Hello! I'll try to keep this one short on the subjective thoughts. Those will be in my actual review, I just like sharing graphs here first.
The Fluance Ai60 is very affordable powered monitor at just $250. For this price, you get a pair of speakers with 6.5-inch woofers, AptX Bluetooth, RCA, Optical, and USB inputs, a sub out, plus a remote. They're also some of the nicest looking speakers in the price range I've seen, and feel pretty well-built to boot. I'm a big fan of the two-tone look, for which there are three combinations, though they're also available in all black if you're boring or a goth ninja.
The electronics are in the right speaker, which uses basic lamp wire to plug into the left one. They are a sealed design - no ports anywhere.
Here's the measurement fluance provides, just a single on-axis graph:
Wow! Except... look at that scaling. 120dB, with some really weird smoothing going on, so it's clearly unreliable. And what the heck is "DSP virtual sound?"
Here's the real deal from 200Hz on up:
NOTE: No nearfield bass splice for now because I screwed those up; you'll see why in a bit.
Also note I use a significantly taller aspect ratio than Amir. Here's the same measurement scaled to match the Revel M16's:
Hmm.
It's not exactly great, but it's at least somewhat timbrally balanced. The listening window is roughly +/- 2dB from 200 to 20KHz, but it's not exactly what I'd call "smooth."
The Early reflections and Sound Power curves are particularly jagged, but the early reflections DI curve isn't terrible other than that 10KHz dip. Subjectively I thought they sounded pretty good but maybe a bit *cough* unrefined. I think the ERDI curve is good enough below 10KHz though that you can get away with some EQing.
Breaking down directivity a bit more, here is the horizontal SPL plot (note I'm now using 10-degree intervals now instead of my old 15, but REW's pretty new dashed lines help me keep the data from getting too cluttered):
Horizontal Contour Plot (normalized to on-axis):
Vertical at 0/5/10/15 degrees above and below tweeter axis + ceiling and floor reflections.
Vertical contour plots:
Horizontal is decent, vertical is average for a two-way non coincident. Interestingly, the Ai60 appears to significantly flatter 15 degrees above the tweeter axis! It loses some excess energy in the presence and upper mids regions. So umm, stand up? Or maybe fluance assumed most people would place these too low, such as on a media console, or on a desk without stands? The world may never know.
Lastly, and this is a biggie, the speaker has some weird behavior around volume controls. Specifically, it appears to apply some kind of loudness EQ based on the volume knob setting. It does not appear to do so based on input signal, only the knob level. This is particularly problematic because there is no display to let you see what volume the speakers are at, other than a single LED flashing red when you hit max volume.
I was only able to do some quick and dirty measurements of this effect, but for example, here is the speaker's in-room response at three different knob settings (note what I think is a room null at approx 30Hz) measured from 1m away:
This was why I screwed up the nearfield bass measurements. I noticed there was just too much bass, and after thinking I'd messed up my baffle step compensation for a while, I realized it was because the speaker was applying dynamic EQ when I'd turned down the knob for the nearfield measurement. Unfortunately, I did not have time to test it again tonight. For those of you curious though, here's what the nearfield woofer response looked like with the dynamic EQ on after baffle step compensation (in other words, the bump is not an effect of the nearfield measurement):
TL;DR: Decent-to-good directivity and bass extension for the price, but I wish on-axis were better given the built-in DSP. I think they could be worth it for the price with some EQ, especially given the design and how many features they pack in. I personally liked them and am happy to recommend them to non-audiophile friends, but the dynamic EQ is annoying and some compression is noticeable when playing loud. They are not the pinnacle of sound quality, but good looking speakers with a good feature set at a good price.
Mainly, just try not to get stabbed by that 10KHz peak off axis peak.
Extra notes:
The Fluance Ai60 is very affordable powered monitor at just $250. For this price, you get a pair of speakers with 6.5-inch woofers, AptX Bluetooth, RCA, Optical, and USB inputs, a sub out, plus a remote. They're also some of the nicest looking speakers in the price range I've seen, and feel pretty well-built to boot. I'm a big fan of the two-tone look, for which there are three combinations, though they're also available in all black if you're boring or a goth ninja.
Here's the measurement fluance provides, just a single on-axis graph:
Wow! Except... look at that scaling. 120dB, with some really weird smoothing going on, so it's clearly unreliable. And what the heck is "DSP virtual sound?"
Here's the real deal from 200Hz on up:
NOTE: No nearfield bass splice for now because I screwed those up; you'll see why in a bit.
