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Experience with Castle speakers?

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Barry_Sound

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Boxes that size cannot have a real transmission line, if manufacturers think they have cracked it in boxes that small they should put their mic where there mouth is. What this type of box often has is a cancellation from the opening at some bass frequencies, making them much worse than a simple port. An in room measurement will show this, and give your a slight chance you can work around it with placement.
Got to say I kept them running for the last two hours or so and over time got quite used to the brightness. The tweeter is really good. Only when switching back to stronger speakers the lack of bass becomes painfully apparent.

We did A/B tests on Peter Gabriels Book of Love and concluded it became a different song and a different singer.

Would love to see measurements at one time to back up my impressions.
 
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Barry_Sound

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Specs are, as with any other manufacturer, very unprecise, but they certainly don't overestimate speaker LF capability. This is a small volume speaker so expecting massive LF response is naive.
No one expected "massive" response, where did you read that?
These arent exactly "small volume" in my opinion either at almost 50cm in height and 10kg each.
 

TheBatsEar

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... it says the specs for the Avon 1. There are several hints, not least the size, the weight and the words "2-way bookshelf speaker". It has been copy and pasted by the intern, probably one more reason why nobody knows Castle outside of us geeks.

Again, the woofer is 150mm, the mid is 130mm and the tweeter is something else entirely.
 
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Barry_Sound

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So... take this with caution because I hardly knot what Im doing. Hooked up the Blue Yeti mic to REW for a comparative measurement of the Castle Avon (red line) vs another reference speaker (blue line). Do you see the dip in the lower hz region?

The Yeti is not made for measurement but in a comparative setting it might tell something:

Bildschirmfoto 2022-02-28 um 09.42.05.png


Second run, zoomed in; treble looks messy but likely is caused by the Yeti or room situation, lets look at the bass region:

Bildschirmfoto 2022-02-28 um 09.59.15.png
 
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ernestcarl

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So... take this with caution because I hardly knot what Im doing. Hooked up the Blue Yeti mic to REW for a comparative measurement of the Castle Avon (red line) vs another reference speaker (blue line). Do you see the dip in the lower hz region?

The Yeti is not made for measurement but in a comparative setting it might tell something:

View attachment 189736

Second run, zoomed in; treble looks messy but likely is caused by the Yeti or room situation, lets look at the bass region:

View attachment 189737

I know the measurements will be limited given the lack of a real measurement microphone... but it still would be much more sensible and comparable if you used a 50 dB vertical scale -- and make the numbers visible. Also would be helpful to know the exact conditions of the measurement. Was this indoors/outdoors? Gating and/or windowing and smoothing are also other useful techniques you might want to play around with.
 

TheBatsEar

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I was under the impression you had a UMIK. Are you able to get calibration data for your mic? That can then be loaded into REW.

Yeah, i would maybe disregard everything below 400Hz or so, because the room will define the response at those wavelength. Above that, in your room, you can use gated measurements, that means, you take only the first few milliseconds of the signal, and ignore late reflections from the room.

You could go outside, if weather/temp permits, then you would only have to consider the first reflection, the higher the speaker, the easier to gate the first reflection away, the more accuracy in the bass region ... ;) Also make several measurements and sum them.
 
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