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Fluid Audio FX50 Review (Active Speaker)

pavuol

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I can't tell if I'm seeing things (1am right now...and im about to sleep),...
2021-01-29 11_14_42-Window.jpg
 

akarma

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My in-room measurements. On-axis 1 meter:
FX50.jpg


I didn't like it at all to say honestly. Just played around with measurements and EQ and sold it.
 

BYRTT

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FX50 curves on objective paper is not in class with for example same price range LP-6 or 305/308P but guess it win on cute little volume signature..
FX50_verse_305PMKII_0_EDIT_2.png


Detailed side by side animation example of anechoic out of box objective curves for FX50 verse 305P plus both of them EQed with a same EQ policy..
FX50_verse_305PMKII_1a_x1x1_1000mS.gif

FX50_verse_305PMKII_1b_x1x1_1000mS.gif
 
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sweetchaos

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3125b

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Omg, this is awesome!!
Can you make a new thread for this?
Thanks!

I can make a thread.
I'm not sure if that website really is the optimal choice since it isn't really (easily) possible to make more complex shapes, but I love the fact that anyone can chime in and build on what is already there just in the browser.

@MZKM 's gathered speaker dimensions:
That is handy, it's a great overview of the speakers tested - but being from Europe I'm more of a metric system guy.
 

Xyrium

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Thanks!

I can make a thread.
I'm not sure if that website really is the optimal choice since it isn't really (easily) possible to make more complex shapes, but I love the fact that anyone can chime in and build on what is already there just in the browser.

That is handy, it's a great overview of the speakers tested - but being from Europe I'm more of a metric system guy.

No worries, pop 'em in via metric, we'll catch up one day! ;)

Great review Amir, I've been interested in a bouncing around a coaxial design, probably something slightly bigger, but this is pretty decent for an absolute budget product.
 

RovenLee

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I agree with your conclusions. I'm happy with fx50 in 60cm listening. I really looking for your measurements. Thank you!
 

infinitesymphony

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For 1/3rd the price, if you can apply EQ (score 5.80 vs. the FX50's 4.74), the Edifier R1280T ($99/pair) might be a good alternative minus the directivity benefits of coaxial design.

Now Kali, JBL, and Adam just need to release coaxial versions of their budget monitors.

PreSonus Sceptre S6 or S8 could be interesting, too, even if they look like cyclopes.

61NE9ZuR6GL._AC_SS350_.jpg
 

Robbo99999

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I'm late to this review......same price as my JBL 308p Mkii speakers that I bought on sale, so I think these are not that great for the price (if you keep your eye open for deals on other speakers), but it is a very small speaker this one, so has it's own use cases because of that, JBL 308p is massive in comparison.
 

AnalogSteph

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There should be an ASR measured hiss chart, as this is significant for active speakers.
Agreed. It's one measurement, 10 cm in front of tweeter. If existing mics should not adequately cover <<20 dB(A), we would have to come up with a solution for that. I would not be averse to unconventional solutions, like getting a common Rode NT1 calibrated (hmm... couldn't one even use the Klippel for that? Backwards, basically?) and using that in a distance of 20 cm to keep proximity effect at bay. That would still be netting a better SNR than any of Rode's small diaphragm models at half the distance, or even a Neumann KM184 for that matter - we are talking 4 dB(A) of self-noise vs. 16 or 13 dB(A) at best, so we can afford doubling the distance (-6 dB) to offset any geometric disadvantage.

Potential snags: (a) getting ambient noise down (being out in a field in the snow tends not to be an option for much of the year, and I'm not sure whether it snows a whole lot where Amir lives anyway), so construction of a mini anechoic chamber may prove necessary, and (b) level calibration of the whole chain, but that's a normal problem.

Hmm, I wonder whether one couldn't use two mics to tackle the ambient noise issue much like human hearing does - place them in an advantageous way so that processing can easily be applied, and aperture has effectively been doubled, so 3 dB SNR gain right there. (As an example of the kind of processing I'm thinking of, there's this neat Foobar2000 plugin called foo_dsp_centercut that uses FFT magic to extract the exact center of a stereo signal, which cleans up stereo rips of noisy mono LPs substantially better than just extracting L+R. Isn't that basically beamforming for audio? There must be something out there on that, my almost decade-old Dell notebook's sound driver implements it for the built-in pair of mics.)

Hmm. I wonder whether the Klippel couldn't do that, too. Could you cover a whole conical segment entirely with as many positions as that takes and then average the results with suitable weighting / delay to obtain sort of a very directional "super mic"? I mean, the noise we're trying to measure isn't coherent, so that could be a problem, but...

Sorry, that was rather more rambling than originally intended. On the FX50s themselves, I do wonder whether it wouldn't be useful to compute dispersion results for smaller effective distances than 1 m as well in order to illustrate the usefulness of coaxes in such scenarios. A coax should retain sensible dissipation at 0.5 m or even 0.3 m, while any non-coaxial speaker would eventually fall apart with a typical midrange dip sooner or later. It is quite obvious that e.g. the 305P or T5V (let alone their bigger siblings) aren't exactly optimized for such short distances. @amirm, I do not remember offhand whether you were or were not keeping the raw data, as I do recall it being in the gigabytes?
 

Maiky76

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amirm

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@amirm, I do not remember offhand whether you were or were not keeping the raw data, as I do recall it being in the gigabytes?
I save every measurement database which is around 750 megabytes for this sort of speaker. I actually keep triple copies just in case. :)
 
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amirm

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Hmm, I wonder whether one couldn't use two mics to tackle the ambient noise issue much like human hearing does
B&K makes an ultra-quite microphone which works exactly like that. That is how they measured the noise floor of Microsoft anechoic chamber which is supposed to be the most quiet place on earth.
 

dasdoing

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listening tests are performed per research that shows mono listening is much more revealing of differences between speakers than stereo or multichannel.

since the supposed advantage of coax speakers is better stereo imaging/seperation, this might not be totaly true in this case
 

dfuller

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since the supposed advantage of coax speakers is better stereo imaging/seperation, this might not be totaly true in this case
That's tied to the dispersion properties of a coax speaker, to be clear.
 
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amirm

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since the supposed advantage of coax speakers is better stereo imaging/seperation, this might not be totaly true in this case
"Supposed" is the right word there....
 
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