Also note I use a significantly taller aspect ratio than Amir. Here's the same measurement scaled to match the Revel M16's:
Hmm.
It's not exactly great, but it's at least somewhat timbrally balanced. The listening window is roughly +/- 2dB from 200 to 20KHz, but it's not exactly what I'd call "smooth."
The Early reflections and Sound Power curves are particularly jagged, but the early reflections DI curve isn't terrible other than that 10KHz dip. Subjectively I thought they sounded pretty good but maybe a bit *cough* unrefined. I think the ERDI curve is good enough below 10KHz though that you can get away with some EQing.
Breaking down directivity a bit more, here is the horizontal SPL plot (note I'm now using 10-degree intervals now instead of my old 15, but REW's pretty new dashed lines help me keep the data from getting too cluttered):
Horizontal Contour Plot (normalized to on-axis):
Vertical at 0/5/10/15 degrees above and below tweeter axis + ceiling and floor reflections.
Vertical contour plots:
Horizontal is decent, vertical is average for a two-way non coincident. Interestingly, the Ai60 appears to significantly flatter 15 degrees above the tweeter axis! It loses some excess energy in the presence and upper mids regions. So umm, stand up? Or maybe fluance assumed most people would place these too low, such as on a media console, or on a desk without stands? The world may never know.
Lastly, and this is a biggie, the speaker has some weird behavior around volume controls. Specifically, it appears to apply some kind of loudness EQ based on the volume knob setting. It does not appear to do so based on input signal, only the knob level. This is particularly problematic because there is no display to let you see what volume the speakers are at, other than a single LED flashing red when you hit max volume.
I was only able to do some quick and dirty measurements of this effect, but for example, here is the speaker's in-room response at three different knob settings (note what I think is a room null at approx 30Hz) measured from 1m away:
This was why I screwed up the nearfield bass measurements. I noticed there was just too much bass, and after thinking I'd messed up my baffle step compensation for a while, I realized it was because the speaker was applying dynamic EQ when I'd turned down the knob for the nearfield measurement. Unfortunately, I did not have time to test it again tonight. For those of you curious though, here's what the nearfield woofer response looked like with the dynamic EQ on after baffle step compensation (in other words, the bump is not an effect of the nearfield measurement):
TL;DR: Decent-to-good directivity and bass extension for the price, but I wish on-axis were better given the built-in DSP. I think they could be worth it for the price with some EQ, especially given the design and how many features they pack in. I personally liked them and am happy to recommend them to non-audiophile friends, but the dynamic EQ is annoying and some compression is noticeable when playing loud. They are not the pinnacle of sound quality, but good looking speakers with a good feature set at a good price.
Mainly, just try not to get stabbed by that 10KHz peak off axis peak.
Extra notes:
- Measurements gated at 6.5ms. I believe resolution should be pretty similar to a 1/20 smoothed anechoic curve above 2-3kHz.
- I use 25 dB/decade scaling on all SPL plots, which is what the NRC uses and CTA-2034A recommend, though Harman rarely uses it in its own graphs.
- Measurements made using the RCA input.
- I make some compromises to be able to make full measurements a bit more rapidly and often in an indoor setting. First is that they are done at 1m. As usual, I checked to see if there are any differences at 2m at a few angles, but I see none within the quasi-anechoic measurements' resolution. I only test bookshelf speakers, so I doubt this will ever be a big issue.
- The other compromise: yes, 75dB @1m is too low, but this allows me to do the hundred + sweeps without worrying about annoying the neighbors. Once again, I run a few sweeps at higher volumes, to make sure there aren't major deviations in frequency response. Next time I'll make a note to actually save those measurements.
- Vertical '0' measurement is slightly different because I have to turn the speaker on its side, so the tweeter is closet to the stand.
- Note, I'm now calculating the Early Reflections curve the proper way, as discussed in this thread. This leads to a slightlybigger dip in the crossover region for non-coincident speakers, but the difference is only about 1dB for this speaker:
- They do have a nice amount of bass for their size and price. But compression becomes very apparent at high SPLs and they have a limited sense of dynamics because of it.
- They hiss with the volume knob up. It disappears at lower knob settings, which would be good for a nearfield setup... except they have that unavoidable dynamic EQ on. So pick your poison. I believe they hiss less with optical.
- Also did not have the time to measure the second speaker to check for pair matching. Could be important because all electronic components are in just the right unit.
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