EV Eliminator living room amplifier choice

[Bruce Morgen]

Well, now that I have tried them for a while in my living room (amplifier does 8Ω 35w/ch @ 1% thd), they are staying even if they are not hi-fi speakers.
I can get a pretty good bass response down to about 45hz with EQ, the directivity is excellent, and they are very linear/neutral with all kinds of music in subjective terms but I would still like amir to test them especially to have the distortion figures.
Their sensitivity is a plus, I don't even feel the need for more power, if it wasn't for my amplifier having terrible SINAD I wouldn't change it maybe.
My wife even likes them in our living room, so they are staying.
I am also thinking of learning more about room correction/measurement, getting a UMIC-1 to better correct via EQ and installing acoustic panels where it is more strategic.
Thank you for all your advice and recommendations.

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We have a couple of those trusty old HP full tower PeeCees here too. The one I'm using to type this has a total of 10 hard drives, only one of which is external. Oh, and our family is also owned by a black and gray tabby.

 

[StndCpp]

We have a couple of those trusty old HP full tower PeeCees here too. The one I'm using to type this has a total of 10 hard drives, only one of which is external. Oh, and our family is also owned by a black and gray tabby.

Got these two HP Z400 workstations (Xeon 6 cores 12 threads 2.5 ghz, 12GB ECC 2013 model irc) in 2019 for 130$ each, the only thing I changed was adding better graphic cards and more hard drives. Never had a problem with them, really reliable machines even if they are now 12 years old.
Mimoso is the boss here, he is our owner, by the way he loves scratching the speaker tissue but what can we do..

 

[Bruce Morgen]

Got these two HP Z400 workstations (Xeon 6 cores 12 threads 2.5 ghz, 12GB ECC 2013 model irc) in 2019 for 130$ each, the only thing I changed was adding better graphic cards and more hard drives. Never had a problem with them, really reliable machines even if they are now 12 years old.
Mimoso is the boss here, he is our owner, by the way he loves scratching the speaker tissue but what can we do..

Mine is more modest -- an Elite 8000 CMT, about 15 years old, quad-core Q9505 CPU, 16GB ECC, and an Nvidia GeForce GT-710, which is about all the GPU the PSU can handle. It does everything I need other than 4K video.

Fortunately, our Abbie The Tabby has shown no interest in shredding any naked woofer cones.

 

[StndCpp]

Mine is more modest -- an Elite 8000 CMT, about 15 years old, quad-core Q9505 CPU, 16GB ECC, and an Nvidia GeForce GT-710, which is about all the GPU the PSU can handle. It does everything I need other than 4K video.

Fortunately, our Abbie The Tabby has shown no interest in shredding any naked woofer cones.

I got 2 cheap geforce GTX 1650 and can't even take full advantage of them, because these boards only support PCIe 2.0, but anyway I can play 4k totally fine locally and in the browser, at least from youtube, I am surprised your Elite 8000 CMT can´t play them either. I am guessing the GPU is the culprit but I havent checked.
I picked the GTX 1650 because it only draws 75w max, it is exclusively powered by the PCIe slot, doesn't use the axiliary power cables.
These speakers have metal protection for the woofers and horns so cats damage them BUT all sides of the cabinets are lined with speaker carpet, and aparently he loves to scracth that.

 

[Bruce Morgen]

I got 2 cheap geforce GTX 1650 and can't even take full advantage of them, because these boards only support PCIe 2.0, but anyway I can play 4k totally fine locally and in the browser, at least from youtube, I am surprised your Elite 8000 CMT can´t play them either. I am guessing the GPU is the culprit but I havent checked.
I picked the GTX 1650 because it only draws 75w max, it is exclusively powered by the PCIe slot, doesn't use the axiliary power cables.
These speakers have metal protection for the woofers and horns so cats damage them BUT all sides of the cabinets are lined with speaker carpet, and aparently he loves to scracth that.

I'm pretty sure yours has a beefier PSU -- the GT-710 needs only about 19 watts max., which is pretty much all my PSU has to spare -- but I think the real limiter here is my CPU, which is the most advanced the MB can handle. I'm guessing -- and it's just a guess -- that four cores at less than 3mHz just won't cut it for 4K.

 

[StndCpp]

I'm pretty sure yours has a beefier PSU -- the GT-710 needs only about 19 watts max., which is pretty much all my PSU has to spare -- but I think the real limiter here is my CPU, which is the most advanced the MB can handle. I'm guessing -- and it's just a guess -- that four cores at less than 3mHz just won't cut it for 4K.

