Elac Uni-Fi 2.0 Review (bookshelf speaker)

[bhayes9614]

Did you swap the speakers to see if the problem followed the right speaker?

I forgot to mention yes I did swap channels and the issue still remained on the right speaker. Also tried two different amplifiers and same thing occurred unfortunately.

 

[ricardomontalbahn77]

I forgot to mention yes I did swap channels and the issue still remained on the right speaker. Also tried two different amplifiers and same thing occurred unfortunately.

Darn. I am sorry to hear this. Can you return/exchange?

 

[bhayes9614]

Darn. I am sorry to hear this. Can you return/exchange?

That's OK I can tell they are great speakers though if you got a good pair! Yes I have 60 days to return no problem. I'm thinking I might try to return them since I personally don't like the looks of the DBR62.

This might sound crazy but I might return the UB52's and sell my current Kef Q150's hoping to get $300 on FB Market Place and buy the Kef Ls50 Meta's on sale right now for $999.99

 

[ricardomontalbahn77]

That's OK I can tell they are great speakers though if you got a good pair! Yes I have 60 days to return no problem. I'm thinking I might try to return them since I personally don't like the looks of the DBR62.

This might sound crazy but I might return the UB52's and sell my current Kef Q150's hoping to get $300 on FB Market Place and buy the Kef Ls50 Meta's on sale right now for $999.99

Sounds like a plan. MA also make good speakers right now

 

[biznunya]

Wow, that escalated quickly, and then veered into Bose. I now know I'm truly on an audiophile page!!
So, to cut through all the wild speculation and mis-quotes about how I go direct from computer to production, or don't measure in production etc, and to get straight to the issue;
Summary-A potential fault was observed in one sample of a product shipped in non-standard packing, from a source other than the manufacturer. As a result of this observation, made with no attempt to identify the cause of the issue, a stop the test and stop the presses and an announcement is made that this product cannot be recommended. Pages of comment ensue. Lots of people chime in that do not have the product themselves and so cannot properly contribute to identifying the cause. Some people that do have the product chime in that say they cannot hear this issue. Then some further statement is made that it can only be heard under certain circumstances. Then the solution is apparently that the faulty product is going to be returned to the source to be sent back to Amazon and lost forever to further investigation.
Did I get that summary close?
Do I sound miffed?
Have I ever sounded miffed before, EVER?

OK, having got that off my chest, let me step back and sound like my usual more reasonable self

First, I am not going to comment on issues of frequency balance or issues with the measured frequency response curves. I don't generally comment on a reviewers subjective findings. You like them, you don't like them. Not everyone likes what I do. That's OK. What you like to listen to is clearly subjective. Interpretation of measure responses is subjective. I don't get upset if folks don't like my speakers. Although to qualify that. I guess I would be very upset if NO-ONE liked my speakers.... LOL

Second, and more to the issue at hand, this sounds like a mechanical issue. It appears to be very narrow bandwidth which is why I say this. Something is resonating and vibrating.
There are cabinet vibrations in this frequency range. There are in any speaker at this price point. My speculation is something that is mechanically coupled is vibrating. I took a sample from my lab and did a slow sweep with a good old fashioned analog oscillator, so I could sweep slowly back and forth around 600Hz. Yes, the cabinet is lively in that range, and what I first heard was rattling of the binding posts on the terminal panel (I was using banana plugs to connect to the speaker). Once I tightened them the problem went away. The interesting thing is, that result of the rattle could be heard on every panel of the speaker when I put my ear close. I've had this happen before, once on a TAD speaker where I traced it to the speaker cable plug cover, and another time to a loose spiked foot on the speaker stand. Based on these experiences and extrapolating to the descriptions given, leads me to my assumptions that it is a mechanical issue. Especially as it seems to be level dependent. It's particularly interesting that the effect seemed to be different the next day, and was only detectable at high levels.
The fact that there seemed to be a large negative, momentary, near DC component immediately proceeding the noise is possibly a red herring, but it is mere conjecture at this point.
Now I have not yet listened at the level I think that was used in the test. I still have to continue investigating, but I have rarely played at levels where I see any significant movement of the midrange cone. This fact does surprise me.

So, what is the solution. Sending back the speaker from whence it came seems the worst option. Lost forever, never to be investigated. Leaving an odd question mark about ELAC quality control or my ability to design and manufacture a product? Indeed if I remember correctly, it was stated that the original owner could not hear the sound from the other speaker of the pair? If so, did that owner ever hear any issue the speaker sample that is under investigation?

It seems that my best option is to purchase the pair of speakers from the original owner, and pay to have them shipped to me for a throrough investigation.
I will be in direct contact to determine if this can be agreed upon.

Best regards

Andrew Jones
ELAC

p.s. "miffed" is being polite.....

I bought a new pair and one speaker had the distortion in the 500Hz - 600Hz range which ended up being the rattling of the binding post on the terminal panel, like you said.

The problem went away once I tightened the post.

Thank you for the help, Mr. Jones

 

[Alling]

Maybe the floorstanders UF52 are better?

I have the UF52s. It didn't take long for me to start noticing seriously annoying artifacts from one of them, but it took several months before I was able to confirm that I wasn't just imagining stuff and that it wasn't the source material, amplifier, room etc that was at fault.

What typically happens is that someone in the recording says 's', or sometimes another sibilant, and then a very sharp noise is heard from only one of the speakers. I have verified, by shifting around the speakers, that it is indeed one of the speakers that's doing this and not something else.

Weirdly enough, I can't hear these artifact in recordings of the speaker output, and just putting on my Sennheiser HD6XXs (without even plugging them in) seems to completely nullify it. Moving close to the speaker also makes it go away almost completely. So perhaps my (barely treated) room contributes to amplifying it.

The problem can also manifest itself in other scenarios, one of which I _have_ been able to record. Around the 4-minute mark in this video (which may not be available outside Sweden), one of my speakers emits a kind of buzzing noise in addition to Erik Ekstrand's voice. It's especially obvious when he says långt ("longt") and eliten ("eh-LEE-ten"); these words can be heard at around the 5- and 7-second marks, respectively, in the attached clips.

I produced the clips by setting my iPhone 13 Pro to mono audio, turning the balance on the preamp all the way to the left and then recording the output with a Sennheiser Profile about 5 cm from the tweeter. One of the clips is from the defective speaker and the other is from the other one, which seems to work as expected. (I swapped the speakers between the recordings so that they both used the left channel, the same speaker cable etc.)

Here are the spectrograms in Audacity (from top to bottom: original audio before downmix to mono; good speaker; bad speaker):

To confirm and attempt to formalize my conclusions, I did a frequency sweep from 1 to 20000 Hz and recorded it in the way outlined above. Here are the resulting spectrograms (top = good speaker; bottom = bad speaker):

(Since the entire sweep took 20 seconds, the x axis is conveniently also the input signal in kHz.)

I don't understand the abundance of parallel lines. But focusing only on the differences between the speakers, there seem to be a lot of weird shit going on in the bad one around 6 kHz. The third harmonic seems especially pronounced.

I haven't been able to hear the artifact in Ain't no Sunshine described by @amirm, but the ones I have heard seem similar, based on his description. (Note again that I have the UF52, not the UB52.)

The bad speaker is going back to Amazon, and I've received a new one that doesn't have this defect.