subwoofer, and my family room, it seems to work well to fill in the dip without adversely affecting sound staging.
Having the crossover setup, I then implemented Dirac Live for my listening position. Wow, that brought the speakers to a new level. Vocals came to life, and the imaging and sound staging, which already were good, improved quite a bit. On Dire Straights' "Ride Across the River," toward then end of the song I hear the crickets all around me like walking through a forest at night. With Kris Isaak's "Heat of the Jungle" I can pinpoint individual instrument locations, and some instruments even sound like they are coming from behind me in certain parts of the song. There are details in the music coming out that I have been missing since giving up my custom Focal speakers years ago. It's very nice to have them back.
The MiniDSP SHD has four configuration presets. I loaded Dirac's filter data for a completely flat frequency response to the first preset, and to the second preset loaded filter data for Dirac's default room response, which is linear, but sloping from about 3 dB at 20 Hz to -3 dB at 20 kHz. With the UBR 62's, some music sounds better with the first preset, while some recordings sound a little bright and sound better with the second preset.