Mine has 475w PSU, yours has 320w, yours also sports a PCIe 2 slot which is normally rated at 75w, I just don't know if your PSU is enough, but I would guess it is, otherwise the PCIe slot would not be compliant with the standard power requirments.
Your CPU on the other hand is a bit older than mine as you say, only has 4 cores and 4 threads, no L3 cache and no SSE 4.2, but I would not be surprised if it could still play 4k video, at least in some very efficient software setting.

 

[Bruce Morgen]

Mine has 475w PSU, yours has 320w, yours also sports a PCIe 2 slot which is normally rated at 75w, I just don't know if your PSU is enough, but I would guess it is, otherwise the PCIe slot would not be compliant with the standard power requirments.
Your CPU on the other hand is a bit older than mine as you say, only has 4 cores and 4 threads, no L3 cache and no SSE 4.2, but I would not be surprised if it could still play 4k video, at least in some very efficient software setting.

Not only are all three of my PCIe 2 slots occupied -- that's potentially 75W x 3, or 225W out of that 320 -- but the three old-timey PCI slots are also occupied. The minimum PSU recommended for your card is 300 and I've got 320 -- that'd be cutting it pretty close, especially considering the wattage required on the 12 volt side to spin up the hard drives, five of which are hefty 3.5-inchers. Anyway, playing 4K video on the HP isn't a priority -- I have a little Beelink mini-PeeCee VESA-mounted on the back of my monitor and hooked up to a big LG TV as its monitor for that job.

Nice chattin' atcha!

 

[StndCpp]

Not only are all three of my PCIe 2 slots occupied -- that's potentially 75W x 3, or 225W out of that 320 -- but the three old-timey PCI slots are also occupied. The minimum PSU recommended for your card is 300 and I've got 320 -- that'd be cutting it pretty close, especially considering the wattage required on the 12 volt side to spin up the hard drives, five of which are hefty 3.5-inchers. Anyway, playing 4K video on the HP isn't a priority -- I have a little Beelink mini-PeeCee VESA-mounted on the back of my monitor and hooked up to a big LG TV as its monitor for that job.

Nice chattin' atcha!

Wow, you have a lot of stuff in the PCI slots, I only have the graphic card and an old Creative Audigy 4 to use as ADC.
You are right about your PSU not being enough for the GTX1650 with all the stuff you mentioned, plus usb peripherals, etc.
Your Beelink is very nice and doesn't take up space, me I use the HPs for all media related stuff, even some really old PC games we like to play as a low budget solution back in 2019.
Yes, really nice talk.

 

[StndCpp]

Looking into making a more non-subjective evaluation of the hi-fi use case virtues of these speakers I gathered some more specifications and measurements for the speaker and its components issued by the manufacturer.

E-V Eliminator i 15-inch speaker https://products.electrovoice.com/binary/Eliminator_i_EDS.pdf
E-V DL15BFH 15-Inch Loudspeaker https://www.fullcompass.com/common/files/27300-DL15BFH.pdf
E-V HP64M Constant-Directivity Horn https://products.electrovoice.com/binary/HP64M_Horn_EDS.pdf
E-V DH2010A Very High-Frequency Reproducers https://www.concertsound.co.uk/WebR...E5CD/8644/10D9/0A0F/111B/21A8/DH2010A_EDS.pdf

Sadly E-V doesn't provide distortion plots or numbers for this speaker, but the info sheet for the woofer does include these. Also for their cousin speaker, the E-V Eliminator floor monitor that features the same drivers, just different cabinets and horns, E-V did include some distortion plots and values, but it won't be the same for the regular Eliminator I think, so interest in these graphs and plot is limited here. ( https://products.electrovoice.com/binary/Eliminator_Monitor_Engineering_Data_Sheet.PDF )

I am very uneducated in all this, but from what I can understand the woofer distortion is fairly acceptable for hi-fi, not perfect, but there is of course trade-offs in a 15 inch transducer. As for the compression driver, things look a bit less satisfying in both linearity and distortion (looking at the Eliminator floor monitor distortion graph), but subjectively they sound nice to my ears anyway.

Linearity seems reasonable, not superb of course.
Directivity seems fine from the data, and in my subjective experience with them this is one of their strong points.
Sensitivity is of course good and that is another strong point.

Nothing is said about the passive crossover, apart that the crossing frequency is 1,6 kH, so I don't know what kind of design it features.

Even with all the data we have I still feel I would like to have more detailed understanding/measurements like in @amirm reviews, but as that is not possible maybe some of the members can have a better interpretation of the available data and enlighten me.

Thank you for all your feedback so far.